A Single Person's Identity by John Fisher

This was given to me about 4 months back. None of the words that follow are mine, but it is way too good of an article to just let it sit on my bookcase and not share it.

"A Single Person's Identity" by John Fisher
August 5, 1973


"I would to talk this evening about living as a single adult in the church, i.e., the body of Christ, the family of God. I'll speak from the Word and from my experience. And even though the subject will probably touch only a limited segment of the church, the principles should apply to us all.

"In the last few years, I have noticed a problem in my own personal life as a single person. The problem is that I live with a pressure toward marriage, because marriage in suppose to be the only way a person can be mature. We have had a lot of fantastic teaching here at PBC, and a great deal of Christian literature is available, about the fact that marriage is an example of the Lord's love for the Church, and about what marriage does for two people in causing them to be mature in Christ. Though taking their masks off and coming to know one another they can learn many deep lessons.

"But I have also noticed that it is possible to make such a statement on this subject that an imbalance in produced. I have even hear people make statements such as, 'It's impossible to be a mature Christian without being married.' This kind of thinking produces some problems for those of us who are single. I have notices that the suggestion creeps into the back of my mind that I am incomplete, in a 'holding pattern' fling around trying to find the airport so that I can get my feet on the ground to start living. This kind of thinking keeps me from living now to be what God has called me to be. It can be very subtle. It comes up even in the way I live around the house and the way I keep things in my room. I keep thinking, 'When...'-- 'When I have a place of my own...' or 'When I have someone with me... then I'll do this or that.'

"On top of that, there are those dear, loving, well-meaning married couples who think that everyone ought to be like they are, and who seek to push us together. You know, 'Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match...!' That's not much help, either! So there is a tension which has been produced in this situation, and I think there are probably many people who feel it.

"What I would like to do it turn to the Scriptures and very quickly go through some passages in which both Jesus and Paul say something about being single. We'll turn first to Matthew 19, beginning in verse 3. Jesus is being tested by the Pharisees. As often, they are trying to trap Him:

     And some Pharisees came to Him, testing Him, and saying "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all?" And He answered and said, "Have you not read, that He who created them from the beginning and made them male and female, and said, 'For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' Consequently, they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. They (the Pharisees) said to Him, "Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate and divorce her?" )In other words, "Why did Moses allow divorce, then, if this is true?") He (Jesus) said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been this way."

"The Law had to be altered because of the depravity of man and the brokenness of his relationships. But God's intention was never for marriage to be that way at all. The two become one, and you cannot separate two who have become one. This is a teaching on marriage and divorce, but Jesus' disciples force Him into another subject, verse 9:

"And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."

"The disciples respond to this heavy statement:

The disciples said to Him in reply, "If the relationship of the man with his wife is like this, it is better not to marry!"

"They were beginning to realize the seriousness Jesus placed on the marriage relationship. And they said 'Wow! If that's the way it is, it's better not even to fool around with it, not even get married.' Notice Jesus' very interesting reply--he does not disagree. He says:

"Not all men can accept this satement, but only those whom it has been given."

 Singleness is a Gift

"What He is saying here is that to some people, singleness is a gift. Have you ever thought of viewing your singleness as a gift from God? That is the way Jesus views it. I am not suggesting that your singleless in necessarily permanent, but I am talking about where you are right now. You can view your singleness, at this point, as a gift from God. You might want to move on. There is a littler more about that in the next verse, but I don't have time for it. It is a good passage for you to study at home. But I did want you to see that Jesus called singleness of a gift.

A Single Person's Identity

"Now, let us turn to I Corinthians 7. This is na interesting chapter in this connection. In verse 7, Paul says:

Yet, I wish that all men were even as I myself am. However, each man has his own gift from God, one in this manner, and another in that. But I say t the unmarried and to the widows that it is good for them that they remain (single) even as I.

