A friend of mine, who lives too far away, contacted me to say he was struggling to understand how the cost of singleness as a Christian could possibly be worth it. As far as he could see, an illicit (非法的）relationship would be “the only possible way for me to enjoy the relational intimacy I’ve dreamt of my entire life.” He concluded, “I cannot imagine the shell of a life I would live without somebody standing by my side.” In the light of this deficit（赤字）of intimacy, could singleness ever be worth it?
My friend isn’t alone. In my own church family, one of the biggest causes of people drifting away from Christ has been entering into illicit relationships, especially single Christian women with unbelieving men. For many of them, the assumption was that life as a single just wasn’t viable（可行的）. They needed intimacy.
It has become an unquestioned assumption today: Singleness (at least godly singleness) and intimacy are alternatives. A choice to be celibate is a choice to be alone. No wonder for so many this seems too much to bear. Can we really expect someone to live without romantic hope? It sounds so unfair.
Marriage and Celibacy
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The Bible is clear that we choose between marriage and celibacy. In Matthew 19, Jesus upholds and expounds（阐述） God’s blueprint for marriage found in Genesis 1 and 2: Marriage is between a man and a woman, and is designed to be for life. The disciples balk (犹豫）a little at this: “If such is the case between a man and his wife, it is better not to marry” (v. 10). But Jesus responds by talking to them about the life of the eunuch. The implication is plain: The only godly alternative to marriage is celibacy (独身）.
But the choice between marriage and celibacy is not the choice between intimacy and loneliness, or at least it shouldn’t be. We can manage without sex. We know this—Jesus himself lived as a celibate man. But we are not designed to live without intimacy. Marriage is not the sole answer to the observation “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18).
Our Western culture has so identified sex and intimacy that in popular thinking the two are virtually identical (几乎完全相同）. We cannot conceive (构想） of intimacy occurring without it in some way being sexual. So when we hear how previous generations described friendship in such intimate terms, we roll our eyes and say, “Well they were obviously gay.” Any intimacy, we imagine, must ultimately be sexual.
Nature of True Friendship
But the Bible conceives of these things very differently. In Proverbs, friendship is far more than a verb for sharing your contact details on Facebook. A friend is someone who knows your soul. Someone who doesn’t just know lots about you, but knows you. And, Proverbs shows us, we cannot hope to live wisely in God’s world without such soul-to-soul friendships. All of us need them, not just those who are single. I’ve seen more than one marriage run into difficulty because the couple had looked entirely to one another to meet all their friendship and intimacy needs and had not pursued good friendships alongside their marriage. It’s not always easy to foster(促进） close friendships when you’re established as a family, but it’s a vital discipline to open up family life to others around you.
When we find we’re able to cultivate these Proverbs-type friendships, we find it’s possible to enjoy a huge amount of intimacy in life. To have people who know you at your sparkling best and utter worst, and to be deeply known and deeply loved—this is deep intimacy any of us can enjoy, and yet many around us never experience (even sadly at times in marriage).
For those of us who remain single, we might not experience the unique depth of intimacy with one person that a married friend might, but we can enjoy a unique breadth of intimacy with a number of close friends that comes from having greater opportunity and capacity than married people typically have to invest in close friendships.
Rich Indeed
Sex and intimacy are not the same. It’s possible to have a lot of sex and yet find no intimacy. Sex is designed to deepen and express intimacy that already exists; it cannot in itself create it. But it’s also possible to have a huge amount of godly, healthy intimacy without sex.
I think of the friendships that mean the most to me. Some have developed over many years; others have become very deep relatively quickly. Some are married; a couple of them are single. It’s a gift to know there are a number of people out there who know me pretty much through and through (彻头彻尾）and who (nevertheless!) love me very deeply. I also think of the tasters of parenthood Christian ministry has given me. Younger men I’ve been able to encourage and have a role in spiritually forming and who still come to me for fatherly guidance; friends’ children I’ve been able to pray and share life with and become an honorary (名誉） uncle to.
I may not have the security and constancy (稳定） of a family unit—what one friend calls life’s “shock absorbers.” But when it comes to intimacy, I’m very rich indeed.
It was fairly obvious to me, from the minute I first met Jesus, that Christianity meant signing up to be countercultural. When I told my friends that I believed in Jesus, some of them no longer wanted to be around me. When I shared with my family that I believed God’s design for sexual fulfillment finds its home in marriage, they had a borderline intervention (干涉）, desperate to convince me that I would never find a healthy relationship if I took sex off the table.
Then I found a new culture that prized purity and made my new worldview feel so “normal” that I couldn’t imagine it any other way. And I almost lived happily ever after.
