Today's reading is going to be from 1 Corinthians 7, starting in verse 7. I wish that all were as I myself am, but with each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. And then we will continue at verse 32. I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord. If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly towards his betrothed, if his passions are strong—and it has to be—let him do as he wishes. Let them marry. It is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desires under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, He will do well. So then he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who remains from marriage will do even better. A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. Yet in my judgment, she is happier if she remains as she is, and I think that I too have the Spirit of God. This is the word of the Lord. Good morning. I'm Richard, one of the elders here. I'm looking forward to looking into God's word with you this morning, a very interesting passage and some of the context around it. Before we get into it, let's pray together. Father, thank you for your goodness in our lives. Thank you that you reveal yourself to us in your word. Thank you that you teach us how you designed us to live and that you extend grace to us and call us back when we stray from your will. This morning, I pray that you would, by your Holy Spirit, open your word to us that we might be transformed by an encounter with you and with your truth more and more and be transformed into the likeness of your son, Jesus Christ. And as David prayed in the Psalms, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts this morning be acceptable to you. Oh God, our rock and our redeemer, amen. So, we're now in the fourth and final week of our series on sex, sexuality, and relationships to the glory of God. I'm going to really quickly review what we've covered so far because each message in this series builds on the previous ones. And so if you were there for those previous messages, this will bring it back to mind. If you weren't, this will give you a little quick overview so you know the context for what we're talking about today. But there's a lot here. So I definitely recommend, if you missed one of the four, go back and listen to the recordings of it on our YouTube, our website. In week one, we looked at God's original intent for sex, sexuality, and relationships by examining how God created man and woman and what kind of relationships that he created them for. Among other things, we saw that God created humanity as male and female with equal value, both in his own image, but with important and complementary differences. We saw that Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, were given a mission that they would only be able to achieve together. And we saw that sex was an essential means to accomplish that mission, as well as an expression of love and joy and unity between them. Unfortunately, as we saw in week two, everything broke when the man and woman disobeyed the one rule that God had given them. Theologians call this catastrophic event the fall. And this fall immediately had negative consequences for Adam and Eve's relationships, both with God and with each other, and even with themselves. There was immediately blame and pain and shame, and the consequences have stuck with us throughout the generations since then. I don't have to tell you that things are broken now. We know that experientially in our lives. However, while everything is broken, it's not totally broken. Scripture frequently references God's original intent for male and female relationships and for sex as the way it's still supposed to be, even in a fallen world. Like Jesus himself points back to the pre-fall creation when he teaches on marriage, for example. And Paul, the kind of original leading theologian in the church and author of most of the New Testament, does the same thing, pointing back to creation before the fall as this is why things are the way God made them. So that was week two. Finally, in week three, last week, we saw that while marriage and family are still key parts of God's intent for human relationships, in the church, Jesus has created a new kind of family where we are all, in Christ, brothers and sisters in a deeper and more eternal way. So while the natural family is still the means by which we fulfill the cultural mandate, God's command before the fall to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over it, The natural family becomes less important in the church age than this new spiritual family that we're adopted into by following Jesus. So this brings us to week four where we're looking at God's intent for singleness. How should single Christians live and how should married people like me support our single brothers and sisters in the church. And I'm going to speak to both of those this morning. Now, at Grace City, we make a point of teaching directly from Scripture. We believe Scripture, the Bible, is the inspired Word of God, and one of our five core values, the R in the acronym Grace for our values, stands for rule of Scripture, meaning we treat the Bible as the definitive source for what's true and for how we should live, so we don't want to just preach our opinions. In that context, teaching on singleness is tricky. There's two kinds of content in the Bible. There's prescriptive content where the word tells you specifically, here's a thing you should do or not do. And then there's descriptive content, like descriptive, where the Bible tells us this person did such and such a thing. And it doesn't directly say what it means for us. And if you're like me, you probably wish a whole lot more of the Bible was the first category. Like, God, just tell me what I should do here. And if you