The Rescue Church

Single But Not Alone

There can be a lot of pressure to find the right person to date as a teenager, an adult in one’s twenties or at any time, really. Like Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire there is a feeling we need someone else to “complete” us. We think we need our Dorothy. Join us as we explore the topic of singleness this weekend, see what Jesus had to say about it and learn how the Church can better support those who are single.

Broadcast on:: 03 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

All right, well let's pray, and we'll jump into the Word. Gracious God, thank you so much for this day, thank you for an opportunity to get together and just kind of hang out and get to know each other a little bit more. I've got to pray that this would also be a time where we get to know you a little bit more as we dig into your Word as we have some discussion following the message. And I just think you would be honored in all of it, that it would be what you want people to hear, not what I might think or whatever, but instead be your words, and in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, we're going to start with some discussion. I've got a question to throw out there. What is, and it might even be listed as one of your discussion questions, but what is your favorite movie that includes a guy or a girl getting together as a couple? Oh my goodness, okay, high school musical, somebody else. Forest gum, there we go, Kirti, Hunger Games, K, Anna Green Gables, the Hallmark Channel. See, that's how I was going to open it, I was just going to say, there is the Hallmark Channel, which that's all it's about. What else? Any other good ones you can think of? Sleepless in Seattle, okay. Here's a question. Tell me about a movie where there is no romantic love interest at all in the movie. One's all over the, Micah, are you the cuckoo one, or, Kirti, what movie? Olympus has fallen, I don't know if there is or not, I'd have to think through that. Anyway, I'm not endorsing, we're not endorsing any of these movies because I won't go down that road. However, what I noticed as I was preparing for this week is that everything that we have in our entertainment, as far as movies, TV, seems to always focus on relationships, and the importance of being in a relationship, and you got to get the girl or the guy or whatever. It seems to be what we talk about consistently. In fact, Disney built like their empire on the princess and pursuing the princess in their cartoons and their movies and things like that. Sometimes we as the church, unfortunately, do the same thing. We as the church talk a lot about marriage, we have marriage conferences, we talk about the topics related to marriage and building a healthy marriage and all of that, which is important and which matters, which is significant, but it's not the only thing that it talks about. There's messages about values of moms and values of dads and all of this, but very little gets talked about and taught on the topic of singleness and being single. So I thought that it kind of made sense following divorce to talk about singleness, but not for the reason you would think, because that's what Jesus did, and I figure he's a pretty good example for us to follow. See, the first passage we're going to look at is in Matthew 19, and we looked at this last week in Matthew 19, and Matthew 19, last week, what we saw was Jesus talking about divorce, and in Jesus calling out the Jews because they had taken what God's intent was for marriage and what he had given his guidelines for divorce, and they had twisted it and pushed it to make allowance for things that God hadn't made an allowance for. And so Jesus addresses that in Matthew 19, and then he continues with this, and first of the disciples asked him a question, he's talking about divorce and talking about the fact that you've tried to make excuses and say that you can get divorce for any reason, but I didn't say that. That was not my intent. In fact, my desire is for people to remain married. In fact, I hate divorce, and so then the disciples say to him, wow, okay, that's rough, and it says specifically, I won't paraphrase it, if this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry. That's a logical response if you're starting to hear about how bad things can be and the fact that, oh no, once I get in, I'm stuck, I'm not allowed to get out, and what does this look like? And so they're saying maybe it's better not to marry. Jesus' response is not everyone can accept this word, but only to those whom it has been given, for there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept this. So Jesus in this passage is talking about singleness and being not being married, and then Paul, years later under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says in 1 Corinthians 7, verse 8, he says, "Now to the unmarried and to the widows, I say, it is good for them to stay unmarried as I do, but if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better for them to marry than to be burned with passion." So there's a real change happening at this point in Jewish culture. If we look back and just given a little bit of the history of what's going on here, if we look back, Israel, for those of you who haven't given it much thought, Israel we think of as a nation. We think of it as a group of people, and at that point they would have said, yes, that that was the case. But there were a group of