You know, I think our listeners might be surprised to know that there's quite a few singles that listen to Family Life Today marriage and family radio podcasts.
Which is really exciting, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, we get letters, emails that say that this program can help them get a vision for marriage and what family and marriage can look like. And not only that, but relationships too, because a lot of what we talk about applies to any kind of relationship that they're in. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most.
I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. Today we get to talk about singleness and clear up some of the misconceptions. And we have Sam Albury with us who's written about this. But Sam, welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you for having me.
Good to be with you. Yeah. And you know what? Right away, there's some listeners going, he has an accent. Where's that come from? Well, I like to think I don't have an accent, but no one else does.
I'm from the UK, so the Queen's English or something like that is what I'm trying to speak. When I preach every once in a while, I'll try to do an accent and my son's told me, Dad, just don't try. Never do it. You're terrible.
It's embarrassing. But yours is real. And you've written a book called The Seven Myths About Singleness. Many of our listeners know you, but you've been a pastor, a regular conference speaker, a global speaker. You've wrote a book called Is God Anti-Gay and Why Bother with the Church? But this one is all about singleness in the seven myths. So I don't know if we'll get through all the myths today, but talk about this. Why a book on singleness?
Lots of reasons, really. One is that I am single, so it's an issue I've had to think through a lot myself. I've had to think through how is this an experience of God's goodness in my own life. But after I wrote the book Is God Anti-Gay, I was doing a lot of teaching on human sexuality and particularly on the issue of same-sex attraction, which has also been part of my story. And so one of the pieces of feedback I most frequently received was, I don't wrestle with same-sex attraction, but you have really helped me think about singleness in a new way. And so I thought, OK, there's obviously stuff here that people aren't used to hearing that has traction that seems to be helping people.
And so I started to dig into that a little more and ended up writing the book on the back of that. Let me ask you this, because so many, when you talk about singleness, go right here, especially in the church, singles don't want to be single. They really want to be married.
It's just a waiting room till they can finally find their fulfillment in a spouse and in marriage. Is that true? Is that a myth?
Is that common? What's your perspective? It may be how some people think it can be. Sometimes the impression given in church is that the singles group is the group that you aspire to graduate out of by getting married. But that's certainly a very different way of thinking about it than we see in the scriptures. And the reason I called the book Seven Myths About Singleness is because the more I looked at what the Bible says about singleness, the more I realized we have so many misconceptions in the church today about how we think about singleness that need to be cleared up. The Bible speaks of singleness unambiguously as being a good thing. So whether we are single by choice or by circumstance or by some other reason, we're not getting God's second best. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7 that marriage is a gift, and he says that singleness is a gift. They're both gifts.
They're both good things. And I think one of the things that often happens is both marriage and singleness have their own ups and downs. And it's very easy for us to compare the ups of marriage with the downs of singleness and not realize, firstly, that there are downs of marriage and there are ups of singleness. And a passage like 1 Corinthians 7, I think, helps us with both of those things. Paul says at one point, you know, Christians are free to marry.
That in the Roman world was quite a radical thought that actually women could have agency over whether or not they married. But Paul says those who marry have worldly troubles, and I would spare you these. And if that was all Paul ever said about marriage, we might think he was a little bit bitter and jaded about the whole thing. But we know Paul says some of the most beautiful and exalted things about marriage that anyone has ever said. But at the same time, he knows that it's two sinners getting together and there are going to be some challenges there, however good the marriage may be.
So Paul is realistic on that. I like that we're talking about this because I think in the church there are misconceptions because I've talked to so many singles that are saying, we just want to be a part of a family, you know, of our brothers and sisters in Christ, that we're all together, that we're all fellowshipping together, that we're all spending time together. But some of them have said to me, but it feels like every time I'm with the married couples, all they're doing is trying to set me up with someone to get married. And there are some singles that that's okay, but there are other singles that are like, I'm content right now.
And so I like that we're kind of talking about some of these misconceptions too. But would you agree with that? In the church, it seems to be divided at times between the singles and the marriage. And have you seen some of that?