"Paul uses that same word 'gift.' He calls singleness a gift. The state in which you are living now, if you are single, is a gift from the Lord. I asked myself, 'Why is this a gift?' I read further in the chapter and Paul answered the question for me in verses 32-35:  

But I want you to be free from concern. On who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but the one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how me my please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the woman who is unmarried, and the virgin, is concerned about the things of the Lord, that he may be holy in body and spirit; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I say, for your benefit, not to put a restraint upon you but to promote what is seemly, and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord.

"Paul is speaking very positively here. He elevated the state of singleness to the point where a person can give his undivided devotion to the Lord, can be totally set aside to please him, with no conflicts of interest. Because let's face it, marriage entails responsibility, higher responsibilities, more dealing with the world, and more financial complications. Please don't misunderstand me; he is not speaking against marriage here at all. He is speaking positively, and is encouraging the single people to realize the blessings and advantages of his singleness.

Don't Say, Tomorrow we will do Such and Such

"This truth has begun to set me free to realize that God has called me to live now. He hasn't called me to life four years from now. I don't know what is going to be happening four years from now. I have no idea. He wants me to realize my full potential as a man right now, to be thankful about where I am, and to enjoy it to the fullest. I have a strange feeling that the single person who is always wishing he were married will probably get married, discover all that is involved, and wish her were single again! He will ask himself, 'Why didn't I used that time for the Lord when I didn't have do many other obligations? Why didn't I give myself totally to Him when I was single?' So I encourage those of you who are single to praise God about your state, to devote yourself fully to Him, and to realize the full potential which God has called you to live right now.

"It has been a great encouragement to me to discover that there are Christian man who have not married and yet who are very mature leaders in the community. One man who is very dear to me is Lyle Hillegas, President of Westmount College. Lyle is a single man, and God has called him to that, at least for now. And Lyle is a responsible, gifted man of God. That fact has helped satisfy my own desire to find 'models' whom I can emulate in patterning my own Christian life. Sometimes all the models we see are married people, and we say 'Where do I fit in?' But God has models for single people. You can find them everywhere. And they are serving the Lord. The reason they are good examples is that they have begun to learn to truly give themselves to the Lord, and to enjoy where they are. Paul says, 'I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.'

"I have been talking up to this point about how a single person should view himself in the body of Christ. I am going to turn a corner now, and talk about relationships between single adults in the body of Christ. As I grew up in the church, I occasionally heard young men speaking about bachelorhood only half-joking in terms like 'Celibates for Christ' and 'Bachelors till the Rapture!' You might have assumed from what I have said so far that I am suggesting that asserting yourself as a single person as realizing God's full potential for your life somehow means avoiding people of the opposite sex or setting yourself aside.

"Art Hoppe, a humorous columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote an article proposing 'Celibate Liberation' in an effort to counteract all the other 'liberation' movements--Woman's Lib and Gay Lib. He called this movement 'Mono Lib.' His classic example is the guy who walks alone out of the bar, puts on his hat, and asks himself 'My place or mine?'

"That is not all what I have in mind! As a matter of fact, what the Lord is beginning to show me, in my new found freedom, is that he wants to drive me into relationships, to put me in them, and through them to teach me and enable me to grow. He wants me to minister as a brother in Christ and to get to know my sisters.

The Pursuit of Love

"I think that a great deal of our tension, not only in our own self-image as single people, but also in our relationships with members of the opposite sex, has arisen because deep down inside, what we are pursuing is the state of marriage. We have gotten this goal into our heads, and we are working toward it. And because the married state is so exaulted and is suppose to be where maturity lies, we start thinking, 'Gee, when is this going to happen to me? Where is my marriage partner?'

"We have gone to classes and have heard teaching on the subject, so we devise our blueprint for the perfect marriage partner. Then, we go running around with our list of the characteristics (speaking from a brother's point of view, now) that we want in a girl and fit everybody up to it. We start to get to know a sister, and ... check, check, check! We have spiritual items that we look for, and the flesh usually throws in a few too ... be realistic.

