Let's pray together.
Father, I pray that the worldview
that tries to fit biblical pieces in,
but is a worldview shaped by
unbiblical assumptions, would be changed.
So that, marriage and singleness
are seen to be what they are
in the radical alteration of things
that Jesus has brought.
This is something that I can't make happen.
But You, by Your Spirit, through Your Word can.
And so I ask that You would perform it.
Not that a few little nuggets would be
fit in to a defective paradigm,
but rather that the whole system
would be blown away
and replaced by
a biblical understanding of all things.
So that the smaller things
like marriage and singleness
would fit in the way that you have designed
in Christ Jesus in this brief
and temporary age in which we live
in preparation for eternity.
So, come and help me be faithful to Your Word now,
and give ears to hear, I pray, through Christ.
Amen.
I'm going to start and end
with my main point,
and in the middle,
I'll saturate you with many texts.
So that we have foundation under
the beginning by the time we get to the end
and say it again.
My main point is that God promises
those of you who will remain single
blessings that are better than
the blessings of marriage and children.
And secondly, that He calls you
to display by your Christ-exalting devotion
in singleness,
to display truths about Christ
and His Kingdom
that shine more clearly through
singleness than through marriage.
Four of them.
Four truths that will shine
more clearly through a life
of devoted singleness in Christ
than through marriage.
Number one.
That the family of God grows
not by propogation through sexual intercourse
but by regeneration through faith in Christ.
Number two.
That relationships in Christ are more
permanent and more precious
than relationships in families.
And of course, it is a wonderful thing
if relationships in families can be both
relationships in families and relationships in Christ,
but we know good and well
that is, for many of us, not the case.
Number three.
That marriage is temporary,
and finally gives way to the
relationship to which it was pointing all along,
namely, Christ and the church.
Just like a picture is not needed
when you are seeing face to face.
And fourth.
That faithfulness to Christ defines the value of life,
and all other relationships get their significance from that.
Faithfulness to Christ.
No family relationship is ultimate.
Relationship to Christ is ultimate.
That's my message.
That's my main point.
It has many layers.
And we now need to see Bible
underneath it,
and where all of that comes from.
And we'll start in the middle of the Bible,
then we'll go back to the front of the Bible,
then to the end of the Bible.
And we'll be all over the Bible in this message,
because this message is a
Biblical theology of singleness.
Isaiah 56:4-5
"For thus says the Lord:
To the eunuchs...
(that is, those that cannot procreate
and thus devote themselves to some
unique service...
a king or somebody.)
Thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths,
who choose the things that please Me and hold fast My covenant.
I will give in My house and within My walls
a monument and a name,
better than sons and daughters.
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off."
So God promises to obedient eunuchs...
blessings that are better than that of sons and daughters.
In other words,
God promises those of you who remain single in Christ,
blessings that are better than being married and having children.
Now, to see that more clearly,
we need to go back to the beginning
of the Bible and make our way forward.
In the created order,
before there was any sin in the world,
and in the covenental order
between Abraham and the coming of Christ,
God is primarily building His covenant people
through the mechanism of procreation.
In other words, being married
and having offspring was of paramount importance.
Because God was focusing His Kingdom building efforts
on an ethnic people - Israel - primarily.
So, to be married and to have children
was the preservation of a name and inheritance
and of a covenant.
So you get in Genesis 1:28,
"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth."
Genesis 2:18
This is all before the fall.
Genesis 2:18
Before woman was made, God says to Adam,
"It is not good that man should be alone.
I will make a helper fit for him."
And then when God chose Abraham
as the beginning of that covenant people of Israel.
He says to him,
go out and look at those stars.
So shall your offspring be.
And when Abraham found that he couldn't have children
because Sarah was barren,
he went and got himself a child by Hagar,
and said to the Lord,
"Oh, that Ishmael might live before You."
And God said, "No."
"But Sarah your wife will have a son."
In other words,
physical offspring really mattered.
And it would come God's way and God's time.
And then He reaffirmed that
to Isaac in Genesis 26:3,
"I will be with you, and I will bless you,
for to you and your offspring, I will give all these lands,
and I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham,
your father."
And again, physical offspring is seen to be crucial.
The reason these offspring are so crucial,
is because they're the way the covenant
is preserved and extended
on into the future.
And because a name would be lost.
A name would be lost.
Do you remember how Saul plead with David
not to wipe out his offspring,
so that his name would not be erased is what he said
1 Samuel 24:21
"Swear to me therefore by the Lord
that you will not cut off my offspring after me,
and that you will not destroy my name
out of my father's house."