read through the whole thing, you may be surprised and disappointed to find out that that's not mostly how God chose to reveal himself to us. When it comes to singleness, there's really only like one significant prescriptive passage written directly to Christians, which is the one that Daniel read this morning from 1 Corinthians 7. And we need to take that passage seriously, and we're going to today, but we also need to recognize that that passage sits in the middle of a much larger context that's not explicit and prescriptive. And it's the larger context that actually applies to most people. And you can see this even in Paul's other letters to the other churches. So we're gonna see that that one prescriptive passage is describing some things that are true for everybody and then some things that are kind of exceptional for some people rather than the main case. And we're gonna speak to both of those this morning. Moreover, when we look to the Bible for guidance on being single today, we have to grapple with this huge cultural gap between the ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman cultures that are described in the Bible, and that are the audience for letters like this one, and today's American culture in which we live. For example, dating, as we understand it, has existed for kind of a century. And we're reading something here that is almost 2,000 years old. Most of the marriages in biblical times were to some extent arranged. Like there's the extreme of your parents just picked out somebody for you with somebody else's parents. And in some cases, you meet them for the first time at the wedding, which is wild to imagine. And then there's probably the more common cases like our families grew up together and authorities in our lives said, hey, you two really probably should get married here. You're a good fit. And then you do with kind of minimal individual freedom in that. So when we look to the Bible for guidance on things like dating today, we're in the territory of what we might call practical wisdom, like things we can derive from the Bible, but not things that are directly laid out in there. In the same way that if you look to the Bible for guidance on driving, you're not gonna find the passage that tells you how you should drive, but there are a lot of things that Jesus says about how we should treat our neighbor that might weigh in on how you approach driving. Unfortunately I think the Bible can give us wisdom on the topics of singleness and dating even in places where it's not directly addressed. So this morning we're going to look at three things. First we're going to look at in what way according to scripture the inspired word of God is singleness better than marriage. And what does that tell us about how to be single to the glory of God. Whether it's a lifelong calling for you or a temporary season of life. So that's the first thing. Second. For those single people who would pursue marriage, which historically is the most common case and the background for what Paul's writing here in 1 Corinthians 7, what practical wisdom does the Bible give us for how to do that well today? And finally, how should married people support our single brothers and sisters in the church, whether they remain single or pursue marriage, and how do we serve and support them well. So we're going to hit all three of those things this morning, starting with why singleness is better. I know from my single friends that being single, especially as you get older, can feel like being a second-class citizen in the church. People can make you feel like there's something wrong with you. Like, number one, you really should want to get married, and number two, since you're not, you must just not want to. And I know that happens occasionally, like sometimes people are called to Mary and are just afraid of commitment. But a lot of times, especially in our day, something else is going on. And here I think the Apostle Paul's words to the church in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 7 are helpful. Reading Paul's letters, especially the letters to the church in Corinth, 1 and 2 Corinthians, can sometimes feel like you're listening to half a phone call. You know, somebody sits down next to you in the airport and they're on the phone. And it doesn't totally make sense. You can kind of figure out what they're saying. but there's clearly a context here I'm not in on, and Paul is clearly replying to other letters. Like earlier in chapter seven, he starts it off with, now with respect to this thing you said, and then goes on from there, but barely mentions the things that he said. So there's some context here that we're not aware of. But when we jump in at seven, Paul writes, I wish that all were as I myself am, but each has his own gift from God. And he was just talking about married people before that. So one of one kind and one of another. To unmarried and widows, I say it's good for them to remain single as I am. But if they can't exercise self-control, they should marry. Daniel read this just a moment ago. So Paul, the preeminent apostle in the early church, was single. Many scholars believe that he was actually a widower, that he was married at some point, because he was probably a rabbi, he was probably a leader. even in the Sanhedrin, which was kind of the Jewish council of leadership. And in order to be part of that, you had to be married to have that role. But at the time of this writing, some years later, he's single, and our best explanation for that is that his wife died. And Jesus, of course, our ultimate example for how to live a perfect life, was single for his entire life. Notice that Paul here doesn't just say it's good to remain single, he says it's a gift from God. It's a gift to be married, some have one gift, and it's a