people that was descended from Abraham that they are called the nation of Israel because Israel's kids were the tribes that made up Israel and the nation of Israel. So in the Old Testament as you go through it, a lot of the teaching, most of the teaching addresses them as a whole, as a nation, as a group of people. But now we've got Jesus coming, and Jesus comes as a Messiah, and He starts to teach, He starts to kind of make a little bit of a shift in saying, hey, your righteousness isn't in you as a nation. You aren't defined as a nation specifically and only you have value as individuals. And He points this out in multiple different ways, but including at this point saying that it's important that they could be alone, that they could be not married. It wasn't all about their identity being in their marriage, in their traditions, in everything they had done previously. Now this is a topic that is becoming increasingly relevant as far as singleness. It's one that we, even though it's become increasingly relevant, we don't talk much about. But the reason I say it's increasing relevant is in 2020 research show, and I'll just give you some statistics for those of you who like numbers, you might find this interesting. For the rest of you, you might not. But if you like numbers, 2020, Pew Research said that 31% of adults are either single or not partnered or in a relationship. So that we're not talking, not married, we're not talking, not just not having been married. It's saying 31% of people are not even in a boyfriend, girlfriend, not even in any sort of relationship, same sex, opposite sex, any of that. They are single. They took a look at the group of people in the ages of 18-29 and found that in that age group, which for us that would be that Gen Z group, 41% are single. And then an interesting stat that caught my attention was that half of those who are single have no desire to not be single. They're not looking for a relationship. They're not pursuing any connections. They are intending to remain single, not even wanting casual dating sort of relationships. In 2023, the US Census Bureau released some information. They said that 46.4% of US adults were single. That's nearly half of US adults are single. As of those who were having their first marriage, the statistics had shown back in 1973, the median age for the first marriage was 22 years old, 22.1 years old. I don't know how they did .22 years old. In 2021, the average or not the average, the median of the first marriage for people in the US is 29 years old, a little over 29 years old. So when we are failing to address a topic of singleness, when we're failing to think about what it means to be single and the impact of single on our communities, on our churches and on our families, we're missing out on a large portion of the people who make up our gatherings, whether it's in a church or in society, wherever we are, the a large portion of them, a lot of portion of a people are single. So that means that we're failing to directly impact or directly address issues that are pertinent to those who are single. We're focusing often on connections that some of our group, maybe even almost two thirds of our group or a third of our group, half of our group, have an experience they're not familiar with. So with all that in mind, it seems very important in the fact that Jesus addressed it, that we should probably talk a little bit more about it than we do, maybe even a lot more about it than we do and what it means to live as single men and women. So it seemed like a good idea, except for the fact that I'm not single. And so I can't necessarily relate to what those who are single go through. And I would say, just like I was sharing with Bill before, when I remember preaching on parenting, and I still don't think I've got that figured out even though I've done it for years and you can ask my kids and they tell you I haven't got it figured out. And marriage, I've been married 25 years and still don't have that figured out. So I'm not speaking as an authority on any of it, but what I'm going to try and do is go back to Scripture and say what, here's what the Bible says and we can learn from that because I figured Jesus and Paul are a much better authority than I would be. And we're going to take a look at practical ways that it impacts us and how it would affect and impact us as a church, us as individuals, us as people. So as I said, in Matthew 19, we'll start there. It talked about last week about divorce and now we're transitioning into being single. And Jesus, Jesus is addressing that. He's already addressed the fact that the divorce is like separation and amputation, a surgical procedure that separates. And we talked last week about that at the same point, that doesn't have to identify us as who we are, that God's grace, it makes a way for forgiveness in spite of that, just like any other sin. And as he spoke definitively against divorce, he starts speaking now to his disciples about being married and whether they should or shouldn't be married. Now this is a really relevant topic to them as well because I don't know if you know this, but most of them were not married. Most of them were single. And then I started to look in this week. This was started in part by a question that I was asked, but I started looking, okay, which disciples were married, which ones got married, what do we know about them? And so according to the Bible, we can start with the Bible. And then I took some