Reasons for Remaining Single, Part 2 A

There is an undistractedness that comes in the life of an unmarried person. He has only really one set of cares and that is his relation to the Lord. The married person has a divided set of cares, the Lord and His family. It isn't that they are bad, they're both good, they're both wonderful, they're both designed by God, but they are two things. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Marriage is the one institution that God established before the fall, part of His creation that He declared very good. If you're in a Christian marriage, no doubt you've seen how good it can be when couples serve the Lord together and raise a family to honor Him. So how then could a commitment to your spouse ever be bad for your spiritual growth? Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur explains how to maintain priorities that please God in your marriage, as he continues a practical study titled Guidelines for Singleness and Marriage.

So follow along now as John begins the lesson. Take your Bible if you will now and let's look together at the seventh chapter of 1 Corinthians. The relationship that God has designed for most people is marriage.

There's no question about that. The relationship that God has designed for most people is marriage. And marriage is good. Marriage is a good thing. In 1 Corinthians 7, 2 right there, let every man have his own wife, let every woman have her own husband.

This is acceptable. This is God's standard. In Proverbs 18, 22, who so findeth a wife, findeth a good thing. And it goes on to say that God looks on it with favor. Marriage is a good thing. In Jeremiah 29, 6, there is a command sent out to go and take wives and beget children and tell your children to take wives and beget more children. God has established as the majority standard of life relationships that people be married. In 1 Timothy 4, he even says heretics will come along in the last days who deny the Lord and they will forbid marriage.

But that's considered a heresy. Marriage is acceptable to God. Hebrews 13, 4, marriage is honorable and the bed is undefiled. So God looks very favorably on marriage, but for everyone, marriage is not the normal. God has given some people the special gift of being single. They do not need to be married to fulfill God's will. In fact, in fulfilling God's will to the very fullest, they are better if they stay single. And the reason I think this is such an important study is that the church tends to categorize single people as abnormal and it isn't so because God has so designed it for some.

Verse 7 of this chapter, I would that all men were as I. He says, I wish everybody was single, but every man has his proper gift. One after this manner, that is after singleness like me, and another after that, that is like marriage. Some are gifted for marriage and some are gifted for singleness. Singleness is a special gift of God. Single people do not need to be looked on as if they're different, strange, abnormal, unfulfilled, unqualified for certain service, not at all. In fact, you know something, people, single people aren't really single because they have the Holy Spirit dwelling in them.

They're uniquely designed by God for function within the body of Christ. Now in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul is dealing with issues in Corinth regarding being married or being single. The Jewish people in Corinth are saying you have to be married. Some of the Greek philosophers are saying you can be more devoted to God, you can be more spiritual by being single. Paul says that isn't even an issue.

That doesn't even matter. Verse 20, he says, let everybody stay the way he was when he was called. Verse 24, let every man in whatever state he is called abide with God. Verse 27, if you're bound to a wife, don't seek to be loosed. If you're loosed from a wife, don't seek a wife. In other words, stay married or stay single.

Either one is fine. They have no relationship to spirituality. God has given some the gift of singleness, others He desires to be married. That's just different. It isn't good or bad, but that's God's design. Now He has clearly said that for some, singleness is right, but not for everybody. For some, singleness is right. He doesn't want to come down and say marriage is wonderful, marriage is everything, everybody ought to get married because that would be to ignore the fact that God wants some people single. So after having said marriage is wonderful, fulfill your marriage. You don't have to leave your wife to be a good Christian.

You don't have to do that. After saying all of that, He says on the other hand, on the contrary, you can be single and be totally fulfilled if you have the gift. Now I think Paul knows that people who are single and have the gift are going to be under pressure because society accepts as the standard marriage, and so single people tend to get pressured into getting married. There tends to be that push, and I think it comes beginningly from mom and dad who want to push their kids into marriage.

And then it comes from peer pressure. Everybody finds somebody, and you're sort of left out, and this pressure begins to build. You get into the church and everything is family, and you have all kinds of family activities and family orientation, and single people sort of stick out, and people look on them as if they belong to a sort of different dimension, and the pressure continues. And I think that what Paul is saying here is very, very important for the church to recognize that God has gifted people for being single, and it is no less significant than being married. It's different.

It's His plan. Now in order to encourage people with the gift, and that's the basic premise you have to hang onto, that singleness is a gift, and if you don't have the gift, get married because it won't do you any good to try to stay single and serve the Lord if all you're thinking about is marriage. It's better to marry than to burn, he says over there in verse 9. So it's for people who have the gift. If you have the gift of singleness, Paul says, exercise it. Now from verse 25 to 40, he gives five reasons they ought to exercise it. Five reasons to stay single if you have the gift.