gift to be single, some have the other. This is one of those funny gifts that doesn't always feel like a great gift, if you're in the middle of it, I know. But that's how Paul's talking about it. And he goes on to say more in the rest of what Daniel read, starting at verse 32, about that gift and talks about how it is distracting to be married, essentially. what that looks like and why it's better, but why it's not necessary to still be a Christian. And the way he talks about this in 1 Corinthians 7 teaches us both about the nature and the purpose of this gift of singleness. First, the nature of the gift of singleness. Paul is highlighting burning with passion as the sign that you don't have the gift of singleness. And we need to make sense of that. It seems like The nature of the gift of singleness is a God-given ability to submit your sexual desires to the Lord and focus your energy elsewhere. But we should be clear that this isn't necessarily effortless to do. The word translated gift here is the Greek word charisma. which is the same word used in reference to spiritual gifts elsewhere. And it's based on the Greek word charis, which we translate grace elsewhere in the New Testament. And this isn't a coincidence, by the way. There's multiple Greek words used in the New Testament, including by Paul, for gift, and he picks this one here. And I think one of the reasons he does that becomes clear if you compare it to another gift like teaching, which is described elsewhere as a gift from God, the ability to teach. It's a free gift of grace given to the skilled teacher, but it's also work to teach. which I can tell you after trying to make sense of what the Bible says about singleness for the last three weeks. I appreciate the gift from God that allows me to get up and teach from his word, and I also recognize that it is not effortless to exercise that gift. It can take a lot of work and pain to do it. And sometimes it can feel like a joy, and sometimes it can feel unpleasant and difficult, as is the case with any gift from God, but it's a thing he gives us for the building up of the church. God gives different gifts in different degrees to different people, and I think this gift of singleness, particularly as it relates to our sexual desire and our ability to submit that to Him easier or not, He gives in different degrees to different people. So some people find it easier to submit this part of themselves to the Lord and remain undistracted by it, and others find it requires constant and active dependence on God. Either way, it's a gift that comes from God, and that's why self-control is described elsewhere by Paul as one of the fruits of the Spirit. Like, our ability to do this, whether it's constant submission or whether it's something that comes easily, both of those expressions of that are a gift from God that bring glory to God as you do it. Second, this passage teaches us about the purpose of the gift of singleness, and we see this going back to 1 Corinthians 7 in verse 35. He says, it's to have undivided devotion to the Lord. The reason Paul argues that it's better to be single is that no matter how good your marriage is, Marriage divides your devotion and your attention. And we see this expression of the gift of singleness in Paul's life and in Jesus' life. They were able to travel and focus on ministry, and they were able to serve God in risky, dangerous situations without being distracted by concern for a family. It was a practical gift for their ministry. Christianity, by the way, is the first religion to ever treat adult singleness as a viable, honorable way of living. We don't think about this now because it's such a normal way of being in our world, but at the time, every other religion and human culture emphasized marriage and childbearing as the only form of a good life. Even pagans, like the Emperor Augustus, for example, find widows who didn't remarry within two years. And this kind of makes practical sense in that time because marriage and children, especially as you grow old, is the support system for the world. There's no public version of it or welfare or anything like that. So if you didn't get married, you were kind of on your own and not taken care of. a burden on others, and the church flips this around. The early church was a living witness to the sufficiency of God and the reality of the church as the family of God when they frequently supported lifelong widows and made space for them to spend their time on ministry. So when Paul talks about, like, to widows it's better not to marry, the church took that seriously and said, like, because you don't have a husband supporting you anymore, which was mostly the way you would survive as a woman in that time, they'd say, we're going to fill that spot and free you up to be devoted to the Lord. And that was a witness to something's different here. This This is kind of what Matt talked about last week with how the gospel relativizes family. This is the church living that out and saying, we're gonna put family below the family of God in importance, and we're gonna show that by supporting people who don't have a natural family at this point. For some people, this gift of singleness seems to be a lifelong calling, and for others, it's a temporary gift. Either way, the way you make the most of that gift is to take advantage of your ability to serve the Lord more fully. So, single people in the room, which is about half our church these days, I wanna ask you, will you be able to look back on this time in your life, however long it is, and say, I used my singleness well. I was able to express undivided devotion to the Lord and his work during this time. If not, as with anything we see in the Bible, I encourage you to respond today in repentance and faith and turn towards