Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Singleness and the Rest of the World

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

There’s a wide spectrum of how individuals experience singleness: some would describe it as suffering, others might just call it sadness, and still others say it’s a sense of freedom. It’s important to recognize though that the experience of suffering and unhappiness are a part of life for everyone—whether you are a single Christian, whether you are happily married, or whether you are unhappily married. Our core challenge is to live a godly and holy life in whatever condition we are in. Every situation will have its particularities, but the similarities are greater than the differences. I’d like to talk about how to live godly lives in Christ under any of our circumstances. This talk was given by Kathy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on March 1, 2014 for the conference "S1NGLE: God’s Gifts — Our Plans". Today's podcast episode is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel and Life. The power of marriage is that it is a reflection of the gospel. Today, Tim Keller explores how marriage can help us more deeply understand Christ's love for us, and how Christ's love for us can completely transform our marriages. You heard Jordan say before lunch that there's a wide spectrum of how individuals experience singleness. Some of you no doubt would describe it as suffering. Others might just call it sadness. And still others say it's a sense, well you saw the video, a sense of freedom. I can do whatever I want. I can turn on a dime. I can go on a mission strip, you know, anytime I want to. I can serve God without the burden of a family. A single is sort of like a little zippy sports car. You can zip

around and a family is like one of those 18 wheelers that takes three blocks to make a turn. And you're carrying diaper bags. make a turn, and you're carrying diaper bags. It's important to recognize, though, that the experience of suffering and unhappiness is a part of life for everyone, no matter what you are, whether you are a single Christian, a happily or unhappily married person, whether you're ill or whether you're financially secure or insecure. Our challenge is to live a godly and a holy life in whatever condition that we're in. That's the core challenge. Every situation in life will have its own particularities, but the similarities are more than the differences. I'm pretty much sure I can prove that. Tim's going to talk about a theology of singleness after me, but before I do that,

before we get to that, before we talk about singleness in particular, I want to talk about how to live godly lives in Christ under any circumstances. You heard Jessica Hong also talk about having a plan in our head about how our lives are supposed to go. I think that's a brilliant insight that she had. We grow up starting in our childhood and just pulling from all sorts of sources, TV and books and conversations and magazines that we've read and who knows where, and we get this sort of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, messy kind of idea of how we think our life is going to go, or if you don't speak Doctor Who. Just seeing if any of you are out there.

Good. An inchoate mass of expectations of how things are going to go. And as long as our experience doesn't diverge too far or too painfully from what we're expecting, we're all right. But once there is a divergence, a why in the road, a fork in the road, that's when our lives have to face, that's when we are given a choice that we have to face. You're not all drivers here in New York, so maybe you don't know what a fork in the road is. It's not somebody's takeout utensils that they left lying in the street. It's where one branch of the road goes this way and the other branch of the road goes that way.

I mean, I'm not making any assumptions here. Not everybody's had the pleasure of meeting the people at the DMV. Divergence can take many forms. Illness, the death of loved ones, romantic relationships that either go sour or they just don't bloom, career opportunities that don't materialize. Even the health that you expected to have might turn out to be out of reach. And in your 20s, these divergences don't seem too important because you have this sense that there's still plenty of time for God to get it right. But as time passes and the sense that our hopes and our dreams are slipping away starts to become more acute that's when this fork in the road presents itself as a choice

we have to make shall I continue to trust God and do as he commands with my life or should I strike out on my own and attempt to grasp those things that will make my dreams come true. As a young Christian, I tag this in my head with the term, I'm just helping God get the things that I know he wants me to have. In college, I did what today would be called stalking. In fact, it was probably called stalking back then. Just to put myself in the path of the man I was sure God wanted me to marry.

I knew what his classes were, so I would just be on the bench between that class and the next class. Or I would be in the cafeteria when I knew he would walk in. Or I would sometimes sit on the hill behind his dorm. Okay, short tangent. If you ever have a problem with why God doesn't answer prayer, just remember I'd be married to two different men, and neither one of them would be Tim if God had answered all my prayers. So sometimes unanswered prayer is a good thing.