Now remember people, it's only if you have the gift. I don't have the gift, and most of you don't have the gift, but if you do have the gift, here are the five reasons to encourage you to stay single. Reason number one, and we're reviewing the first three, the pressure of the system.

The pressure of the system. And he says there in verse 26, it's good for the present distress. It's good to be single because of the present violence. There was a persecution coming right around the corner, Paul could see it, it was only a matter of time until it would be there, and he realized that married people were going to suffer much more under persecution, why? Because wives would suffer the death of their husbands, husbands would suffer the death of their wife, children would suffer the death of their parents, and that family ties would make the pain and the anguish and the anxiety and the pressure all the greater in a persecuting situation.

The bitter conflict and the terrible alternative of duty to God and affection to the family would tear people apart. So in a difficult society, in a persecuting environment, it is better to be single, he says, if you have the gift, because you don't have that tremendous pressure that the world of persecution lays on you. Second point, and we covered these in detail last time, I'm only reminding you, the problems of the flesh. A second reason if you have the gift to remain single is the problems of the flesh. Verse 28, the middle of the verse, nevertheless, such shall have trouble in the flesh and I would spare you. Married people, that's fine, it's all right, you don't sin if you get married, it says in 28, but you will have trouble.

And the word flesh means our humanness. There will be human trouble, there will be human conflict, there will be just the plain old problems of our humanness. Marriage frequently, usually intensifies human weakness. And if you're married, you just have trouble, you have to deal with issues in your home, with your wife, with your husband, with your children, it just adds a friction to living.

Marriage isn't all that friction, it isn't all bad, it's wonderful and it's blissful when it is the way God designed it, but there will be times of difficulty. The third reason he says to stay single if you have the gift is the passing of the world. After all, marriage is only a part of this fashion, of this schema, of this world and it's all passing away anyway.

He says, it remains that they that have wives should be as though they had none, they that weep as though they weep not, and they that rejoice as though they rejoice not, and they that buy as though they possess not, and they that have pleasure in the world not abusing it, for the schema of the world is in the process of passing away. In other words, those things are all part of the world. The world's pleasures, the world's commodities, the world's emotions, and the world's relationships. And if you can be free of those things, then you're just that much less attached.

And we went into that last time as well. Set your affections on things above. If you're single, just think, you don't have to get totally attached to the world, totally attached to the emotions that come in close relationships in marriage, to the necessities of buying things and indulging in worldly activity.

Now I'm not saying that it's wrong to have pleasure and it's wrong to buy things or it's wrong to be emotional or it's wrong to be married, no. It's just that that demands a certain kind of attachment. And it is an attachment to a passing world. There's no marriage in heaven.

That's just a passing thing. And so He simply says, if you have the gift of singleness, it just means you don't need to get so engulfed in the world as a married person does. And it doesn't mean badly engulfed.

It doesn't mean in the world's evil. It just means you have to, for example, buy life insurance and spend your money on that so if you die, somebody's going to be able to take care of your children. You have to save your money for their education.

You have to have this medical insurance or money laid away for all the family's physical needs. You have to buy a bigger house, a bigger car, more of this and more of that because you have to support the larger group of people you have around you. You have to be sensitive to psychological needs, emotional needs, spiritual needs.

There is a concentration there. There is an involvement there that marriage demands. That's all He's saying. If you have the gift of singleness and don't need to get into that, then you're better to stay single.

All right then. If you have the gift of singleness, He says, remain single because of the pressures of the world, the problems of the flesh, and the passing of the world. Let me give you the fourth and we'll start with verse 32 where we left off. The fourth point supporting staying single is the preoccupation of the married. If a person stays single, he doesn't get engulfed in the preoccupation of the married. You say, well, what is the preoccupation of the married? What are they preoccupied with?

The answer is each other. Look at verse 32, but I would have you without care. Now what he means there is free from anxiety.

I would have you free from anxiety. He that is unmarried cares for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married cares for the things that are of the world, how he may please what? His wife and is divided. In your Bible at the end of verse 33, if it isn't there, right, and is divided. That's in the best manuscripts.

The proper manuscripts say how he may please his wife and is divided. Now what is he saying here? Well, he said, I'd like you to be free from anxiety.

I'd like you to be, in a sense, carefree. Lightfoot said, a man who is a hero in himself becomes a coward when he thinks of his widowed wife and his orphaned children. There are certain cares that just encumber your mind when you're married. A married man must concentrate on things concerning his wife. A single unmarried, verse 32 says, cares for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord.