historical stuff that's out there as well. People that are much older than me or you or Alan, even you, much older than all of us are able to give some insights as to things that happened back when Jesus was alive and when some of his apostles were alive. And as we did this, as I did this, what I found was that most of them, not only were single, but it seems like most of them remain single. We know that Peter was married. We know that he was married because it talks about his mother-in-law and it's hard to have a mother-in-law without having a wife. So sometimes it's hard to have a mother-in-law either way. But regardless, I love my mother-in-law. I don't know if she's watching online or she'll be watching later, but I love you, Karen. So backpedal a little bit. Anyway, so we know Peter was married. We know that Jesus wasn't married and we know that of the rest of them, the only one that there's a little bit of debate on is Philip, whether or not Philip got married because there's talk about Philip's family, but most theologians say that it's not actually Philip the apostle, it's Philip the evangelist that actually had the kids. And so in likelihood, there's a chance that only one of all of the apostles was married. Jesus was speaking to a group of single men, and honestly, there was some single women hanging out with them as well as disciples, but not the apostles. So we've got a group of single people that Jesus is speaking to. And he tells them that as they're saying, "Well, isn't it better that we should be single?" And he says, "Well, let me just be clear. Not all of you can handle being single." He said, "It's not meant for everyone." And so reasons it's not meant for everyone. We can talk about a variety of those, that there's companionship. That's one of the things we know that Jesus, or that God back in Genesis, says that it was not good for man to be alone, probably because we'd get ourselves in trouble, maybe because we just couldn't handle it, I don't know. But for God himself saying, "Hey, I'm going to give you a partner," he says to Adam. For others, we know that not only, maybe it's not that they needed that help, or they needed that partner, maybe it's that, as Paul says, there's a desire to do things that were intended in marriage. And if you're going to do what's intended for marriage, you should get marriage, because I think what his words were something along the lines of, they cannot control themselves. So they should marry. And so the idea of, there's things that are intended for marriage and for married couples, and if you can't get through life without doing those things that are intended for marriage and married couples, then that is another reason that you would get married. So we've got reasons that people get married, and he says then, okay, so, but some were born in such a way that they wouldn't be able to have marital relationships. It doesn't mean necessarily that they couldn't be married, but they weren't able to do the things that were intended for marriage, meaning, well, there's little ears, so we'll just let you kind of fill in the blanks. But there was things that they couldn't do that would be normal in a relationship, in a married husband and wife relationship physically, so they maybe would not get married. They're called eunuchs. And there's others that were made that way, he says, that would be things like, there's a couple of different theories on this, and possibly both are true, for sure, we know one is. One is that they were physically made that way, meaning castration. So they would make it so that the men could be trusted to be around the kings, the women in the kings castle, and their palace, and wherever they were, their kingdom, the people that were most important to the king, that were women, this person could take care of them without the king being afraid that that person would do something they weren't supposed to do. So there was that. There's some talk that possibly some of those situations where people that were born that way, born unable to do those things or physically unable to. I heard a theory, and I don't know that I buy into this one, but I'm going to just put it out there just so that it doesn't look like I'm avoiding one that could potentially be the case. The one that I heard of is that there's a chance that some of the situations here when they're talking about eunuchs could have been related to men who had a same sex attraction, and that they were choosing not to act on it. They were men who were born attracted to women, and so as a result, they would choose not to act on that situation and thus be a eunuch, not physically, but in the way that they chose to live. Regardless, he's saying that there's a variety of reasons that happens, that there is a possibility that you will be single or that you would choose to be single. Now, some did choose singleness as we see in Jesus' apostles and in others around. Sometimes it was for situations as as pointed out by Paul and by Jesus is that if we stay single, we're able to focus on other things. Now, I'm not saying that marriage is bad. I'm not saying that having kids is bad, but any of you who have been married or have kids know that that takes some of your time and some of your energy. In some cases, it takes a lot of your time and a lot of your energy, especially when they're at that young age, when they're not sleeping through the night, then it takes most of your energy. And so when you look at the idea of