The Love Of A Lifetime Series

There’s a book that I came across a few weeks ago as I was wandering through the Christian bookstore, it’s one that I’d recommend for any single person. It’s called, “Joyfully Single in a Couple’s World.” In that book Harold Sala, says that singles have three basic needs. I would go even further to say that these are three needs that are shared by every human being.

The first is our need to give and receive love. The late psychiatrist Karl Menninger said, “Love is the medicine for the sickness of the world” and psychologist Eric Fromm believes that loneliness and the inability to love are the underlying causes of both psychic and emotional disorders. Joshua Liebman in his book Peace of Mind wrote, “There comes a time in the development of every person when he must love his neighbor or become a twisted, stunted personality.”

God has built within each of us a need to give and receive love. This is one of the greatest reasons why we marry. Because we have this need. And this is one of the things that brings the most pain to single people, not having this need met.

The second need that we find common to both singles and marrieds is the need to feel worthwhile. There are those of you sitting right here in this room today who struggle with your own self image. Some of you may have come from homes where you were told that you were no good. You may have been abused or neglected. Or maybe as a result of a physical attribute you were made fun of. As children we are very impressionable. And while we learn as adults that we are important in God’s sight, the messages we receive growing up shape us into the people we will become. As adults we spend so much of our time trying to prove that we are worthwhile. We do it by working hard in our careers, attempting to be successful. We do it by dieting and attempting to feel worthwhile by the way we look. Some people try to find their worth in relationships and so they end up in a marriage in which they’re attempting to get their self-worth boosted by their spouse, and when their spouse fails it only does more to demean them as a person. All of us have the need to feel worth-while.

The final need that is common to all of us is to have the security that comes from a relationship. There’s something about being in a happy marriage that brings security to our lives; it’s something that is often missing these days as divorce has become an easy out. I’m going to give a challenge to those of you who are married as we close in a couple of minutes but to those of you who are single let me say this: each of these needs: to give and receive love, to feel worthwhile, and to have the security that comes from a relationship can be met without being married or without even being in a relationship with a man or woman.

The Apostle Paul had some surprising things to say on a lot of topics. One of those areas is on the topic of singleness. We don’t have time to read what he wrote this morning but let me give you the gist of it: he says, if you’re single stay that way, unless you can’t control your sexual desires, then marry. But he makes it clear that this is his “opinion” not the word of the Lord. In order to understand why he’s saying what he saying you’ve got to understand his frame of thinking and the view of the church of his day. They believed Christ’s second coming was imminent. They believed it would happen within their lifetime. And so Paul says, there’s no point in getting married, Christ is coming back, just focus on living for him. Those of you who are single, here’s the most relevant piece of information that you can glean from this entire passage, it’s at the bottom of the first page of the outline: the benefit of singleness is unhindered devotion to God. As a single person you can focus on serving God to an extent that those of us who are married are not able. That’s why the Catholic Church has for so long insisted on celibacy.