Matt Chandler - Singles

Why don’t you go ahead and grab your Bibles? We’re going to be in 1st Corinthians chapter 7. It’s going to take us a bit to get there, but I want to orient you toward that text, and then we’ll look at the word here in just a second. I want to start by saying the real purpose of our time together today, the purpose of this sermon, is to reorient our hearts, both as marrieds and as singles, around what the Word of God has to say about singleness. Now, let me say right out of the gate that I needed a lot of help to write this sermon, and here’s what I mean by needing a lot of help. Lauren and I were married the summer after her freshman year in college and the summer after my junior year, so when it comes to the single life, I simply did not live it—unless you want to count my first three years in college as the single life. I know nothing of graduating, getting a job, and then living out the single life. I know nothing experientially about that, and so I’ve leaned into a lot of people to write this. So, Pete, Sara, Jean, Adele, Found, Oppressed, and Sprinkle, Sam, all very joyful, Beth Smith, or some of the authors of Wesley Hill. I had a lot of generous and insightful dialogue with many of our singles—some who are hoping to be married, others who are divorced, and others who are single mothers and single fathers. I just tried to, as best I can, let the Word of God bear its weight. I also needed to get to the bottom of some ideas around singleness, unique struggles, and unique opportunities. It has been very fruitful and, at times, if I’m honest, very painful for me to prepare to preach this. Let me explain what I mean by painful. One of the great joys of my life is to shepherd and walk alongside you as brothers and sisters in this place. I am committed to my personal relationship with Christ, then to my wife and children, and then to this congregation—that’s the order of my priorities and my affections. What struck me as I was preparing this is how often, especially if you are a single man or single woman, you must feel ostracized or out of the story here in our church, which is so family-centric. If you’re an encouraged single, you’re a single who’s wrestled through where you are in life, and I was thinking how often you have to do this kind of mental gymnastics when I think 90% of my illustrations have to do with either my children or my marriage or some aspect of family life. If you’re a discouraged single, I have to believe that every time those illustrations are used, you feel more isolated, more out of step, and more discouraged in your relationship with the Lord. So, part of the discernment in this is me repenting of that and wanting to get better at encouraging you and helping you to live out your singleness without always having to do those mental gymnastics. With that said, let me overgeneralize. It seems that, in general, singles are viewed by themselves as well as others as lacking something. The longer the singleness persists, the more both singles and marrieds view the situation through the lenses of loss. This is a common story I have heard both in reading and in conversation with our singles here. What happens is, in your younger single days, as your friends start to get married, your married friends try to hook you up with their other single friends in the hope that you will find your spouse. Then, as singleness persists, married individuals start to think that something might be wrong with you. Singles begin to feel as though God has robbed them of something or forgotten them by not bestowing upon them this blessing of a life partner and the covenant of marriage. What I want to start with right out of the gate is that both married couples who view singleness as an oddity and single men or women who think God has forgotten them or robbed them of joy by not giving them a spouse are way out of line with how the Word of God talks about singleness and how Jesus himself and other biblical authors rejoiced in singleness. Here’s what I want to do. I want to start by just talking about types of Christian singles. I don’t plan on addressing those who are not Christians in your singleness; I don’t really know how to navigate you through this talk. So, if you’re a believer in Christ, a follower of Jesus, I want to unpack how Jesus saw singles. Specifically, he thought there were three types of singles. From there, I want to talk about singleness as a gift because I think that idea of singleness is often the butt of jokes and not really understood in its biblical framework. I then want to talk about the advantages of being single. After that, I want to talk about some of the unique struggles, and finally, I just want to encourage singles in a particular way.