And some of you remember,
the whole institution,
the very complex,
institution of Levirate marriage.
Remember that?
Where a man is obliged to marry his deceased brother's widow
so that the name of the brother would not be lost in the tribes.
And the ordination was that the first son born would get the name
of the dead brother.
Listen to Deuteronomy 25:6.
"And the first son whom she bears
shall succeed to the name
of his dead brother, that his
name might not be blotted out
of Israel."
Now that's an amazing provision, is it not?
For the perpetuation of the name
through the physical seed of
this man's wife and his brother.
The most famous illustration of that is?
Boaz and Ruth.
Remember?
He marries Ruth in order that
Elimelech and Mahlon, her husband
would not lose their name and their inheritance.
Listen to these words,
"Ruth, the Moabite, the widow of Mahlon
I have bought to be my wife
to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance,
that the name of the dead may not be cut off
from among the brothers, and from the gate of his native place.
You are witnesses to this day."
Ruth 4:10
So you can see how crucial marriage
and offspring were to the preservation
of name and inheritance and covenant.
No wonder Jephthah's daughter
asked for two months
not to bewail her impending death,
but to bewail her virginity.
An amazing story.
"So she said to her father,
'let this thing be done for me,
let me alone for two months,
that I may go up and down on the mountains,
weep for my virginity,
I and my companions.'
And so he said, 'Go.'"
That's the background for Isaiah 56:5.
That's the background.
To cause your jaw to drop.
And for you to stand amazed at this.
Thus says the Lord:
The eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths,
who choose the things that please Me,
hold fast to My covenant.
These unmarried, these childless ones.
I will give in My house and within My walls
a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off.
Now where in the world did that come from?
And where is that pointing?
It came from chapter 53.
Want to go there with me?
We read chapter 53, this glorious prophecy of the Messiah
coming to be wounded for our transgressions,
be crushed for our iniquities.
But do we ponder verse 10?
"It was the will of the Lord to crush Him."
This is what God did to Christ on the cross.
Prophesied 700 years earlier.
"It was the will of the Lord to crush Him.
He has put Him to grief.
When His soul makes an offering for guilt..."
There's our salvation.
"When His soul makes an offering for guilt,
He shall see His offspring.
He shall prolong His days."
Indeed forever, after the resurrection.
"The will of the Lord shall prosper in His hand."
What does that mean?
He shall see His offspring?
Jesus was never married.
Don't you believe any crazy movie that says He was.
The whole point is that He wasn't married.
And that He was a dry tree
and a eunuch,
and a single man,
faithfully to the day of His death.
That's the point.
This is another kind of offspring.
When Christ dies for sinners like you and me,
who by grace put our faith in Him
and are united to Him,
we become His children.
And the children of God.
And a whole new way of bringing offspring into being
takes precedence over the old way.
Which is why the next chapter,
54, begins like this:
"Sing, O barren one,
who did not bear,
break forth into singing
and cry aloud,
you who have not been in labor,
for the children of the desolate one
will be more than the children
of her who is married."
A whole new way of thinking.
A whole new way of growing a family is coming into being
prophetically at this point,
and literally at the coming of Jesus.
So what does Jesus say when He comes
to Nicodemus who cannot change his worldview.
He just doesn't get it.
"Truly, truly, I say to you,
unless one is born again,
he cannot enter the kingdom of God."
I'm here to make children.
I'm here to build a family.
I'm here to give birth,
like you never knew.
And the Apostle Paul picks up
the strain in Galatians 3.
"Know then, that it is those who
are of faith who are the sons of Abraham."
Not the physical descendants.
"In Christ Jesus, you are
all sons of God through faith."
In other words, it's not physical descent that
makes God's family.
The covenant people are the people who are born of God,
and have faith in Jesus.
Peter picks up the theme.
Chapter 1:3
"According to His great mercy,
He has caused us to be born again to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead,
and to an inheritance..."
You want an inheritance?
You've got to have the right Father.
God.
How do you get God as your Father?
Be born again.
"...and to an inheritance, imperishable,
undefiled, unfading, kept in heaven
for you."
Jesus, Paul, Peter, all of them saying,
children are born into God's family
and receive the inheritance
not by marriage.
Not by procreation.
But by faith and regeneration,
which means,
single people in Christ have zero disadvantage
in bearing children for God.
And in many ways,
significant advantages.