being single versus being married, Paul and Jesus both say, "Hey, if you are single, you're able to focus on those things that God has called you to outside of marriage and outside of these other things because you don't have that responsibility." Again, not that you shouldn't be, but that you could be and that would be a reason for it. Now, Paul seems to say it even a little bit more emphatically. Paul says things that indicate that, "Hey, being single is great." He's like, "Hey, I am the guy who loves being the bachelor. I plan on being a bachelor the rest of my life. If you can handle being a bachelor, you should be a bachelor because it's amazing." It's kind of what Paul seems to be saying. I did read one thing that said maybe as Paul talks about a thorn in the flesh that he's been praying that would go away, that wouldn't. One person throughout the theory, is it possible that the thorn in the flesh was him being single and wishing he wasn't single but single but knew he needed to be? I think that's a stretch, but everybody's got their theories and you can find anything you want if you just spend enough time on the internet. So that was one of the theories that was thrown out there. Essentially, though, back to Paul, a lot of it was about him saying, "Hey, I want to be able to focus on the purposes that God has called me to. I want to be focused to be in this missionary, being able to travel, being able to do the things that are there, that are out in front of me." And he's not wrong that marriage can have its challenges. You all know that if you've been married, if you know anybody that's married, you know that marriage can have its challenges. Part of the reason probably Jesus talked about divorce as well because that's one of the ways people tend to get out of the challenges. I know for some friends of mine and people I know that are single, that have wrestled with the fact of being single, they wrestled with things like, "Yeah, but if I was married, I would have a spouse that could potentially have a second income that could help with some of the bills. I could have a person that could help me with some of the things that I have as responsibility or have that companionship." Those were some of the reasons that were out there. Now, if you're married, you know that there's two sides to that coin. If you're not married, you know there's two sides to that coin as well. That yes, you have a second income potentially, but you can also have more expenses. You have a helper, but you also have a person who has to be helped. There's two sides to each of these coins. But one of the things that was probably most concerning to me when some of these people who were women that have approached and said, "Hey, this is my frustration with being single." These were women that were in their 30s or 40s and they said, "Things like the church, there's not as much opportunity to serve in the church." Almost like as a church, we have said that if you are a single woman, that you do not have the same value, you do not have the same worth as a married woman or as a man. And they wrestled with things like maybe they're less credible, less valuable. One of them wanted to go into missions, but didn't feel they could go into missions because they were a single woman and if they didn't have a husband, then they were looked at differently as they were talking to churches because that's the man's job to lead and do the missionary work, not a woman's job. There was one that said, "Well, I'd love to serve, but I can't be a leader. I can't lead in a church because I'm a woman. What about that?" To that, I would say, "Let's go back to the Bible and let's look at the fact that God used Deborah in the Old Testament as a prophetess. Let's look at the fact that Jesus first appears to Mary who is a woman. Let's look at the fact that there are people like Lydia and others who are talked about as being leaders in the church and say, "Okay, we maybe have done a bad job of calling that out. We call that all the men that lead in the church but not the women." Now, I mean quickly backpedal a little bit and say, "I hold maybe a controversial belief," and I say it is controversial belief, where I think the Bible is pretty clear though that men and women were created differently with different abilities and we don't have time to go into all of that. That could almost be a full series going through all of this. But it's what I would call a complementarian view, meaning men have different things that they can do well and that God has gifted us as men and women typically the same. And so each of us when we fill our, use our abilities and do what God has created us to do, we are better as a whole because of those different things that can work together. Again, that's where I stand. Some would say that that's wrong and they hold a view that they're equal in all areas and that anything you can do, I can do better and vice versa. But we won't get into all that today except as to say that from us as a church, if you're wondering where we as a church stand, the lead pastor at the rescue church and our elders are set up as men. Not that women aren't speaking into it, not that they don't have value, but we look at the passages in Timothy and Titus and we see that that is always referred to as a man. So I just, we can have that conversation if you have more questions on that but I wanted to be careful as I'm talking about this just to touch on that a little bit. All that to say on