Except that, it turns out believing that sexual fulfillment is designed for marriage doesn’t make you any less of a sexual being. Understanding and even loving God’s view of sex doesn’t make you want it less. Singleness presents a series of hardships, but for me learning to live without physical intimacy has provided the biggest challenge and deepest suffering of this season.
I have spent so much time trying to remove the struggle; thinking that the day this didn’t hurt would be the day I most honored God, that removing the temptation would be the sign of God’s blessing. But our God seems to be in the business of blessing us, not in spite of suffering, but through suffering. I believe that one day, I will look at my life and say with confidence that one of the greatest blessings I have experienced and gifts that I have given to others has been the pain of learning to live without physical intimacy.
Gift of Missing Out
There is pain in watching my friends be fed one after another with the thing I hunger for the most. There is pain in facing each morning with the knowledge that today there will be no daily bread for this hunger. There is pain as I sit, feeling as though I am starving to death, and listen to my married friends try to explain that such eating is overrated.
But that pain has taught me how to hold my infertile friend and cry with her when Mother’s Day rolls around again. That pain has given weight to my words when I explain to a mom with three kids that Friday nights alone on your couch really aren’t as amazing as they sound.
The pain of missing out on physical pleasure in this life holds out to us the gift of longing for the next life. Foregoing the earthly shadow by faith because we believe so much in the heavenly reality.
It might be that the pain of a life without physical intimacy was part of what equipped Paul to proclaim through the Spirit that to die is gain. To die is to gain a glorified body that feels and experiences the truth that all our needs are met in Jesus. To die is to gain the heavenly reality that earthly intimacy can only reflect in shadows. To die is to gain full oneness with God, fullness of joy, and pleasures forevermore.
Gift of Denied Design
There is almost nothing as strange and painful as the act of choosing to trust God over the very fiber of your design. It’s a pretty hard sell to get your body on board with the idea that you’re not missing out on what you were created to enjoy. It’s challenging to not feel entitled to sex. In fact, it’s one of the things that has made it the hardest to trust my sweet and faithful God. And in some ways—in dark and frightened places—I feel forgotten and betrayed and confused because I know he knows me. I know he knows my body and my heart, and I know he designed and wired this desire inside of me in the same way he wired my belly to grumble every morning around 11:02 a.m. My hunger is designed to prompt me to eat. So I do. Yet my Father has told me that when I am hungry in this sense I must trust him and not find food for myself. And he has seen fit not to give me any guarantee that this hunger will ever be satisfied in this life.
Yet this struggle has taught me to value hunger; to embrace it as a means of getting God, rather than thinking of this hunger as an enemy. It’s like fasting. God commands us to fast, but not so that he can prove he is as good as a cheeseburger by making our hunger go away. The goal of fasting is not for God to remove our hunger, but for us to learn that in the midst of hunger he is trustworthy. The feeling of hunger is the point of the fast. It teaches us to hunger for something better.
Today, my body wants something tangible and physical that it was designed to have. And today, I don’t get to have that thing. Of course my body grumbles, and as it does, I get to testify that in the midst of my hunger, God is trustworthy. I’m learning to hunger for something better.
It doesn’t feel good, but it is a gift that I can share with others. Sitting across from a wife as she explains why it’s time to leave her husband because he is not meeting her emotional needs—needs that are real and valid and designed to be met—I have experienced that gift. I have been able to look her in the eyes and say that it is normal and natural and good to be hungry for the things she needs. I get to minister to her by looking her in the eyes and sharing how that hunger can be a gift; how suffering the loss of valid dreams is an opportunity to gain Christ.
This pain has blessed me by forcing me to be all in with God: banking on him for my joy. Our God is a God of pleasure. He is not calling us to hunger because he wants us to be miserable. He is calling us to hunger because he wants us to experience the greatest pleasure available to man: himself.
Nothing sounds as foolish to the world as a person who would pursue purity, not out of some sense of religious obligation, but out of a faith that there is a greater pleasure in store for those who would trust in the Creator. Nothing makes God look as beautiful as when we, who have tasted his goodness, would use our lives to testify that we will forego any momentary joy in order to taste more of him.
Pain of Failure
In my worst moments, I feel set up to fail. I have told friends through tears that I do not know how I am going to persevere in light of my hunger and in light of my Father’s gracious call to purity. I have lifted up my fists to heaven and confessed: I do not feel like I have everything I need for life and godliness. I have laid on the floor in the dark and wondered: Is this struggle the one that is going to cause me to leave the God I love?
Yet, each day, as the sun goes down and I’m still securely held in the arms of the Father, my faith is built. He doesn’t promise to give me everything I need to never ever falter （动摇）. He promises to give me everything I need to finish this race. And today I love him; he has proved himself faithful. He will finish the good work he began in me.
