Singles Series

Real Life: playing Your Part – Singles

Being Single can be Good

Reduced Financial responsibilities

Reduced Time responsibilities

What to do when…

Single by Choice

Use increased Time available to

Grow in the Lord

Serve the Lord

What to do when…

Single by Circumstance

Pray for Purity

Wait for the Wedding

Serve the Savior

Slide 1

If you ever go into a bookstore, and you look for books on living life, you find all kinds of books on

being a husband or wife,

on how to raise your boys,

on Mothering in a godly way,

but you don’t find hardly any books on living life well as a Single.

I think that because in society we place a high value on the institution of marriage, and rightly so, but in doing so, we relegate single people to the back of the bus.

And even in the church, so often as we get older, when people will get to know a single person, often the conversation will turn to trying to find them a mate.

If you are married with kids, how often do we invite someone single over to dinner versus another family?

Now granted, often there are more families than singles, but that doesn’t mean that we exclude them from fellowship. But even if unintentionally, that is often what we seem to do.

And for the single person, it becomes hard to live that way for long without questions of

Have you met anyone yet?

When are you going to think about getting married?

To perhaps even questions about their sexuality.

My question today is

Is it ok to be a single Christian in the church or

Can a person choose to be single for at least a time after entering adulthood?

And

As a single Christian living in this world,

how is it that I should be playing my part in society and the church?

We are going to be looking at some verses in 1 Corinthians 7 (p. 809)

Slide

We will also be looking at a few other Scriptures that are not just for singles, but for living life well.

I want to start out reading 1 Corinthians 7:8

8 Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am.

Something I want all of us to see here is that

Being Single can be Good

Slide

Paul says in

1 Corinthians 7:8

It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am.

Some of you who are single may be saying

What is good about being single?

I am sure there are few married people can tell you.

But single people know that sometimes it can be

Lonely

Boring

Seemingly unfulfilling

And to top that all off, hasn’t God designed marriage for everyone?

While I would agree that marriage is the norm for most people, but it is not necessarily for everyone.

Look at Jesus. He wasn’t married but in his physical life lived purposefully and fulfilled.

Well that is God, He can do that.

Well, what about Paul. He said that it was good to remain unmarried as he was.

The fact of the matter is that while marriage will be the norm, God has not created each of us the same.

Even though things can be generally true about people, they are not always true.

I could say something like women are more emotional than men and that would be true, but I am sure we could all come up with some exceptions.

I could say that men are stronger than women and again, it would be true, but there are exceptions.

The point is that even when something is generally true, it doesn’t mean that that is how it will be for every person.

Paul tells us in these verses that staying single will be beneficial for some people.

So we see that for some people it can be good to remain single and that is ok.

And we, as the church, need to be ok with that too.

Now if the person is looking for a mate, this is not wrong, but we should not try to play matchmaker with someone who is choosing a single life.

And we need to help them continue to be incorporated into the life of the church.

Invite a single person you know over for dinner.

Integrate them into your activities.

We need to work at helping singles feel part of the body in the church.

And we need to be able to accept and honor a persons decision to stay single if that is what they choose for that point in time in their life.

What are the good things

Slide

So what are the good things about being single?

Paul tells us in