Jesus. Trust that you are washed and forgiven by his death and resurrection and ask him to show you what would it look like to use this gift well, even if it's not a gift I want. How do I use it to bring glory to you and joy to your people in this season, however it is? And then as you do that, use that gift with confidence. I can't stress this enough. It's clear in this passage, but I want to really emphasize it. You are very much not a second-class citizen because you're single. In fact, you are gifted to serve the Lord better than married Christians, provided you take hold of and use that gift. And that's an honorable thing to do for however long it lasts in your life. Now, for most people, Singleness is a temporary gift. Based on God's original design, reaffirmed by Jesus and by Paul in the New Testament, and described with examples, descriptive ones, throughout scripture, it seems that God's will is still for most people to marry. So this brings us to our second big topic. If you want to pursue marriage, what does the Bible teach about pursuing marriage? to the glory of God and for your own joy, and particularly in our time, which is pretty far removed from biblical culture. For this one, as I mentioned in the beginning, we don't have a clear prescriptive passage of scripture, though I wish we did, because that would make this so much easier right now. But we don't. So I'm going to have to derive some practical wisdom from a variety of places in the Bible, some of which we've already seen over the last few weeks. Some of them have a particular passage, others are more like practical wisdom derived from the overall biblical picture of how God made humans and human relationships. And there's five things I want to highlight here. It's not complete, but they seem like important things that show up throughout scripture. Number one, before we talk about anything else related to pursuing marriage, well, I want to emphasize, maintain your identity in Christ primarily. Don't let your, quote, success or failure in dating or marriage define your identity or your worth. The thing that is most true about you is that God made you in his image and loved you so much that he pursued you in Jesus and saved you and brought you back into his family. That whatever else happens in your relationships is the most true and important thing about you and keep that focus. Certainly don't let the person you're dating make you question your identity in Christ. Nothing they can say is as meaningful as what God says about you. So keep coming back to that. Rehearse that to yourself. And I want to be super clear again. I'm going to keep saying this. Marriage doesn't make you more valuable or a better Christian or anything like that. Marriage, like singleness, as Paul says, is a good gift from God, but it's not definitive or ultimate for you. The only thing that is is who you are in Christ. All right, with that perspective, now we can shift into, but how do you actually approach this well? So that brings us to the second thing, which is calibrate your expectations to seek out what God says is important in a spouse. I think this is particularly difficult in our time because dating apps have trained people to think about other people as a collection of attributes that you filter on to find the right match. For example, you may think you care a lot about height. So you filter that on the dating app. I only want people above a certain height or below a certain height or something. And you necessarily miss all the people in the world that might cause you to discover that height wasn't as important as you thought. And you're never going to find that out because we're operating on this kind of shopping list filter sort of mentality of honing in on the person that meets the things I think are important to me, which you have to do because there's this paradox of choice. It's like buying toothpaste or laundry detergent. There's too many choices, so you have to filter it aggressively. But that's not really the way God designed relationships to work. Actual people are way more than their attributes. And you only discover this by getting to know actual people in a real life context. So we need to get out of the shopping mentality promoted by online dating and put yourself in contexts where you'll get to know actual people as whole people and discover that your preferences are a lot more malleable than you thought when you encounter actual people that are a complex intersection of a whole bunch of different things. Church is certainly a good place to do that. Also, because our church is relatively small, multi-church events are another good place to do that, like meetups or like we started hosting these dances here, which I think we're going to do again, because we're trying to make a space where it was possible to meet other like-minded Christians as people and not as attributes and statistics in an application or something. But this can also happen naturally through friendships and networks, and it's good to introduce your friends to other people that they might be interested in, even if they don't check the boxes for what they tell you is on their list. Second thing here about calibrating your expectations is to let go of the myth of the one or the soulmate. This is not how the world works. And I went looking for where did this start? And I was reminded, this is not a biblical idea at all. This is an idea from Plato. It shows up in Symposium, which is a wacky book in a lot of ways. I'm not going to recommend it to you. But you may have read it in school at some point. And in Symposium, Plato has one of the characters explaining why human relationships work the way they do. And this character says, here's how it all started. The gods created people with four arms and four legs and two