I have failed. I’m ashamed to say that more days of this life than not I have behaved as an orphan. Though adopted and promised provision, I have refused to trust. Instead I have taken for myself what has not been given. But he has never forsaken me. I have traded him for the fleeting pleasures of this world too many times to count, but he has never traded me. And he will never trade me. He has met me in the pig pen and led me home. Even through my failure, I have been given the gift of trusting him more today than I did yesterday.
Blessed in Suffering
There are pieces of my testimony that I hate; that I might wish to rewrite. But even in my failure, God has written my life with his divine grace. Perhaps this struggle more than any other has made me more like Christ by forcing me to bank on his resume instead of my own.
Today, in order to worship God, my body needs to be hungry. Today, he is giving me the blessed pain of hunger, because it’s the only way I’m going to make it home. He has promised to do whatever it takes to get me home to him.
If you are ashamed, if you have failed, rest your heart in the fact that the gospel was made for just such a time. We don’t have a great high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses. Praise God that we have Jesus, who has walked in singleness; he was tempted in every way, yet he never succumbed. So draw near to him in repentance and faith, and receive mercy and find grace to help in your time of trouble.
If you’re married, you either do or don’t have children. And that’s a big deal. A very big deal. Some joker has said that, in the media, marriage is all about sex and hardly about children; but in real life it’s the other way around.
Well, it may or may not be.
One of the strangest and slowest pains in marriage is the longing for children who never come. Someone has called it “a strange grief that has no focus for its tears and no object for its love.” When someone dies, there’s a sad day to remember, a sad place to visit, sad possessions to spark memories, sad photos to trigger tears.
But when a child hasn’t been conceived, there’s precisely nothing and nobody. And it just goes on and on in that strange interplay of hope and disappointment, month by month.
Weighty Entrustment (委托）
One of the really big purposes of marriage in the Bible is children. God blesses humanity with the words, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). To have children and nurture them, to bring them up in the love and fear of the Lord Jesus (Eph. 6:4), to love them unconditionally, to provide them with a secure home, to discipline them (Heb. 12:7–9), to pray for them—it’s all a wonderful privilege.
Even in their most exhausted moments, a young parent can say, “I wouldn’t be without them!” It can also be a desperately sad privilege, if they turn from the God who made and loved them. But even in the sadness, it’s still a privilege. When asked about our family, my wife, Carolyn, and I usually say, “God has entrusted us with three sons and a daughter.” I love that word “entrusted.” Children aren’t given to us; God entrusts them to us for a time. We have the weighty, God-given responsibility to be a father and a mother who love them with something approximating his own love. It’s one of the big ways in which parents serve and reflect the Lord.
Serving God When Children Don’t Come
But what if we try for children and they just don’t come, whether naturally or by adoption? We’re no less married. And we’re no less able to love and serve God. Just as unmarried people can serve God wholeheartedly, so married couples without children can love God passionately and serve him with zeal and sacrifice. And just as there will be different ways in which unmarried men and women serve God, so there may be different outlets for couples without children to love God. Their home can still be an image of Christ the bridegroom’s love for his church, his bride, and the loving submission of his bride to her bridegroom. And it should still be an outward-looking relationship, seeking opportunities to pour out the love of Christ to people all around.
Whether married or unmarried, whether parents or childless, each of us is called to love the God who, in Jesus, has poured out his love on us with every spiritual blessing.
I glanced to my right at church and saw a dear friend worshiping. I felt a jolt of joy. Three years ago, she was engaged to her college girlfriend. She’d grown up in the church but said she’d honestly learned more about the patterns on the ceiling of the building than she’d learned about the Bible. The day she told her parents she was definitely staying with her girlfriend, she got a tattoo of Romans 8:28 on her ankle: “For we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” She was sure God couldn’t be against her following her heart.
But two weeks after getting engaged, she woke up feeling sure she couldn’t go through with their plan. Since ending things with her fiancée, she’d started coming to our church and eating up the things she heard. I’ve watched her grow in her discipleship more like a bamboo shoot than a weed.
I’m so proud of her.
In the same quick glance, I saw another friend. He’s been a Christian all his life, and he’s been attracted to other guys since early adolescence. When I first started talking about my own lifelong experience of same-sex attraction, he was surprised. He’d met other Christians in the same boat, but they’d all come from different churches. “I thought each church had one of us,” he laughed, “and that I was the one!”
As a single man who loves the Lord but would almost certainly be married to another man if he did not, Pride Month is always hard for my friend, and I’m so proud of him.