I think I have, yes. It's very easy for churches to think, well, and you know, we all tend to do this, we tend to think I need to be around people who are in the same situation that I'm in. So young married of the previous church, I was at a lot of young families there. It was very easy for people to think, well, we're new parents, we want to be around other new parents, or we're single and we want to be around other singles. But the fact is, God has designed the church to be a blended family where we all need each other and across generations, across marital status, we all have something to offer one another.
And if we only ever hang around the same type of people, we're simply going to magnify the same blind spots and miss some amazing things that God has for us to learn by being around people at different ages and stages of life to us. Well, it's easy as a married couple, and I think in a church, this is often promoted that married couples think singles are always laying around thinking about, I want to get married. I just can't wait to get married. It's my goal in life. You're single.
Is that true? Is that something you spend a lot of time thinking I long to be married or is there a balance there? There is a balance there. Certainly in the early time, early years of my Christian life, I spend a lot of time longing to be married. One of the things that's happened that I didn't really notice it, it was so gradual and sort of unconscious is as time went on, I just found myself thinking about it less and praying about it less because I was becoming more content in my singleness, more able to maximize the opportunities of my singleness.
And it got to the point where I sort of hadn't really noticed that I wasn't thinking about marriage and hankering after it in the way that I had been. And I think it's a healthier perspective, you know, if both marriage and singleness are good, then to desire marriage is to desire a good thing, but it's not an ultimate thing and therefore it might be a good thing to desire, but it's not a healthy thing to fixate on and to obsess over. And sometimes the reverse is true, I know some people in challenging marriages where it's very easy for them to think the grass is greener on the other side and think, well, if I was single, I wouldn't have any problems in my life. So it can cut both ways, but we always tend to think the grass is greener and not have that realistic view. One of the things that's helped me, by the way, is families and marriages I've got to know very well where, you know, the people have been honest about both the positives and the challenges, and it helps me as a single to have a realistic idea of both the blessings and joys of marriage on the one hand, but also some of the pains and some of the trials of it as well. So true.
Yeah. Do you feel like in the church, you know, married families, married couples should be reaching out to singles? What would the relationship look like? Do singles want that? Do they feel pandered to if that happens? I mean, how can there be a good relationship between the married couples and the families in the church and the singles?
I think it needs to happen. Everyone is slightly different, of course, but I think single people don't want to feel like anyone's project. So if it's, you know, that the family is using their, you know, reaching out to them in a sort of, as an act of charity, I could see that feeling a little condescending and patronizing. But the fact is, in God's economy, it blesses singles and it blesses married people for there to be healthy friendship and interaction between the two. I remember talking to a couple I know well who were newish parents and I kind of popped around to visit them one evening and they said, we spend so much time with other parents. It's really nice to have a conversation with someone about other things in life other than just, you know, what messes we've had to wipe up today and, you know, all those kinds of things.
And I really, you know, they were saying that there's a whole world out there that they just don't get to hear about or think about anymore because their life is kind of tunnel visioned into sleepless nights and changing diapers and what is leaking out of where and shouldn't be in their child. So, you know, it's a two way thing. So we all need to approach it with that mentality that there's something for married people to receive from their single friends and there's something for single people to receive from their married friends. I like that. You also talk about one of your myths is that singleness is too hard.
That's a myth that you talk about in the book. Talk about that a little bit because you had mentioned you're same sex attracted. Are you thinking that you probably will never get married?
What are your options there? You know, is that too hard? Are people saying, oh, yeah, that's too hard? Yeah, I don't want to rule out getting married because God is sovereign and likes to surprise us sometimes. But I'm not expecting to get married.
I'm in my mid 40s now or very, very late 30s as I like to call it. So I'm not really expecting to be married now. And I'm happy either way, to be honest. It's the kind of thing where I want to be open handed before the Lord and say to him, well, I'm sort of expecting to be single. But if marriage is something you have for me, then I will receive that with gladness. And as always, whenever I pray for guidance, I pray for God to not be subtle because I'm an idiot.