faces on one head. And then Zeus looks at this and is like, these many-limbed people are going to be way too powerful. Something must be done. And so he splits them. into the configuration you're familiar with now and scatters them and condemns people to sort of not be as powerful because now they're spending all their time trying to find their other missing half to complete them. So the you-complete-me idea is a wacky idea from Plato. It is not the biblical perspective for how people work. And I think Tim Keller puts it well, as he so often does. In biblical terms, there is no perfect match for you and you are no perfect match for anybody else. There are certainly clear wrong matches, but everybody in the world is an imperfect match for you because of sin. and because of how God uses marriage to transform us. So it's not like you make yourself into somebody's perfect match, and they make themselves into your perfect match, and now you can be this odd, two-faced, four-limbed thing. It's like two imperfect people committing to grow together in the Lord. So that brings some of the pressure down. You're not looking for the one. You're looking for a one. Then the third thing on calibrating your expectations, look for what matters. Look for someone who follows Jesus. The Bible assumes this all over. It should not be controversial, but it is now. Just one example from the same chapter we were reading earlier. At the end of 1 Corinthians 7, Paul writes, and illustrating this with widows, a woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she's free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord. The ESV says, only in the Lord, but he must belong to the Lord, I think is a clearer translation of it. This is super practical. This is God knowing what's good for us. If a couple is divided on the most important thing about you, everything else gets more difficult. And it's not just big decisions like, what should we do with our children? How should we raise them? It's little practical things like, do we really need to go to church every Sunday? And also a small group, that takes a lot of time and the mountains are there. There's so many other things we could do together, like go to the mountains and have brunch. I can tell you I've been in ministry a long time, a couple decades now, and literally every time I see an active, engaged Christian marry an unbeliever, within two years they're no longer part of the church in a meaningful way. There's usually a few weeks where I'm still going alone, then there's the Christmas and Easter phase, and then there's the, you know, we're just out of the habit and it's not part of my life anymore. which is a tragic outcome. If your relationship with Christ is the most important thing about you, no human relationship is worth that sacrifice. It's just not practical. Look for someone you can be on mission with. Going back to Genesis 1 and the first marriage, we have this short but dense narrative. Adam's given a mission from God, then God creates Eve as a suitable helper. and partner for that mission, and then God extends their mission to both of them collectively. So Christian marriage is not just for emotional support and entertainment, but you have kind of your own separate missions that you do during the day. It's a partnership in shared mission. So look for someone you can be on mission with. And there's an implication there, which is kind of like figure out what God has for you, what does this mission look like in your life, and find people who are going in the same direction. And then finally, on the calibrating your expectations, look for someone that you're attracted to. This is a theme that runs throughout all the descriptive texts about examples of marriage in the Old Testament, most clearly in Song of Solomon, which is the longest treatment of a husband and wife talking to and about each other. And much of Song of Solomon is a celebration of their attraction to each other, including physical. It also has competence and character and some other things that they value in each other. So we shouldn't think of attractiveness like the world, which limits it just to a pretty stereotypical physical attractiveness, but this is really about avoiding false guilt that some Christians get of, well, like, they seem great and I'm not otherwise attracted to them, but I should be, or like I'm doing something wrong. Throughout the Bible, we see examples of It's okay to care about attraction, but it's more comprehensive than just physical appearance. All right, number three on how to do this well. So we talked about calibrating your expectations to what God says is important. The flip side of this is work to become what God says is important in a spouse. Or to say it differently, by God's help, work to become the kind of person that the kind of person you want to marry would want to marry. So as you've thought about, this is the kind of person I want to marry, think about what are they looking for, and how can I become that? And three quick ways to do that. First, use your gift of singleness, like we talked about in the previous section. Your relationship with the Lord is the most important thing about you, and you have the best opportunity to single-mindedly develop that in this season of your life. So don't waste that. God will change you as you follow Jesus. Second, know how the Bible describes a mature Christian and peripherally aspire and work towards that. There are several places for this. One you can look at is the qualifications for elders and deacons and deaconesses in Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 3. There's characteristics there that are kind of minimum qualifications for people to be elders or deacons or deaconesses, but they're also a decent rubric to look at for just what