Paul was single all his life.
Or at least, lest we overstate it,
single all of the life we knew him.
Because he says he has no wife
in 1 Corinthians 9,
but whether he is a widower, we don't know.
So he has no wife in all of the New Testament documents,
and he is a father if there ever was one.
He says, 1 Corinthians 4:15,
He's talking to his church,
"Though you have countless guides in Christ,
you have not many fathers.
I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel."
That's a single man talking.
Men. Single men.
"I became your father. I'm your father.
Single and unmarried as I am."
Or let him speak for the women.
1 Thessalonians 2:7
"But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother
taking care of her own children."
And so it will be said of many single women in Christ.
She was a great mother in the church and never married.
Now, take heed and be careful
lest you trivialize what I'm saying.
As though you think that
Pastor John is sentimentalizing singleness
to make the single folks
feel good in this series on marriage.
I could care less about making anybody feel good.
I am declaring
the temporary and secondary nature
of marriage and family,
over against the eternal and primary nature
of the church.
That's what I'm declaring.
I'm declaring the temporary and secondary nature
of marriage and family
over against the primary and eternal nature
of the family of God.
Hear that.
This is not trivial.
This is huge.
And I fear that we have settled into our land
and our culture.
And idolized the family.
Idolized marriage.
We're here for a vapor's breath
and then we're gone.
What happens here is relatively minor compared to
what will be after the resurrection.
This is no small thing I'm saying.
In the resurrection, Matthew 22:30,
Jesus says,
"In the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage,
but are like angels in heaven."
I am declaring the radical, biblical truth
that being in a human family
is no sign of an eternal blessing.
Being in God's family means being eternally blessed.
Relationships based on family are temporary.
Relationships based on union with Christ are eternal.
Marriage is a temporary institution,
and stands for something that lasts forever,
namely our relationship to Jesus Christ:
Church and Bridegroom.
And when His mother and His brothers
came to Him, Jesus, and asked to see Him,
He said,
"Who is My mother?
Who are My brothers?"
And stretching out His hand towards His disciples,
He said, "Here are My mother and My brothers."
There's not a much more radical statement in the Bible than that.
You want to be the mother of Jesus?
Follow Him.
The mother of God is an obedient Christian.
"Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts at which You nursed."
A woman cried.
He turned and said to her,
"Blessed, rather, are those who hear the Word of God and keep it."
Does this mean anything to you?
Does talking like that change your worldview?
Oh, how blessed were the breasts that gave You suck.
Oh, how blessed was the womb that bore You.
He looks at that woman and says,
"You keep the Word of God, and you'll be My mother."
Do not elevate natural processes
like procreation and childbearing
and marriage to anything bigger than what they are.
Temporal, physical means of keeping the world going,
and illustrations of Christ and the church,
which when He comes, fade away.
"Truly, truly, I say to you
there is no one who has left house,
or brothers, or sisters, or mother,
or father, or children, or lands
for My sake and the gospel,
who will not receive a hundred fold now in this time,
houses, and brothers, and sisters,
and mothers, and children,
and lands with persecutions,
and in the age to come,
eternal life."
Single person,
married person,
do you want many mothers?
Do you want many children?
Brothers, sisters, lands?
A place to stay at night?
Be a part of the church.
Join the family of God.
It's a huge calling upon the church.
I'm not saying we do it very well.
But hear, church, what we're called to be.
Hear this.
You leave them, and you get a hundred to replace
in the church - if we're doing our job.
So what shall we say in view of this amazing biblical vision
of the secondary and temporary nature of marriage
and procreation?
What shall we say?
We should say what Jesus said,
and what Paul said, following Jesus.
And here's what Jesus said.
Matthew 19:12
"There are eunuchs, who have been so from birth.
There are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men.
And there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs
for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Let the one who is able to receive this, receive it."
There is no reason that we should
take the phrase,
"made themselves eunuchs,"
to refer to any form of physical sterilization.
There's no reason to take it that way.
Anymore than we take the words,
"if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out."
But we take both of them very seriously.
If you can receive it, receive it.
Some people choose, by God's calling,
a life of devoted singleness in Christ.
And to them He's promised,
a name and a memorial
better than the name
of marriage and children.
Paul picked it up
and put it most starkly in chapter 7.
Most of you single folks have read this
and pondered what this means for you.
I'll read verses 32, 33, 35 of 1 Corinthians 7.
"To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is good for them
to remain single as I am.
I want you to be free from anxieties.