Now this is potential, people. It doesn't mean that every single person is totally devoted to Jesus. It's just that he has the potential for that total devotion. There is an undistractedness that comes in the life of an unmarried person. He has only really one set of cares, and that is his relation to the Lord.

The married person has a divided set of cares, the Lord and His family. It isn't that they are bad. They're both good. They're both wonderful.

They're both designed by God, but they are two things. There is the inability for single-mindedness in marriage. Married man is a divided person. I think about Luke 14, verse 20, where Jesus was calling people to follow him, and he says to this one guy, come and follow me, and the guy says, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come. I wonder how many times that has happened around the world in the history of the church that there have been ministries and opportunities open, but somebody married a wife and couldn't go. You say, well, was it wrong for them to marry?

No, it wasn't wrong. But maybe it would have been better if they had the gift of singleness to have stayed single, and then they wouldn't have had that problem. I'll give you an interesting footnote. This is the only spiritual gift that I know of in the Scripture that you have an option to use.

Isn't that interesting? It's the only one where there is an option, where he says, if you want to get married, that's fine, verse 28, you have not sinned. But I would sure suggest to you that if you have the gift of singleness, use it. God never makes a marriage a sin. I got a letter from somebody that said their sin was in marriage. There is no such thing as sinning in getting married. That is not a sin to get married unless you were to marry an unbeliever. But in marriage, that is a good thing. They sin not. It is the only spiritual gift that I know of that you have an option to use. And I'm sure there are some people who could have, if they really were sensitive to the Lord, stayed single and really been useful, but like Luke 14, 20, they married a wife. That isn't wrong. It just may be that God could have used them in a different way. He'll use them through their marriage, perhaps equally. But that option is there.

All right. If you're unmarried, potentially there is the possibility of caring only for the things that belong to the Lord, how to please Him. Just that total single-minded devotion. But verse 33, if you're married, you care for the things that are of the world, how you may please your wife, and are divided. Now this is precisely true of the woman. Verse 34, the first part can be eliminated.

There is difference also between a wife. That part is out and and is divided should be in. One of the reasons I say this, we have later manuscript evidence since the script of the King James that proved to us that the proper reading here is, as I said, please his wife and is divided. And then it picks up in verse 34 with the word and.

So it would be a capital A. And the virgin and the unmarried woman cares for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit, but she that is married cares for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And again, he's simply saying there is a dividedness here.

It isn't wrong, it's just there. A single person, male or female, has that total potential of concentration and devotion to the Lord in service to Him. A married person must care for his family because God says so. At the same time, must be involved in pursuing the things of the Lord.

Now you'll notice an interesting thing. It says at the end of verse 35 that this person is without distraction. A single person need to have no distraction from serving the Lord. How many times, for example, in your life, some of you that are married to an unbeliever, have you had the struggle between trying to please an unbelieving partner and trying to serve the Lord? Or maybe you've got a super colossal, outstanding, walking in the spirit partner and you still realize that sometimes your involvement as a family means that you can't do some things that maybe you otherwise could do.

Now you can do some things that you otherwise couldn't do. So it goes both ways. But that's all Paul is saying. A person who's married has a divided concentration, but look at verse 34. The one that is single cares for the things of the Lord, whether she's a virgin or unmarried, she cares for the things of the Lord, and she is holy in body and in spirit, potential. What does it mean? The word holy, basically in its very simple sense, means separated. And I think that's what he's saying. He's not saying single people are more holy than married people.

Is that true? What does holiness have to do with? It certainly doesn't have to do with your marital status, it has to do with the righteousness of God imputed to you, right? And there are plenty of single people who aren't very holy and there are plenty of married people who are and that isn't the criteria. But what he's saying is that the one who is not married can be separated under God physically and spiritually. And there are no physical attachments, humanly speaking. There is no need to satisfy the physical.

There are no spiritual encumbrances. There is a certain liberty and consecration and that's what he's talking about. And remember, this is only for those who have the gift. If you don't have the gift, like 1 Timothy 5 says, let the younger women marry. Let them marry because if you don't, they're going to grow wanton later on and then you're going to have problems. Let them marry. But if you have the gift, remain that way, there is a possibility and a potential of consecration in body and spirit that is very unique. But a married woman cares for the things of the world. She has to worry about pleasing her husband, which is good.

She ought to do that, but it's just that there are two things. Now let me add verse 35 because Paul did and it's important. Now, this I speak for your own profit.