does mature Christianity look like. And even if you don't aspire to be a leader in the church, the characteristics are gonna be similar. And then third, don't try to do this work in your own life on your own. Men seek out older men with healthy marriages and learn wisdom from them. Women seek out older women with healthy marriages and learn wisdom from them. There's so many nuances and applications here that are individual things for your context and your gifting. aren't appropriate to develop in a group setting like this, that they're best developed in conversation with people who know you and know the Word. I know Don and I, my wife, have a lot of conversations with single people along these lines, and we welcome that, and I know other leaders in our church do as well. All right, fourth thing to pursue marriage to the glory of God, be chaste. We don't use this word very much, but it is kind of the best biblical word for what sexual purity looks like before marriage. It should be clear from this whole series up to this point, but just in case, the only God-given context for sex is within a lifelong covenant marriage between a man and a woman. All other sex before or outside marriage is, in biblical terms, sin. Of course, the blood of Christ covers this sin just like any other, and the Bible treats this as, treats sin as sin in a lot of ways. So if you've sinned sexually, there is forgiveness and there is a path forward in Jesus, and I encourage you to repent and move forward in faith with Him. And as Jesus often said to people when they were doing exactly that, His phrase was often something along the lines of, you're forgiven, go and sin no more. So this is about repentance is a turning and a choice, not to be perfect, but to change direction. Now, even as Christians agree that sex outside of marriage is sin, there's still this question, which I hear frequently, but what's allowed? What can we do short of sexual intercourse? Because there's this long continuum from, say, holding hands or hugging or something to sexual intercourse. And so people ask, but what's allowed outside of marriage? What can we get away with? Which I think is the wrong question. And there's three reasons why it's the wrong question. Number one, sex is designed by God as a one-way street. It's not like eating a meal where you get full and stop partway through and don't finish your meal. Sex is designed so that each thing leads to the next and there's momentum to it. And it's very hard to stop along that path of physical intimacy. There's this kind of domino effect. And so there's a refrain you see several times in Song of Solomon, which is, I think, like I mentioned earlier, this biggest celebration of marital love. And clearly, there's a sexual element to it. The bride in there frequently says to her unmarried female friends, I implore you, I adjure you, don't awaken love before it's ready." She's saying, when it's ready, it's great. Before it's ready, it's not serving you well. So there's the one-way street thing. Sex also makes us less objective, or really physical intimacy in general makes us less objective about the object of our physical intimacy. So it becomes harder to evaluate in the middle of a relationship, is this going where it should be? Is this healthy? Are we honoring God in it? We're kind of blinded to that, which I think actually is a God-given thing in marriage as part of your building unity. It serves to cover over... small things in your relationship, and God uses that to his glory and our joy. But it's not always useful when you're in this phase of trying to figure out if somebody is the right person to marry. And then third, shame from getting this wrong has lasting effects for you, for the other person, for your relationship, for your future relationships. And this is one of those things where the downside can be worse than the upside. The Bible doesn't make clear rules around this other than keeping sex within marriage, and I think we should avoid making rules for things the Bible doesn't make rules about. We should be wise about particular cases for it, which means we should be wise about setting boundaries for ourselves. and be suspicious of your own self-discipline and self-control. I think we tend to be over-optimistic about that. Like, we love Jesus, we're good people, we can…we'll be self-controlled. I know just one example of this, speaking from our own experience. When Don and I first got together, we'd made mistakes in this area before and had shame and pain from that. And we didn't want to repeat that in our relationship. And we both knew about that kind of domino effect in our own lives. So we said, we're just going to make a simple rule for ourselves, not for everybody, that we're not going to kiss until we get married. So our first kiss with each other was at our wedding, which I wouldn't make as a rule for everybody. Not always easy to stick to. But from our past experience and being honest about our own self-control at the time, we said, this is the thing that's going to serve us best in our relationship. A fun side effect of that was that we talked a lot. And when we got to premarital counseling, our pastor went through this checklist of all the things you need to make sure you talk about. And he said, well, you've already talked about all of these. So let's plan a wedding. And why did we talk about all those? Because we needed to do something. And it made us, we realized how much of the time in our previous relationships was taken up with physical intimacy. Even if you're not having sex yet, it's just so easy to say, I don't know what we should talk about now, let's make out. And so by drawing that line there, I wouldn't make that a rule for everybody, but I think that way of thinking about it, of what is wise for us to