Oh, I like that prayer. And you know, at certain points in my life, if you'd said to me, you're going to be single for the next 50 years, I might have been despairing of that. I think I've understood things about singleness now that I hadn't understood then. And I've learned how to, I hope, better use my singleness now in ways that I hadn't then, such that actually, if I'm single for the rest of my life, that's quite an exciting prospect. And again, this is where it's good to come back to Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 7, verse 7, that both marriage and singleness are gifts, because it means whatever happens, we get to experience the goodness of God.
And so that takes a lot of pressure off. My entire sense of happiness and worth and fulfillment isn't hanging in the balance on whether my marital status is single or married. Either of those options is a way for God to mediate to me his goodness and his kindness.
Both of those things are gifts, are good gifts. And God isn't the kind of weird, distant uncle who doesn't know you very well and gets you wildly inappropriate gifts at Christmas time because he doesn't know you. God knows us better than we know ourselves, and so we can receive and trust what he gives us.
I love that because it's a picture of you're basically laying down your life before God, who knows you, who loves you, who wants the best for you. And you're saying, God, I am content. I have you. I'm content if you bring me a wife. I'm content and I'm going to trust you as a good father. And that's a pretty big deal for us to lay our lives before God and trust him with what we have right now and what he has for our future.
That's not always an easy place to get to. It isn't, and I'm not consistent, and it's an ongoing discipline, isn't it? But I think one of the things I realized a few years ago was I was trying to be content in my singleness, and I realized that I need to be content in Christ as a single person, and those two things are not quite the same. Being content in Christ doesn't mean everything about being single has to be wonderful and good all the time. It just means actually Jesus is enough, but the singleness is easy at that point or difficult at that point. And Jesus is the constant here.
If he's the source of my contentment, then actually I can ride out the storms that come my way. Which is exactly true for marriage as well. Yeah, I was going to say it's very similar, but as you say, singleness is too hard as a myth.
Do you hear a lot of singles saying that it's hard to be single? Because as a married man for now over 40 years, I look at, and you quoted in the book 1 Corinthians 7, 32, Paul writes, I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man, the single man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord, but the married man is anxious about the worldly things, how to please his wife and his interests are divided. I read that and hear that as a married man, I'm like, yeah, that's my life.
I can't be single-minded on the things that, you know, the Lord wants me to like a single guy because I have to take care of my wife and my kids and I have all these things. So, you know, as a married guy, I'm thinking my life's hard. I don't think a single guy is thinking his life's hard, but you're saying, no, singles feel like their life is hard, even though there is this undivided focus, you know, that Paul talks about.
So talk about that. Why does singles think their life's hard? Because I don't think it's that hard. The very thing that means we can be undivided in our devotion to the Lord is also the very thing that can make singleness most painful. What makes you being pulled in so many directions as a husband and father is the fact that you have a wife and kids.
Life has complexity now. So for the single person, there may be a kind of operational simplicity to life. You know, me getting ready to leave for the day, it takes a matter of minutes compared to, you know, for example, my brother with his wife and kids for them as a family to get ready to leave the house for the day takes most of the day. So there's a kind of an operational ease that comes with being single, but at the same time, you know, the danger of singleness, and this is where all of us need to kind of be more careful is the danger is it can easily become isolating and lonely because you're not as interwoven in the lives of other people as you would be if you're a parent and a spouse. It shouldn't mean that single people are completely relationally isolated, that that's not meant to be the case, but it's going to take the whole church making sure that's not the case. So that can be one of the hard things about singleness is that absence of those built-in other people that are always going to be there in your life, or at least you would hope would always be there. But again, one of the things, and this has been a benefit to me of being a pastor and seeing a lot of lives up close is you realize the very things that I might feel nervous about with long-term singleness apply just as well to marriage.