But I was just helping God because I knew he didn't want me to be alone. One of the biggest temptations, to speak specifically about singleness for a moment, is to form an intimate relationship with someone who does not share your faith. Many of you are, and every single one of you, I think I could stake the family savings on this, know someone who is either dating or considering marriage to a non-Christian as a way of taking matters into their own hands to end their single state to help God get what they need. It can't be wrong if it feels so right is a song lyric that has a lot to answer for as an excuse for some really bad decisions. This is a tangent, but I may as well

say it here. I don't know other people who said it, but let's just be as blunt as we can. Actually, I don't have any other setting Janice would tell you. Christians are commanded not to marry non-believers. And if we're forbidden to marry someone who doesn't worship our God, non-believers. And if we're forbidden to marry someone who doesn't worship our God, we are also being disobedient in living with, cultivating physical intimacy with, or otherwise mimicking the behaviors of marriage with someone outside the faith. When we want something, it is so easy to lie to ourselves. I'm not really breaking that commandment. I haven't married, and we're just living together. We're not really having sex. We're just sleeping in the same bed.

I mean, those are intimacies that are reserved for marriage, and just sort of creeping up until your toe is right next to the line of disobedience is not a way of showing God how much you love him. God's people, even in the Old Testament, I'm sure you've seen this and wondered at it, were always forbidden to marry any foreigners. But the thing you have to realize is that's not a discussion of don't marry outside your ethnicity. That was never an issue because remember Ruth? She's always called Ruth the Moabitess, and she's listed as one of the ancestors of Jesus. So her ethnicity wasn't in question, and she has, in the book of Ruth, probably the most famous conversion speech of anyone in the world. You know, whither you go, thou goest, I will go,

your people will be my people, your God will be my God. She wasn't a foreigner because she was a worshiper of the God of Israel. So when we're told that we're not to marry outside of people who worship God, this is not just busy work. Is that term still current? Something to keep you busy while the teacher has a little break? God didn't give this command just in order to make your search for a mate hard, if not impossible. If there were no other reason but the bare fact that the word of God forbids it, that really should be enough. Deuteronomy 29, 29 is one of my very favorite verses, maybe because it's easy to remember, 29, 29. It says, the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever that we may follow all the works of the law. And in 1 John, the letter of 1 John in chapter 5, verse 2, it says, actually it's verse 3, in fact, this is love for God, to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome.

It's not a burden to do something for someone that you love, to show them that you love them. Common sense and experience, if you need something more than just the authority of the word of God, should also tell you why this is so important. The phrase in the Bible, I'm sure you've heard this phrase, is not to be unequally yoked, right? You've heard that in an unequal marriage? We don't see too many yokes around here, unless you've been to a country-themed restaurant where they have decorations on the walls, and there's this big wooden thing with a beam and then two holes, two holes that are meant for the heads of the animals that are going to be pulling the plow

or the wagon or whatever they're pulling. It's meant to harness the strength of the team to accomplish the task, and we don't really have that much occasion to have teams harnessed up or agrarian images are a little foreign to us these days. But the idea was that you'd put animals of the same species into a yoke. Because otherwise, if you had, say, a horse and an ox, they walk at different speeds. They have different gates. They're different heights. So that yoke would be a chafing and a pain to both of them,

and it wouldn't harness their power. They'd be pulling against each other. They would be rocking back and forth instead of going forward. In an unequal marriage, it's a pain to both people, to the one who has to marginalize their faith or the spouse who feels marginalized by the other person's faith. You can bring this up at the Q&A if you want to, but I wish you'd listen.

If you don't listen to me, listen to the voices of people who have been in unequal marriages. I wrote an article a couple years ago called Don't Take It From Me, and you can find it if you just Google that and my name. But the article's fine. Read the article. Okay, fine. But read the comments, because the people who commented of saying, I have been there, this has been my experience, I have had the experience of being in an unequal marriage, don't do it. It's not worth it. So if you need more authority than the word of God, listen to those voices.

Marriage is one of the most significant human relationships there is, but is also one of the most difficult and misunderstood. In The Meaning of Marriage, Tim and Kathy Keller offer biblical wisdom and insight that will help you understand God's vision for marriage. Whether you're single, considering marriage, or someone who's been married a long time, The Meaning of Marriage will help you face the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God. The Meaning of Marriage is our thank you for your gift to help Gospel and Life share the love of Christ with people all over the world.