singleness and all that to say on marriage, we do place a high value as Christians on godly marriage and that's one of the points that I have on your thing if you're filling in the blanks. We put a high value on godly marriage because God puts a high value on godly marriage. But being single as Jesus points out and as Paul points out, in no way makes a person less valuable. As a single person, you are no less value than a mom or a dad, a husband or a wife. As Christians, our identity should be in Jesus, not in our spouse anyway, so there is that or in our lack of a spouse. And if the highest rate of singleness is among young adults and we're not willing to look at the fact that God has given young adults value and worth as singles, then we're probably saying we really don't care about the future of the church because until they're married, they don't have any value in the church. So we need to be careful about it that way. But the second largest group of singles is our seniors. Statistically in the US, the second largest group is the seniors and we know that Jesus and God throughout scripture talk a lot about caring for our widows, caring for those who don't have families to care for them. And in fact, I started to look at it and say, okay, well, if widows are singles and that would make sense that we as the church need to be responsible for caring for widows because God says we're responsible for it. And I found a hundred verses, literally a hundred verses, and there may be more that speak to God in the church caring about widows. Now, I don't know what the exact number is because when I started searching and found a hundred, I didn't go through every one of those hundred and I didn't look to see if there was more. My point is if there's even close to that, it's a big deal. If it's mentioned that many times, it matters to God. So if it matters to God, it should matter to us, which means as we as the church should, if we want to say, okay, how can this practically affect us, we should be intentional about doing what he said and caring for widows, caring for those who are seniors that need, don't have family to walk with them. The Bible also says, just so that you're not passing this on, you're not going, oh, yeah, I've got a single mom, it's their responsibility to take care of her, not mine, or I've got a single dad and it's their church's responsibility, not mine. The Bible's also very clear in 1 Timothy 5 that it's the responsibility of us as kids as a next generation to care for our parents and one of the things that we can do as the church, as people, is can be supportive of those who are caring for seniors and caring for parents. I don't know how many times that I have talked to people that are helping care for parents and it's not that they don't love them, it's not that they don't want to do it, but it's hard. I say that as someone who cared for my mom for the last part of her life, it's challenging. It can be, not always, sometimes it's amazing, but in some cases, it really is exhausting and people don't maybe realize that. So one of the ways we can be supportive of people who are single is by supporting those who are walking with them and caring for them. I know Darcy and Tobias aren't here this week, but it meant a lot, you know, they're busy with a baby and all of that stuff, but it meant a lot to me when even I were going to dinner with them one time, and they invited my mom to come along. It meant a lot because it wasn't just me caring for my mom, it wasn't me entertaining my mom. It was somebody else saying, "Hey, just bring her along," and she can hang out. Darcy brought her mom, our mom's talked, and it was a way that they could help me without just a practical way. I just say all that to go. There's practical ways we can encourage and support each other. For those of you and other friends who would reach out and say, "Hey, how's it going?" That means a lot. It means a lot when you're doing that. And at some point, each of us are probably going to get old like that, and are going to probably need someone else to help care for us. And so I'm sure my kids hope there's somebody else walking with them besides just them dealing with me. Maybe I'll be the easy one. Maybe it'll be Eve, it'll be the hard one. I don't know. We'll see. That's many, many, many years away, I hope. But besides that situation, but there are situations where there are single men, single women that are seniors that need help caring for them, and that we as a church should come alongside and walk with them, and step into that. But not just them. What about with our younger singles, the middle age singles, the young adult singles? We as a church and we as people need to be careful on what we say. There's always an opportunity to talk about being careful with words. It's good advice. Micah wrote something. I can't remember what verse it is. Do you remember what it is? We wrote five verses on our fridge that really talk about the power of words and being careful with our words and not speaking things that are not edifying. As much as God talks a lot about widows, He talks a lot, probably even more so, about what we say and how we use our words. And we can unintentionally hurt people with things that we say. I'll take it out of this context and put it into families having kids. Because you weren't all involved in this, but when Eve and I were wanting to have kids, we weren't able to have kids. We went through doctor's appointments after appointment