The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord,
how to please the Lord.
The married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife.
I say this to secure your
undivided devotion to the Lord."
Paul speaks about each having his own gift.
Verse 7.
One of one kind, one of another kind.
In other words,
let him who is able to receive it, receive it.
So, here we are at the end where we began.
With all this Scripture underneath us now.
And I will give my main point again.
My main point of this message is,
God promises, those who remain single in Christ
blessings that are better than
the blessings of marriage and children.
Now, if someone should ask
as I did,
how about both?
Wouldn't it be better to have both?
The blessings of marriage and children,
and the eternal blessings?
There are two answers to that question.
Number one.
You will learn sooner or later,
and you may as well learn now,
that the blessings of being with Christ in heaven,
are so far superior
to the blessings of being married and raising children,
that to ask this question,
wouldn't it be better to have both?
Is like asking,
"If you're going to give me the ocean,
can't I have a thimble as well?"
It does lose some of its force.
You just need to see heaven.
You need to see Christ.
better than we see Him,
to keep things in proper perspective.
That's the first answer.
Can I have a thimble with the Pacific Ocean?
The second answer to the question
is that both marriage and singleness
present us with unique trials and unique opportunities
for sanctification.
Unique. Not the same. Different.
Both important.
And there will be unique rewards for each.
And which is better will depend not on
whether you were married or single,
but on how you responded to each.
So, I say it again,
to all singles in Christ,
who will be that way long term,
God promises you blessings in the age to come
that are better, far better,
than the blessings of
marriage and children.
And that brings some responsibility and calling with it.
I can imagine, somebody who
would rather me not make this emphasis,
saying, "what this bunch of singles really needs to hear,
is that they should stop abdicating
their responsibility and postponing
the end of adolescence for about thirty years."
Well, I've said that, if you have ears to hear.
If you think what I'm saying here
is a license to extend adolesence
to 25, and 30, and 35,
while you play computer games
and don't take up your cause for Christ?
And lay your life down for Him?
With all this time you have?
Then you don't understand anything I've said.
I am summoning singles to a radical devotion to Jesus Christ
which means grow up and become a dad at 25
and single the rest of your life, if God wills.
And a mother at 25, of a spiritual family that you disciple
who are born, not of going to bed with a girl or a guy.
The strongest, most Christlike single is the one
who is virgin till death.
And may it be so for many.
What a glory!
What a reward!
And the world will tell you, "That's a waste."
That's a waste.
They don't know anything.
How's your worldview?
Are you buying into it?
Then you're gone.
Then life.
There are four truths
that singles can display in this world
better than married people.
I've spent nine weeks
telling married people
how to display Christ and the church.
And I'm taking one week
to say to single people
what's the counterpart drama in your life.
What are you supposed to display?
If me and Noel, if we, are supposed to display
Christ and the church in our relationship,
what's singleness about?
It's about these four truths.
Number one.
Displaying that the family of God grows not by propogation through
sexual intercourse,
which you avoid and abstain from
because you believe in Christ.
But rather it grows by regeneration and faith in Christ,
and you give your life to begetting such children.
Second.
The relationships in Christ are more permanent and more precious
than the relationships in families,
and therefore we'll give our lives to cultivating relationships
that last forever.
Noel and I won't be married in the Kingdom.
That's huge in the way singles and marrieds think
about relationships and friendships
and covenant bonding with people.
Number three.
That marriage is temporary.
It finally gives way to the relationship
to which it's been pointing all along:
Christ and the church.
And fourth.
Faithfulness to Christ
defines the value of life.
And all other relationships
get their significance from this.
Faithfulness to Christ.
No family relationship is ultimate.
Relationship to Christ is ultimate.
So, to Him be glory,
in the Christ-exalting drama of marriage,
and to Him be glory,
in the Christ-exalting drama of the single life.
Amen.
Let's pray.
Father, I am very aware
that that's an orientation message
on the way to look at things biblically.
And many questions for individuals
now remain to be answered.
Which I cannot answer for them.
One has one gift, one has another.
Let him who can receive it, receive it.
But You can answer, Lord. You can answer.
Is it marriage? Or is it singleness?
And Your answer doesn't arrive always when we want to hear it,
and so I pray that all the singles
will be patient with You and with life.
And they will be devoted utterly to You.
Now and if they marry.
Devoted utterly to You in marriage.
So make Yourself supreme in the life of singleness.
And supreme in the life of marriage,
I pray.
In Jesus' name,
Amen.