One blessing that comes with a long season of singleness is having time to contemplate what Paul could have possibly meant when he called singleness a gift. This designation puzzled me for years. I remember sorting through a stack of books at Barnes and Noble and finding one titled If Singleness is a Gift, What’s the Return Policy? I laughed. But I could also identify.
When Paul writes about singleness as a gift in 1 Corinthians 7, he uses the Greek word, charisma. The root of this word is charis, which means grace. Paul saw his singleness as an extension of God’s grace to him; not as a problem, not as a punishment, but as the overflow of God’s unmerited favor toward him. That challenges me.
What is the gift of singleness? What do we mean by that phrase? A few years ago, I sat in a classroom at Bible college listening to a professor teach on this topic. He distinguished between two different forms: a lifelong gift of singleness and a gift that lasts only until you get married. Others say there is one spiritual gift of singleness (celibacy), it lasts your whole life, and everyone who doesn’t have it will probably get married. Some see singleness as a season, a context, a set of circumstances that everyone finds themselves in for some portion of their life. I have agreed and disagreed with all of those views in turn, and I’m not sure which to recommend to you, friends.
I do, however, recommend that we bet our lives (and our love lives) on this: God is happy to meet our every need, he withholds no good gift from those he loves, and he has freely given us the blindingly beautiful righteousness of Christ to wear as our own. Meditating on those truths, it becomes less important to identify whether I have a spiritual gift of singleness or whether singleness is merely the context I am living in or how long this is going to last. The Holy Spirit is a river running from the throne room of God to my heart and he is constantly (daily, hourly) transporting the goods I need to to be fruitful, content, and pure as a single person. I’m not sure how to label this transaction, but I know it’s good.
In my early twenties, I could say, “Singleness is a blessing,” in the same way that I could recite, “Exercise is good for me.” A known truth, but not a felt one. Two things changed: I got a better understanding of God’s intentions for singleness and a better understanding of why He values it. I plan to share more about what I’ve learned regarding those subjects in my next two posts. Until then...
Going green!
Lynn
Post a Comment