"You know what happens then. We get down to item seven or eight on the list and she doesn't measure up. She we say, 'Good-bye. She's not the one, let's try another one.' Because we are pursuing this idealized conception of marriage, we have preconceived ideas of what that is all about. This causes all kinds of frustrated reflection and comparisons.

"What I really wont to share with you tonight, the idea which is closest to my heart, is what I have discovered that what God wants us to pursue is not marriage, but love, and that marriage is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end. The end is love. Marriage is the servant of love. If we are pursuing marriage, we are pursuing the wrong thing. Love starts to become subservient to marriage. We start making up our own ideas of what love is, and we don't allow the Lord to show is and teach us what love actually is through the relationship He gives us. 'Pursue love, not marriage,' This is such a simple principle, but it has set me free in the past few months in my relationship with my Christian sisters.

A Single Person's Identity

"Pursuing love immediately does all sorts of wonderful things! It alleviates all the questioning. 'Id this the one because that is not so important at this point. We are learning how to minister, how to build up one another, how to be friends. We have had such great teaching on this subject in recent weeks. Dave Roper's message last week on the friendship of Jonathan and David is beautiful. And I was so excited this morning to hear Dave speaking on David and Abigail because it was so perfectly in tune with what I wanted to say tonight about how the sisters can turn and minister to the bothers. You see, when we are free to pursue loving one another in the Lord, we are free from all the tensions, pressures, and hassles of trying to find a mate.

Principles for Relationships

"I need to tell you what I mean by 'pursuing love.' The standard of love must always be that expressed in I Corinthians 13. As far as I am concerned, no other definition of love is worth spending much time on. In verses 4 through 7 there is a checklist of eight characteristics of true love. Check and see if you truly understand what love it. This passage stands in tremendous contrast to the 'love' of the world, the common, ordinary usage of that word, the 'love' we hear of today in songs and movies. Listen to the words here: 'Love is patient. Love is kind. It is not jealous. Love does not brag. It is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly, does not seek its own (it is not possessive). It is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.' That is the love we're talking about. It is a giving love. It is a fruit of the Spirit of God. It is impossible to have apart from Jesus Christ alive in your life. It is the life of God living out through you to enfold other people.

Acceptance

"I would like to talk now about two very practical areas concerning the pursuit of love in relationships between mature single adults. These are two principles which come out of my own experience and are certainly backed up by the Word. The first is ACCEPTANCE. That is, instead of coming to a person with my preconceived ideas of what I hope this person already is, I come as a viewer, a receiver. This person is to be accepted by me because she (or he) is accepted by the Lord. The Lord loves this person, and died for this person, and I am to accept the fact I am to stand back and allow myself to be ministered to, to be blessed and encouraged by this person, to accept her (or him) the way she (or he) is and then just sit back and discover what is there. 

"This is a fantastic, exciting way to relate to people! If we view the people we meet in life as a discovery, then we don't put bonds on them, we don't force them to conform to our preconceptions. We can accept them and learn from them, and grow from what they give to us. God accepted us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). He didn't place any behavioral criteria on us. He accepted us in our filth. Now, are we going to place more restrictive standards upon anyone else? The Lord says, 'As I accept you, so you accept your brothers.'



"In this pursuit of love, acceptance is what helps us to be able to take our masks off. This is the quiet, slow process of revealing myself to another person. It may be difficult, ever painful, very painful. But it is rich and deep and fulfilling. Have you ever had that experience of revealing yourself to another person and have that person start to open himself to you in a free relationship of acceptance? You don't have to wait until marriage to experience that, you can start now. We should be relating to all Christians in a way--brothers with brothers, brothers with sisters, sisters with sisters--in a discovery relationship of being unveiled before one another. We really need to help each other take our masks off, and acceptance is the key to that.