maintain our purity and have a healthy relationship, I think you can take that principle, even if you don't take the exact application that we use for ourselves. And notice, even just talking about it is healthy, so that you don't find yourself in a situation where you have really different expectations about this. I've seen hurt from that, too. All right, so that was the fourth thing, be chaste as you pursue marriage. Finally, number five, pursue marriage in community, which means... First, having the kind of community that can be around you as you have relationships and not just kind of disappearing off. And it means being transparent and engaging early in community with a relationship. Sometimes people treat engaging their friends or mentors or church community in a relationship as an escalation. Like, things are getting pretty serious now. I probably should introduce this person to the other important people in my life. Like, meeting the parents is the classic example of this. When it should probably be a really early thing. If you have people in your life that you trust, that know you well, they should be speaking into your relationships in the very beginning. And if you're waiting until, like, I've been with this person for six months and none of you knew it, and it's getting pretty serious now, so you should probably meet them before I ask you to stand with me at my wedding. That is too late. So start those kinds of conversations with your community earlier. And I think you're going to have healthier relationships, especially early on. And be open to advice that you get from other people and make it safe for them to weigh in on what's going on in that part of your life. I know cases where wise friends or mentors are afraid to say, like, this person isn't good for you. I'm not impressed with you when you're with them, but they're afraid to say it because they know you're gonna get upset and it's gonna affect that friendship. So make it safe by seeking input from others. And you're more likely to get that advice early when it's less painful. So to recap, five ways to pursue marriage well, if God's calling you to do that. One, maintain your identity in Christ. Two, calibrate your expectations towards what God says is important to seek in a spouse. Three, work to become what God says is important in a spouse. Four, be chaste. Five, pursue marriage in community. Now, finally, before we wrap up and respond with communion and today baptism and worship, I want to finish with some admonitions for the married people in the church, the other half of the room, like me, who want to support and serve our single brothers and sisters well. And these are really applications from all four of the sermons in the series so far. So, number one, Married people actually treat singleness as a gift from God. We need to repent for where we've treated singleness as a second-class status in the kingdom. We need to rightly honor single people who are using this gift the way Paul described in 1 Corinthians 7. So let's take a look at how we talk to and about single people and the gift of singleness and check our hearts, ask God to show us places where we have not honored this gift and we've treated marriage as better in a way that Paul doesn't. Number two. live in the reality of the family of God. As Matt showed us last week, Jesus treats the family of God, the family formed by God adopting us into his kingdom, as more important and more eternal than our natural families. This means we should be working to make single people in the church feel like they are part of our family. Our spiritual brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers should feel as present and engaged, if not more present and engaged, in our family than our natural relations do. Our kids, if we have them, should experience that reality and should be kind of surprised and puzzled when other people don't, which is something we've experienced with our kids. It's like, wait, you don't have unrelated people at dinner every night in your family? That's weird. Because living the reality of this family of God means doing our whole lives together. So singleness should not only not feel second class, it also shouldn't feel lonely in the church. You should feel like you have a family. And it's on not just single people to do that for each other, though that is part of it, but it's very much on us as married people to include single people in our family life. And then last thing, honorably and wisely support your single brothers and sisters as they pursue marriage. A moment ago, I suggested that singles pursue marriage in community. Married people be a key part of that community. Take your responsibility for wisdom seriously. If someone comes to you for advice about relationships, make sure you're familiar enough with the Bible that you're giving them wise advice and not just your opinions, or worse yet, a Christianese version of the world's advice. We've got to know what's in there if we're going to give wise advice. And if you can't do that, that's okay, but don't bluff it. If somebody comes to you with a hard question about relationships, for example, and you don't know a biblical answer with confidence, say, let's seek it out together. Let's read something together on this. Let's get into the Bible. And I think that's how we take our responsibility for actually giving wise counsel seriously. Bottom line, glorifying God in singleness isn't just a challenge for singles. It's important for us as a whole church to engage with and live out what the whole Bible teaches. So may Grace City be the kind of community that's a witness to the world, both for how we celebrate and live the gift of singleness, as well as for how we help each other pursue and live marriages to the glory of God. Let's pray.