So request your copy today at gospelinlife.com slash give. That's gospelinlife.com slash give. Okay, I'm going to return. That was the tangent. Returning to my main line of thought. When we face the choice to renew our trust in God in the midst of circumstances not of our choosing and not of our liking, or, take the other fork, to attempt to capture what we want without his help.

This is an opportunity to grow in your faith exponentially. In point of actual fact, we are having to come to terms with submission to the will of God, both as it's revealed in his commands in Scripture and also providentially as it's been revealed in your circumstances of life. This is not something that may have ever been presented to you. If you've had a relatively untroubled life, you may never have asked yourself if God's will for you, his assignment for how you're meant to glorify him, might be different from your plans. And if it does differ, whose plan are you going to trust? Suddenly there's major issues of faith

and the wisdom and the love of God and his sovereign right to order your life by reason of his creation, redemption, and his preservation of all you are become very real and very immediate. I have Crohn's disease. It's an autoimmune disease of the gut, kind of like asthma of the digestive system, if you need a definition. I was diagnosed decades ago, but about 18 years ago, it became pretty severe. And my reaction when I got sick, and then sicker, and then permanently handicapped, was to thrash about in panic. No, God could not be asking this of me.

It had to be a mistake. And my prayer life was mainly of the fix-it variety. You got this wrong, God. Fix it. Of all people, I should have known better because actually I got converted when I was faced with the very first fork in the road. I couldn't pray the Lord's Prayer. It was the only prayer I knew. I grew up in a home that occasionally the kids went to Sunday school. I knew the Lord's Prayer. And when I was trying to pray it, I got to the part where it says, thy will be done. And that's not what I meant. I did not want thy will to be done. I wanted my will to be done. And I felt like, okay, I'm stuck. I mean, I have to choose now for the rest of my life

whether or not I'm going to be obeying God. And of course, that's going to be terrible. Once he gets his hands on your life, you know it's just going to be, you know, awful. I mean, that's the lie we hear. Or whether I'm going to strike out on my own and try and grasp what I want in my own rebellion. After what have been uncountable, I really cannot even begin to think of counting them, numbers of these choices forced on me, I realized I finally passed a tipping point, if I can steal that term from Malcolm Gladwell. I still have fears and sorrows when a long-cherished plan is in tatters or in jeopardy even, and I will cry and I will weep and I will scream whenever things are not going

my way. I'll scream to God, not at God. But I finally come to the place where my suffering does not call into question God's love or his wisdom or his goodness. When Jesus asked his disciples if they too were going to leave him, this is in John 6, there had been a mass exodus of people who were following Jesus. Peter said to him, Lord, where else can we go? You have the words of eternal life. And I'm with Peter. If there were times where if there had been somewhere else I could have gone, I would have gone there. But there is nowhere else to go. Jesus has the words of eternal life. Let me be blunt again. Still, singleness is not your biggest problem.

And if you are ill, illness is not your biggest problem. And for people who are unhappily married, your spouse is not your problem. And your circumstances of life, whatever they are, are not your biggest problem. We tell ourselves, oh God, if you would only change the circumstances, everything would be all right. But you are wrong. The biggest problem we have, I have got this underlined, and big stars, is a lack of confidence and trust in the God of the universe. You and I focus on the specific situation, and we identify that as the problem,

but that's just the pebble in our shoe. That's a thorn in our side. That's a kick in our collective butt to throw us into the hands of God where we will discover riches we never knew were there because we were content with the comforts offered in this world. It's not until God is all you have that you discover God is all you need. That's pretty trite. You've heard that. But things get to be trite by being true and said a lot.

So I'll tell you another way to say it. God wants us all to himself and anything that he uses, whatever it takes to chase us into his arms, takes to chase us into his arms, loneliness or bereavement or illness or anything, from the perspective of eternity, we will not say, that was too high a price to pay. That really wasn't worth it to get the love of God and the fellowship of Christ in heaven thrown in. But what about the people who aren't facing what you're facing, a life without the companionship and love of a spouse, chastity instead of sexual satisfaction? What about people who aren't ill, who aren't alone or poor?

