I need to make a declaration right at the outset, for transparency. I’m an unmarried man. There, I’ve said it. Not an easy thing to admit to as a Christian in your early fifties. Particularly in a social media-driven culture where your ‘relationship status’ is considered to be a key aspect of your identity.
Articles encouraging contentment in God
Covenant Eyes is a popular provider of internet accountability software. It has recently launched its new Screen Accountability software. I have used Covenant Eyes for several years, so when they launched this change I was interested to see how it worked.
Our pastor recently preached a Sunday morning sermon on marriage and the family. He prayed for “our marriages and families” at the end and then added the line, “and we also pray for those who are single.” I peeped around the room and thought that he might just as well have said, “and Gary too” since I was the only single person there!
The article “Is it OK to masturbate?” is never out of the top three most-read articles on the TFT website. But the topic is rarely addressed Biblically and so we can find ourselves conflicted by feelings of shame, confusion and self-justification. Because of the taboos that surround discussing masturbation, many of our beliefs and feelings about this subject were probably formed in our teenage years.
In those moments where we singles may be struggling, probably the last words we want to hear are “Well, God has just called you to be single”. Sometimes this sentence comes with a “right now” on the end. Something about this isn’t very reassuring. When we think about people who experienced a calling of some kind in the Bible a few images may come to mind.
Receiving a gift should stir feelings of great gratitude. But if we were to play a word association game with ‘singleness’ - described in Scripture as a gift (1 Corinthians 7:7) - how many of us would associate it with joy, thankfulness and other positive emotions? There have certainly been times I’ve failed to treat this gift as something good, provided by our loving heavenly Father. So, why is singleness not valued as it should be?