Nine Lies in the Not-Yet-Married Life

February 13, 2014 

• by Marshall Segal

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, perhaps one of the more polarizing holidays of our year. It’s very fun and exciting for the love birds, too commercial and insincere for the skeptics, and sometimes especially lonely for the single.

Singleness’s greatest sorrows are secretly reinforced every February in the souls of the not-yet-married still waiting for their wedding day. While many of our friends and family are inundated with dates, flowers, chocolate, and love notes, lots and lots of the valentine-less are overwhelmed with everything from impatience to bitterness, from shame to regret to confusion.

There will likely be good-intentioned, lovingly-naive husbands and wives who forget the emotional complexities of unwanted singleness and enthusiastically encourage you to just enjoy this season of “dating Jesus.” Yes, Jesus is our only hope and cure, but it won’t be in some hopelessly romantic, chocolate-covered, neatly-wrapped way. The truth is that the unfulfilled desire for a companion and lover, especially year after year, much more often feels like the grief and bondage of joblessness or infertility than the uninhibited emotional and devotional freedom many imagine. “Itis not good for man to be alone.”

The Full and Fruitful Single Life

We want our lives to be full and fruitful. We want to experience all God has made and given us as much as possible, and we want our experience in this short life to really count for his glory and the good of others. Sadly too often in our not-yet-married lives, we’ve made marriage a qualification for that kind of happiness and significance. There’ve been days — a lot of days — when I really couldn’t imagine a full and fruitful life without a wife.

But as much as God loves marriage, he didn’t design it to bear the burden of our eternal purpose and happiness. From the beginning, it’s been a means of experiencing and expressing a far greater union — union with God, through his Son, by his Spirit. Paul says the key to experiencing the freedom purchased for us at the cross is walking in the newness of the Spirit (Galatians 5:16), turning away from the desires of the flesh and filling ourselves with new fruits — love, peace, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self–control (Galatians 5:22). The free and full life is found in Christ and played out in Christ-likeness, summed up in these nine prizes of the Christian life.

Looking for Produce in the Right Aisle

Perhaps the greatest sorrow of the single life is that so many put off pursuing the produce of the Spirit until they get married. We foolishly think finding love will mysteriously unlock these fruits in our lives. It’s true that marriage very often brings sanctification, but the testimony of many is that marriage is more diagnosis than prescription in our pursuit of holiness. Rather than unlocking fruits, it will more often (graciously) uncover flaws — flaws we will then trust God to cleanse and correct.

In reality, none of the fruits of the Spirit are reserved for marriage. They’re the produce of conversion (our union with Christ), not of marriage (our union with a spouse). And fortunately for the not-yet-married, the union that matters most doesn’t require a license from your local county administrator. When we’re looking down the wedding aisle expecting a bride or groom to finally make us happy and fruitful, we’re looking for love, joy, and peace in the wrong places. God’s already given his Spirit — and all his fruits — to every person saved and satisfied in him — valentine or not.

Nine Fruits for Thought

Satan is the father of lies (John 8:44). And his most effective means of starving our not-yet-married lives of this soul-satisfying fruit are his lies. Lies about you. Lies about your past. Lies about marriage. Lies about your future spouse. Lies about your friends and family. And without a wife or husband, if we’re not careful, we might find ourselves with a lot more time to listen to him.

If we’re going to fight for fruitfulness, we need to hear the lies as lies and confront them with God’s invincible love for his children, which he has given us in the truth of his promises. So here are nine deceptions we singles need to defeat, each with a weapon from God’s word, holding joy for last. Whether you (click)