The Bible records people asking this question all the time. There's Psalm 73, there's John 21. That's where Peter has just been told he's going to die a certain kind of death, and he looks over at John and says to Jesus, well, what about him? What's he getting? C.S. Lewis picks up Jesus's words and puts them in the mouth of Aslan. You are only told your own story. What God is doing in their lives is God's business. Would you rather that he left you alone to dabble with the toys of sex and money and the entertaining pursuits that the world offers while knowing and glorifying God is neglected? If we're honest, sometimes the answer is, yes, I would like to be left alone

to dabble with those things. I'm not feeling very spiritual today, God. Can we just put it off until, I think next Tuesday maybe I'll be. But when we're thinking clearly, our dearest desire should be to know him and whatever it takes to make us cling to him is worth it. In fact, I remember very clearly shortly after my marriage telling one of my very good friends that I was really worried about my spiritual life because now that I wasn't lonely anymore, I didn't have the motivation to run to Jesus the way I did when I was alone. That was a whole different issue that married people face, but I realized how merciful God had been to me in allowing that to have a

motivation. I mean, there's a whole poem about the hounds of heaven who chase you into the arms of God. And if it's your loneliness or if it's your sadness at your single state, whatever it takes, you won't think it's too big of a sacrifice. Sorry, the croak is starting to come back. We know that if we choose to trust God's goodness and love, ultimately, perhaps on the other side of resurrection, let me say that again, ultimately, perhaps on the other side of resurrection, everything will be all right. Let me end on a note of hope. You know, they put that clock here, but then they they put this here so I can't see the clock. Sometimes the most crushing part of any circumstance, whether it's singleness

or illness like me or a thousand other things, is the fear that it will be lifelong. We look down this bleak corridor of years, and we say, I can't do it. I can't remain chaste for a lifetime. I can't fathom being alone for decade after decade. I can't deal with this disease day after day after day. No, you can't. Neither can I. But the good news is that we don't have to. We only have to take a day-sized chunk at a time. God gives us his grace, and he upholds us with his presence just for the day. Jesus said that the day's own trouble was enough, and what

he won't do, this was huge for me whenever this hit me, what God won't do is he will not enter the dark imagination of your worst nightmare and give you hypothetical grace so that you see how well God will be taking care of you 10, 20, 30 years from now when you get there and things are as bad as you imagine them to be. God doesn't play that game. He won't. So if you want to imagine your life as you think it might be five years from now, 10 years from now, maybe you're still single 20 years from now, you're imagining it without the presence of God that will be there if you get there. If you get there, he's already there

waiting. But while you're doing the whole imagination, oh, I can't face that, he's not in that. You're facing that totally without God's grace present because he's not going to enter your little daydream. I've said this for years, ever since college when it hit me like an avalanche, but recently someone just published a very short article. I don't even know who she is. Her name is Betsy Childs, and it was in First Things, and a friend emailed it to me, so I'm really happy to be able to quote someone besides myself. So I will end with reading just a few sentences from Betsy Child's article, which is entitled Marriage and Celibacy, Lifelong Grace One Day at a Time.

Those who have chosen to lead a celibate life may be happy in their friendships, their church, and their work. But when they peer into the future, the frightening prospect of growing old alone overshadows the mercies provided in the present. If the thought of enduring your marriage or lack of marriage for the rest of your life is daunting, it's because God doesn't hand out grace in a lifetime supply. He provides it one day at a time. If you feel like God has not given you the capacity to love your spouse for a lifetime, that's because he hasn't. But he has given you exactly what you need to be loving today. Furthermore, God has not given celibates the grace to bear a lifetime of solitude, but he will give it, he will give you what you need to make through this day. God will give us what

we need, but he will not give it to us until we need it. He didn't give the Israelites enough food to last through 40 years in the wilderness. He gave them manna one day at a time. None of us has a lifelong stockpile of grace, but we can look forward to God's faithfulness over a lifetime offered to us one day at a time. Thanks for listening to today's teaching from Dr. Keller. If you were encouraged by this podcast, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel and Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people access resources like this podcast. Just visit gospelandlife.com to learn more.

This month's sermons were recorded in 1991. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.