 Commitment

"The other principle is COMMITMENT. This is a quality which I really sense is very much missed in our brother/sister relationships. What has happened is that a lot of us have come to use the brother/sister relationship basically on a cop-out from responsibility. The way I see it, it is actually a taking on of responsibility for a brother to get to know a sister or a sister to get to know a brother. I am speaking primarily to the brothers now, because I've talked to a lot of them about this, and I've talked to some sisters, too, who have been deeply hurt--too many who have been deeply hurt. In fact, one of my motivations for being here tonight is that I have talked to so many sisters who have been in relationships which have started to open, in which they have started to reveal themselves, and the brother has started to reveal himself, they have started to spend some time ... and then the weirdness has set in.

"By 'weirdness' I mean the pressure which results from the prospect of marriage--raising disquieting inner questions like, 'Is this the one? Is this THAT relationship?' -- yet without our communicating our feelings and questions to the other people. This 'weirdness' starts to creep in, both people get uptight, and the guy splits! The sister has opened and bared her heart, but the brother has turned and left her. This has happened many times because of 'Well, this is just a good brother/sister relationship, right?' We use that, sometimes, as a cop-out from the responsibility involved in truly getting to know another.

"I have begun to see that there is really no back door in any relationship. Once you start a relationship, in the kingdom of God, even if it starts to get difficult, you have a responsibility to work that difficulty out with each other--you pray, you talk, you seek the Lord's mind as to what is happening. You are not to run in fear, because in God's book, there is no back door to relationships. You are to close the door behind you and to move forward. The definitions of the relationship may change. But the Lord is striving for us all to become one in Him and any move counter to that oneness is a move against the Lord's Will. He desires oneness.

"Perhaps I can share just one personal experience which will help to show you what I mean. In recent months, I have gotten to know a sister whom I met in South Africa. We met again in Redlands, California which I was teaching there last winter, and we got to know each other in a very free relationship. I realized that she had been 'burned' in relationships before, and she was very cautious about showing anything of her deep inner feelings and desires. But I noticed that as we got to know each other she began to trust me more, and she began to reveal more of her life to me. It was mutual, and we began to reveal more of her life to me. It was mutual, and we began to encourage one another and to open up toward each other.

"And then the weirdness came! This was before I learned these things. As a matter of fact, this relationship was one of the factors which helped teach me. The weirdness come, we had a good talk, and we took a step back. We said, hey, we are really not sure where we're going. Neither of us is thinking about marriage right now, so let's not keep heading there, 'brother/sister,' right? Right!

A Single Person's Identity

"As I drive home that night, the Lord showed me something. My responsibility to that sister was more then ever to remain committed. If there ever was a time I was responsible to stay with her and be communicative, it was then. The next time we got together, she said, 'You know, I thought I was never going to see you again.' If I had left, it would have been one more time, and it would have been that much more difficult for her to open up her life the next time to someone else. We both discovered together that something good happened at this point. We weren't worrying about marriage--we had erased that. We simply began to minister to one another and to pursue the meeting of each other's needs as a man and a woman. Now, it is a fantastic relationship, and it is still going on! Is this striking a cord?

Pursuing Love

"I so appreciate Dave's word this morning, and I'd like to close by reinforcing his major point. What Dave showed us so beautifully from the life of Abigail was that she ministered to David's life as a sister in the Lord, calling him to the truth in love. Please realize that these principles are not only for single people, but for all brothers and sister in the entire body of Christ. One of my greatest experiences this past year has been getting to know Ann-Marie Ritchie. I have spent the last two years with Ron Ritchie for discipleship and teaching. But in the past year I've discoered his other half for what she is-- not Ron Ritchie's wife, but the person Ann-Marie. She has blessed me to no end! She has ministered to me, encouraged me, built me up as a man. We are talking about righteous relationships, and being free to have them. And God wants us to have them.

"The last thing I want to say is, if God leads you, begin to commit yourself to a special person. Step out in faith, jump in, and do it! It involves a risk, tremendous risk. It is a lot easier to keep everyone a certain distance, and if the relationship starts to get weird, to split. What I encourage you to do is to pursue love, in spite of your fear, and watch God set you free! If anyone should be having relationships which are open and beautiful and righteous between men and women, it is Christians. That is what the Lord has put us here to do."