This afternoon, I’ll take my kids for an informal Bible class with my closest Christian friend. Rachel came to Christ when she was an undergrad at Yale after her high school girlfriend dumped her. She’d previously identified as an atheist. But Jesus had other plans for her life. Now she’s leading theological development on LGBT+ questions for the largest campus ministry in the world, writing and speaking on sexuality and Scripture, and pursuing a PhD in public theology so she can serve the church even better long-term. She’s one of the most Bible-soaked people I know, and the more she’s learned about the Scriptures since her conversion, the more she’s been sure they’re clear that same-sex marriage is off-limits for believers—not because God is stingy, but because he is so rich in love that he gives us glimpses of his love in different kinds of relationship.
Her ministry is a blessing to thousands, her friendship is a blessing to me, and I’m so proud of her.
Earlier this month, I had the joy of speaking at The Gospel Coalition Women’s Conference. After a session that touched on both race and sexuality, a woman came up to me to talk. As a black woman who had (as she put it) lived for many years in the LGBT+ community, she was eager for people to recognize that race and sexuality are very different things that cannot be tangled up together, and for more Christians to grasp what the Bible says about each with both conviction and compassion. After we chatted, she said, “I’m a hugger, can I hug you?” “Yes please,” I replied.
This sister has put her whole life into Jesus’s hands, and I’m so proud of her.
Later, after a panel on sex, a white woman with tattoos all up her arms came to talk to me. “I lived in the LGBT community for a decade, and I’ve only recently come to Christ,” she said. “Welcome, sister!” I replied. “I’d love to hear more of your story.” She shared that she’d nearly died in a car crash, and that she had been in love with a Christian woman, who had told her, “I can’t give you romantic love, but I can give you sisterhood. You need to choose.” “I chose sisterhood,” she said.
This woman has trusted Jesus with her heart, and I’m so proud of her.
I looked up and recognized another sister toward the back of the line of people who wanted to talk. I’d spoken for the church where this woman serves on staff. I smiled at her and waved. Like me, she has a lifelong experience of same-sex attraction, but she knows that Jesus’s love is better than anyone else’s. When she got to the front of the line, she told me her name, in case I’d forgotten. I hugged her and said, “Of course I remember you!”
She’s serving Jesus with her whole heart and trusting he’s for real when he says that anyone who wants to save her life will lose it, but whoever loses her life for his sake will find it, and I’m so proud of her.
She has a lifelong experience of same-sex attraction, but she knows that Jesus’s love is better than anyone else’s.
I woke last Monday to an email from a brother who is serving Jesus as a single man. He’s writing and speaking on a host of issues, not least on sexuality, as he’s always been attracted to men and not women. He’s faithful and funny and humble and smart—the kind of pastor we’d all want.
I love him as a brother, and I’m so proud of him.
As friends and siblings like these dear men and women walk through Pride Month, they don’t feel a lack of comprehension about why so many in our culture who identify as LGBT+ want to celebrate their sexuality. They get it. Many who are celebrating this month will have grown up in communities where they felt like they couldn’t be both known and loved. Many have hidden their desires for years, hearing slurs against gay and lesbian people and fearing people knowing how they felt. Many have grown up in churches where same-sex attraction was mocked and vilified as something a good Christian girl or boy could not possibly experience. Being able to speak out feels like freedom, gasping for air, being seen and known and loved at last.
Many in our culture who are celebrating this month have grown up in communities where they felt like they couldn’t be both known and loved.
If you, like me, are a Christian who deeply believes that the Bible is clear on sex only belonging in male-female marriage, our response to this cannot be to compromise on what the Bible says—as if we think we know better than the God who made us, or that we’re somehow more loving than the God who is love (1 John 4:16). But it also cannot be to propagate (宣传）the patterns that lead many in the church who experience same-sex attraction to feel like they can only be both known and loved after they leave.
The Bible doesn’t call us to less love than the world. It calls us to more. And love means carrying each other’s burdens, hearing each other’s struggles, witnessing each other’s hurt, and believing together that Jesus loves us more than any other man or woman ever could (Gal. 6:2; James 5:16; John 15:12). It means denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following our Lord—including sacrificing romantic dreams and sexual desires when they are calling us away from him (Matt. 16:24).
But it doesn’t mean being alone. Whatever our patterns of attraction and temptation, we’re meant to need each other and to shoulder up, like fellow soldiers (Phil. 2:25 and Philem. 2).
Last week at our community group, my friend with Romans 8:28 tattooed on her ankle showed it to a seeker in our group. My friend said, “When I first got this, I didn’t understand the verse. I thought it was about God getting on board with my agenda. Now I understand it means the opposite.”
If you, like her, like me, and like so many of my friends—male and female, married and single—are choosing Jesus over same-sex sexuality this month, this week, this year, this life, I may not get to meet you. But I’m so proud of you.
发表于 23-10-2023 09:37 PM
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