Now, somebody's going to get confused if he doesn't say this, so he says, I'm just telling you this, folks, for your profit. I am not casting a brachas around your neck, a noose. I'm not putting a legalistic noose on you.

I just want you to know what is good that you may attend on the Lord without distraction. It isn't that you have to stay single. Even if you have the gift for it, it is not a command. It is not that you must do this or else it is that you have the option. You have the liberty. You have the freedom. And I'm only telling you for your own good, if you have the gift, you'd be better off to use it.

And again, I point out the fact that this is the only gift I know of that's optional. So he's saying potentially you can have an undistracted devotion to the Lord if you want to take advantage of it. And I'm not saying this to bind you in legalism. I'm not saying this like a command that puts a noose around your neck and hangs you. I'm just telling you this.

I'm not trying to put a snare on you. I just want you to know that this would give you the potential of serving the Lord without any division. Let me give you an illustration of it. Look back in your Bible at Luke 10. Some of you may be fussing around in your brain for an illustration, so here's one in Luke 10.

This is a really great story here. Luke 10 38 says, Now it came to pass as they went that he entered into a certain village, and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. Now here's Jesus, and he's in the house of this lovely lady named Martha. And she had a sister called Mary who also sat at Jesus' feet and heard his word. Jesus came into the house, sat down, and Mary just plopped at his feet and just hung on every word, just drank it in. But Martha, verse 40, was cumbered about much serving.

Martha was busy around the house getting everything ready. Is there anything wrong with preparing a meal? No, that's biblical hospitality. Is that good? That's good.

Somebody comes and you feed them, that's wonderful. So she's busy doing that. She's cumbered about much serving, and she came to Jesus, and this is what she says to Christ, most interesting. Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Lord, does it matter to you that I'm setting the table by myself while she sits there?

Does this bother you, Lord? Lord, would you tell her to help me? Now, that'll give you some idea of the authority that Martha felt she had over Mary. She had to ask Jesus to tell her. Would you please tell her to help me set this table? Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things, in parenthesis, none of which matter.

Why you say that? MacArthur, verse 42. One thing, what, is needful, and Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her. I'm not telling her anything. She's doing what she ought to do. Which would you rather have, the word of God or a cold dinner or a hot dinner? I'd rather have the word of God and a cold dinner or no dinner than a hot dinner, not the word of God.

That's the implication. She's doing what's right. You see, here's Mary, and she has a single-mindedness, doesn't she? She could care less about the table and the place settings. She could care less about the whatever's going on in the kitchen. All she wants to do is drink in with devotion to Jesus Christ, but not Martha.

She's thinking about Christ is there, and she's got all kinds of things going. Well, this is just simply the illustration of the fact. It isn't wrong to be hospitable, but it does cause, in this case, a divided devotion, doesn't it?

That's what Paul is saying. Thank God for people who have that single-mindedness. You know, when I was in Quito, Ecuador, and had the wonderful privilege of meeting and since then corresponding with Rachel Saint, this unusual woman who's given her whole life to those Alki Indians, she's an incredible person. I often think to myself that maybe unmarried people are the most fulfilled people of all because they don't need somebody else to make them complete. And she's a complete person in herself by the power of the Spirit, and she's down there with those Indians, and she's just going at it revolutionizing a whole society for Christ.

And throughout the history of the church, there have been many people with that kind of gift and that kind of commitment to Christ, and I thank God for them. There are reasons, you see, to receive the gift of singleness and welcome it. The pressure of the system, the problems of the flesh, the passing of the world, and the preoccupation of the married. When you get married, there is a dividedness in your life.

It isn't bad, it's just a fact. Now fifthly, and this is the last reason he tells the single people they'd be better off to stay single if they have the gift. The fifth one is the permanence of the union. Well, when you get married, you are married, and that is it, and there's no turning back. Verse 39, let's jump down to 39, we'll get back to the others. Now the wife is bound by the law as long as her husband lives. Well, that's a long time.

Now this is a lifetime arrangement. Now some people have questioned why this passage is in here, 39 and 40, and there's a whole lot of discussion about it, and I don't know that I can give you the absolute answer to why it's here, but I'll tell you what I believe. I don't believe it's isolated. Some say it's just a tack on to answer an issue about widows. I don't think so. I think basically, though it does answer that issue, it is here as just another reason for remaining single.

Why? It's the permanence of marriage. You'd be better off if you have the gift to stay single, because once you're married, that is it, and you'll never be able to exercise the potential again, so think a long time before you do. Marriage is permanent.

Once you're stuck, you're stuck. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur. He's chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and I trust you found encouragement from today's lesson on guidelines for singleness and marriage.

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