You know, I might be thinking, well, who's going to look after me when I'm old? Being married now is no guarantee you're not going to have that issue either. So it's not as if all the security is on the marriage side of the ledger here, and there's just fundamental insecurity built into this world anyway. One of the things I often say to married people is, and it's an uncomfortable thing to say in some respects, but over half of you are going to be single again. Couples don't normally die at the same time, or sadly marriages end in divorce. So singleness is not an irrelevance for you if you're married because half of you are going to be single again one day, and the best time to think through what the Bible says about singleness is before you find yourself plunged back into it in some kind of painful, traumatic context. So all that to say, a lot of the things we might find hard about singleness we don't always realize that are also true of people who are married as well. No, it's true.
I didn't think of that. I've seen people be lonely in their marriages, and I would rather be lonely as a single person than lonely as a married person. That seems to me a very challenging situation to be in.
I think that that's true, and I've talked to many women. When we've experienced hard times in our marriage, I can remember in the middle of the night laying beside Dave thinking, I have never felt lonelier in my life, because there's an expectation that that person should fulfill the needs that I have, my loneliness needs, and they don't. And so then there's a form of rejection with that as well, or a wondering if there's something wrong with me. So you're right, I've talked to many, many married people that have an extreme sense of loneliness, and it's complicated on either side. I have a question, what are the dumb things that married people say to singles?
And there'll be many on the other, going in the other direction as well. I think it can be things like, are you still single, or surely you're looking for someone right now, or do you want us to find someone for you? I think it may be different for if you're a single guy as opposed to if you're a single girl. If you're a single girl, people are in more of a rush to set you up. If you're a single guy, people tend to assume you're probably incapable of looking after yourself. So the number of times I've had people around for a meal, and as soon as I've put the food down in front of them, they've all gone, oh, this actually looks quite nice, which tells me that on the way there, they were basically having a conversation of, OK, whatever comes out of the can that he opens and he puts in front of us, we're just going to have to eat, OK? Because there's a sort of cultural expectation, if you're a single man, you're probably living like a 16-year-old.
So there's lots of things. I remember one friend of mine saying once, he said he was at church weddings, the old ladies at church would come up to him and say, oh, it could be you next time. And he said the only way he could stop them saying that to them was by saying it to them at church funerals, which is a nuclear option there. Well, there is a sense. I do get my revenge on some of my married friends. If they've just had a child, a dear friend of mine at church actually recently had a child and I know he's getting, you can measure the nightly sleep he gets in minutes now rather than hours. And I was talking to him the other day and I said, I'm sorry if I'm tired, I only got eight and a half hours sleep last night.
And if it had the energy to hit me, I think he would have done, but he was so worn out I knew I was safe. Yeah. And I do think, you know, there's a perspective as married couples that singles aren't fulfilled. They don't cook well. They don't know how to live well. They're just managing, but they're nowhere near living the life that we're living. And this is often thought by married couples who aren't happy in their marriage and yet they're like, you know, this single guy or single girl can't be fulfilled in their life.
Talk about that. How does a single truly find fulfillment is, is it, is it fulfilling? Um, no, but then nor is marriage. And there's, there's a serious point behind that, which is that Christ is fulfilling. So he says in John 6 35, this is such a precious verse to me. He says, I'm the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will not hunger whoever believes in me will never thirst. And so he's saying that he is the only one that will ultimately satisfy us today.
There is a hunger and thirst in our souls that the best, even the best of human relationships will not be able to satisfy. A dear friend of mine in his early seventies with a very, very happy and a very healthy marriage. They both got married.
I think both of them were in their early twenties when they got married. So it'd been a very long and a very happy marriage. And he said to me once, he said, my marriage is much better than I thought it would be a much better than I deserve it to be, but it's not enough.
And he's right. There's, there's Christian wisdom in that statement. And I think, and you were saying earlier that we have this expectation that that human partner is meant to fulfill our every need and therefore fearless can feel a sense of disappointment or even resentment when that isn't the case. And that's, that's because we're, we're putting an expectation on marriage, which it's not designed to fulfill. If Jesus is the bread of life, it means a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend are not going to be able to be that for us. And if we're thinking marriage is going to meet all of my relational needs, all of my emotional needs, all of my psychological needs, we're actually going to be very difficult to be married to because we will either wear out our unsuspecting spouse or they will end up crushing us.
