Do you have the gift of singleness??
This is a question on the minds of many young Christians today… Many would see the gift of singleness as a special, supernatural gifting from God that disables sexual desires within a person, giving them the ability to be single for life. This ‘gift of singleness’ is also often attributed to Paul the Apostle, specifically the teaching of 1 Corinthians 7. But I think that if Paul were around today he would be most adamantly objected to this idea!
I think Paul would say (and in fact does say in 1 Cor 7:7) that if you are single, you currently have the gift of singleness! And if you are married, you currently have the gift of marriage! Both singleness and marriage are blessings from God. They are both gifts in their own right. And at any point, God, in his great wisdom, may present the occasion in which your gift may be exchanged. Just because I currently have the gift of singleness, doesn’t mean that I will never be married. And just because my married counterparts currently have the gift of marriage, doesn’t mean that as a result of a tragic accident or illness, they may once again have the gift of singleness.
Both marriage and singleness are blessings and gifts from God, although, they are two very different gifts and bring with them very different privileges and heartaches. Again, I think this is what Paul is saying in 1 Cor 7. Being married brings with it many more cares and concerns than singleness. A married person has a spouse to consider, love and take care of. With a spouse comes another whole family, with some in-laws. It may bring with it the blessing of 1, 2, 3, 4 or more children; a bunch more people to be responsible for. These things are also blessings themselves, but with each of these blessings there is a huge amount of responsibility and concerns. Singleness doesn’t bring with it these kinds of privileges and concerns; it has a set of different ones. A single person has more freedom with their time. There are less people dependent on them every time they make a decision. But it does come with the heartache of loneliness and the desire for companionship. I think this is Paul’s point in the second half of 1 Cor 7 and as a pastor he wants to spare people the worries and added concerns of marriage.
Marriage is NOT a sinful or second rate choice for those who cannot control their hormones. Again, I think Paul would be horrified with this conclusion! Marriage is a blessing from God. It was woven into the fabric of creation right back in Genesis 2 when the woman was created as a helper for the man. Marriage is a beautiful thing! However, it is also not to be elevated so highly to the detriment of the blessing of singleness! Singleness is NOT a second rate choice for those who no one really wants to marry. If you are single right now, there is NOTHING wrong with you! You are not single because you are unlovely!
Both marriage and singleness are blessings from God, and Paul is encouraging the Corinthians to get their priorities right…the Kingdom of God comes FIRST! Whatever situation God has placed you in, serve him! Don’t waste your life wishing you had the other gift. Both gifts have privileges and heartaches, and God knows your pain, whatever it might be. God is our loving Father who knows what is best for us and the hard thing is that it may not always be what we think is best for us. But God is a trustworthy God! He loves his children and is working all things out for their good (Rom 8:28). He wants us to seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness and he will provide all that we need (Matt 6:25-34). Whether we are single or married, whatever our current gifting, God wants us to use our gift for his glory. He wants us to put his kingdom first!!
To come… Can you choose lifelong singleness?
posted by Naomi @ 12:35 AM
6 Comments:
disables sexual desires?
Disables? really?
Good post Nomes :)
Look forward to the next one...
Fair call Roj... I was trying to push a point and granted, probably too far...
Great stuff Naomi... thanks for putting so much thought into this and then summarising it all so clearly! Serve God in the circumstance He has placed you in now :)
"I think Paul would say (and in fact does say in 1 Cor 7:7) that if you are single, you currently have the gift of singleness".
Actually, this is not biblically correct, and there has been a group of dedicated, theologically minded, single women who have made it their cause to say so!*
For centuries, the idea of a "gift of singleness" was unheard of. The Catholic church put forth the notion of "the gift of celibacy": that Paul making an exception for those who are gifted in such a way that they freely choose to stay single for the sake of the kingdom (also echoed in Matthew 19:10). The "GoS" was an invention of the Living Bible* in the 60's, perhaps as a protestant attempt to mitigating the Catholic excesses of the GoC (ie. celibate priests).
The scriptures almost always talk about singleness and marriage in the practical terms of human volition, rather than divine chance. This not to undermine the sovereignty of God, it merely reflects how would have us approach marriage (ie. taking prayerful action, but not just sitting back and waiting for God to simply produce a spouse-- see Proverbs 18:22).
Likewise, with a concordance, you can see in the scriptures what biblical writers did and did not consider a "gift". This kind of language is never used to describe marriage, let alone singleness. The kind of unwanted prolonged singleness that you see today among Christian women (due to the shortage of men in our churches) NEVER would have been considered a gift by previous generations of Christians! There is indeed a grieving process that single women generally go through when they reach an age where they realize that they are not going to have children. This is not spiritual weakness, it's a reality for even the most devout women in our church communities.
Indeed, we must serve God fully and find gladness in Him, regardless of our circumstances. And walk in faith that He work ANYTHING to His good. But we must also be careful about what we call a "gift". Although singles are not second rate people, if we are honest, singleness is not a "gift of equal value" to marriage. It falls far short of the desired outcome for most who find themselves in that situation past a certain point, and has life affecting consequences, not only for the individual, but for the church as well. Rather than simply explaining it away as "God's plan", we need to start addressing the fact that this epidemic of protracted singleness that we are seeing today has its roots more in our fallen world.
btw- WE DID IT! A group of us got together and successfully campaigned to the Living Bible (now called the New Living Translation) to have the GoS removed from the 1 Cor 7:7, replacing it instead with wording that is more consistent with the original Greek text.
Thanks for your comment
In my post I was in no way trying to say that singleness is an easy thing. there are many heartaches attached to singleness and I am aquainted with a number of them (although my experience of them is of course different to yours).
What I wanted to affirm is that God blesses us with many good things. Both marriage and singleness are good things from God in different ways (although we don't always see them as such). But unfortunately in a world of lots of good things we can't always have them all, and its right to be sad and grieve the absence of good things in our lives, such as a spouse or children. But I do think that we need to be careful to not let our sadness obscure the good things that God has given us.
I think we also need to be careful to not eleveate marriage so highly, being so envious of our married friends, that we forget that marriage life is not as blissful as we imagine it. We just need to look at the divorce rate in our country to see that marriage is not providing people with all they had hoped it would. And in my mind (and from what I have seen) being in a broken marriage, a marriage that isn't working as it should, is often much harder than being single.
I think we need to be honest and realise that we live in a broken world where both singleness and marriage will be painful. We are sinful people who hurt each other, we feel lonely (in or out of marriage), we don't always get what we would like, and all these things cause us pain, heartache and grief.
But its in these circumstances, the ones when we can't understand what God is doing, that we need to trust GOd. And I believe that he is a trustworthy God! Unfortunately, trusting God doesn't mean that our heartaches or pain will be taken away now, but we do know that this broken world is temporary and that one day God will take his children to live with him in heaven where there will be no more pain.
And then we will see that "our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us" (Rom 8:18)
So in my pain and loneliness, the times I feel sad about being single, I thank God for the blessings he has given me, for the way I can serve him now, for the friends that he's placed around me, for the children in my life that I can spend time with and love, and I also pray come Lord Jesus come!
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