and being told that you may not ever have kids, which I'll say for Eve more so than me was extremely emotionally hard. Because there's something that you know you want, you believe God created you for yet, yet you can't do it. And people meaning well would say things about why haven't you guys started having family? You guys should have kids and would make comments about what's taken you so long. And it wasn't meant to be hurtful, but when you're trying and when you want everything, everything in you wants to be a mom and all anybody can ask you is how come you aren't having kids? And that's the topic of conversation. When you're going to get started, what's holding you so long, you know, other comments that would go along with it. And I'd say the same can probably be taken into situations with those who are single. We need to be careful with our words of things like, hey, why aren't you dating somebody? What about this? What about this? Maybe they're in a situation where they want to be in a relationship, but there isn't somebody. And that constant talk can be pointing out an area where they may feel like a failure or may feel like they're not able to do something that they want to do. So we can be very careful with our words. It may be a situation where we don't know the details and they've gone through a bad breakup, a bad situation, a spouse has left them, whatever that might be. So I would just encourage just be careful with our words and also be careful with what we in our teaching and what we communicate even in small groups and things like that that we're not just talking to topics about couples and about being married because that communicates that if you want to make an impact, if you want to have value, if you want to have worth, you need to be married. You need to have someone else. And a fact that a person is single and this is the last thing I had on your notes, a person's singleness, I made up that word I think, but a person's singleness doesn't limit their significance. There are plenty of people who were significant in spite of the fact that they were single. Their identity was not tied to being single. When you think of the Apostle Paul, there's likely you don't go, "Oh yeah, there's that guy that wasn't married." Instead you think of the guy that wrote a third of the Bible or you think of the guy who was the missionary to bring in the Gospel to the known world at the time. Our identity doesn't lie in our singleness or our marriedness or whatever because every one of us has worth. We'll talk a little bit more about this next week, but our worth comes from Jesus. It comes from God creating us and saying, "Hey, you were created on purpose with a purpose." We can go back into Jeremiah where he talks about knowing us before we were even born and the fact that he loved us so much that he came to earth to die for us. That's how much we matter as people is that he creates us with purpose and he knows that we screw up and so he comes to earth to make a way for us to have a relationship with him. And then when we have that relationship with him, we're told that we're adopted as his children. We're told that we're forgiven. We're told that we're made righteous. We're told that we're destined to reign for all eternity. None of that has to do with whether or not we're single or married or any of that. So while we as a church will continue to place a high value on marriage, while we as a church will continue to talk about godly marriage, we also need to be intentional and we will continue to be intentional about placing a high value on people in general. People whether they're married, people whether they're single, whatever category, because everyone, every one of you, every one of us matters to god regardless of what, whether or not we are married. So that's what I wanted to touch on today more of a teaching than a sermon. We'll have a chance for some discussion here in just a second, but let's pray and we'll jump into the and get some feedback from each of you. Gracious god. Thank you that you value each of us as people, not because of a spouse, not because of someone else in our lives because of who we are, because of who you made us to be. As we go into this week, this week, I just pray that you would help us not to place our identity and what someone else says about us, not to place our value and worth on whether or not we're in a relationship, not in a relationship, whether or not our relationship is healthy or unhealthy, but got the fact that you love us, that you cared about us so much that you died for us, that we could have a relationship with you. So God, I just pray for those who are struggling with the thought of being single, whether they're wrestling with that. I pray that you'd encourage them and that you would let them see that you see them as people. I pray that we as a church and as people would value all people, whether they're single married kids, adults, seniors, whatever age, whatever situation is going on, and that you would help us to see people as you do. And Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for listening to this recent message from the Rescue Church. We pray that God will use this message to encourage, challenge, and inspire you in your faith journey. To hear our messages live, head to one of our physical campuses. If you'd like to learn more about the Rescue Church, please visit us online at therescuechurch.com or email us at office@therescuechurch.com. [BLANK_AUDIO]