That's exactly what I did do. I think in our first years of marriage, I think I started out with my eyes and my heart for Jesus, knowing that he would be the fulfiller of my soul. But somewhere along the line, I felt like Dave wasn't meeting the expectations that I had. And I think this is true whether you're single or married.
When you take your eyes off of Christ, who is the lover of our souls, the person that gives us life, and we put them on any thing else, the other thing becomes an idol. And I'll never forget the day that I was so distraught in our marriage, so broken. I just felt so abandoned by Dave.
I felt like I didn't really have much love left for him. And I remember being on my knees and telling God, like, Lord, I thought my marriage would look like this, and I thought Dave would be doing these things for me. And I heard it so clearly in my mind, that thought of, Ann Wilson, I never created Dave to meet all of your needs. He's not equipped to do that. I never had an intention that he would do that.
I am the one who will meet your needs. I am the giver of life, not your husband. And I think whether we're single or married, we all have to come to that point of, oh, he is the giver of life. He is the purpose. That's why he died, to have that relationship with me, the bridegroom and the bride coming together.
And that is, he is the person that gives the satisfaction more than any other thing or person can give. And I think that's, you know, obviously true for a single person or married. In either state, we look somewhere else, single's thinking it's marriage, married people thinking it's single, and we miss going vertical. When you go vertical, you find life, whether you're single or married, and if you miss that, it doesn't matter. If you're married or not married, if you miss that, you miss life. And so it's a good reminder to that's the truth of the gospel.
And that's where life is found in Christ. Thanks Sam. You're so welcome. Thanks for having me. I imagine that most of you who are listening today are like me. You're not single, you're married, and yet you know singles, people at church, people in your neighborhood or in your workplace. So let me talk to us first. I think it's important for us to think rightly about singleness and God's design for this. I think this is where Sam's book can be helpful for us. And I think we need to be inviting singles we know into the larger community of faith, into our homes, and to be a part of our extended family.
And then let me talk to those of you who are listening who are single. I hope this conversation between Dave and Ann and Sam Albury has been helpful for you. And I hope you'll get copies of Sam's book, which is titled Seven Myths About Singleness. It's a book we've got in our Family Life Today Resource Center. I think it'll help you think rightly about where you are in life right now and how you can maximize your singleness for God's glory. You can find out about Sam's book when you go to our website, which is familylifetoday.com.
Again, the title of the book is Seven Myths About Singleness by Sam Albury. Order it from us online at familylifetoday.com or call to order at 1-800-FL-TODAY, 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now let me take just a minute and say thank you to those of you who have helped make today's program possible. Conversations like the one we've listened to today are not possible without listeners like you who step forward and help fund the production and syndication of this daily radio program, this podcast. Some of you who are regular listeners, our monthly legacy partners with us, some of you donate from time to time. Whatever is the case, you helped make today's program possible and we want to say thank you for that. We want to talk to those of you who are regular listeners who have never made a donation.
How about helping us make tomorrow's program possible? You can do that by making a donation today. You can go to familylifetoday.com to donate or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. When you do, we'd love to send you as a thank you gift a couple of books we've talked about this week from Matt and Lisa Jacobson. One book is 100 Ways to Love Your Son.
The other book is 100 Ways to Love Your Daughter. These are practical suggestions for how we can be expressing love to our children and the books are our thank you gift to those of you who can help donate today. Again, donate online at familylifetoday.com or call to donate 1-800-FL-TODAY is our number. Thanks in advance for your support of this ministry helping us reach more people more often with practical biblical help and hope for their marriage and their family. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to talk to someone who is in a season of singleness right now as a result of tragic events. Jonathan Pitts lost his wife Winter a number of years ago and he joins us to talk about living through what he calls his winter season. I hope you can tune in for that tomorrow. On behalf of our hosts Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
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