"God's Purposes for Singleness" by Jennifer Miller

Our prayer is that you will be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power. Hello everyone, and welcome again to Strength of Strand Sisters. I'm so happy to be with you all again today. It's been quite a while. I'm Jamila Kurtz, for those who don't know me, and I'm coming to you from the beautiful country of Kenya. We're excited to have Jen Miller share with us today on God's purpose for singleness. Jen lived in Central Ohio for most of her life, but now she spent the last number of years teaching school in Hutchinson, Kansas.

This study of God's purposes for singleness is one that she loves to share because of how it has transformed her perspective on the subject. I'm looking forward to the encouragement today of what it means to embrace fully whatever role God has us currently in. After Jen shares with us, we're going to have a time of question and answer, so be ready with any questions you may have.

Jen, I'd love to pray for you before you begin. So if you want to all join me, we can pray. Lord, I just thank you so much for this opportunity we have, and thank you for this technology that allows us to happen, Lord, where we can just gather from places all over the world.

And Lord, we just want to take this moment to just praise Your name. Lord, I pray especially, Lord, that our hearts can be open. I pray for Jen, Lord, now that You would just direct her, Lord, that You would just give her an anointing, Lord, of Your grace and Your wisdom. Lord, I pray that only the words that You want to be shared will be shared today. Lord, everything else will fall by the wind.

God, we just thank You so much for the incredible blessing it is for us to be Your daughters. And Lord, we just want to just be open, Lord, and to be thirsting and just waiting, Lord, for You to infill us with Your Spirit and with Your grace.

As Lord, we're here, Lord, right now, Lord, in this moment. So we just ask all this in the name of Jesus. Amen. One little thought I thought I'd add is that just an invitation that you can all turn on your screens. It's such an encouragement, I think, to a speaker to be able to talk to faces. So I thought I'd just add that invitation in here. But go ahead, Jen. We're ready and waiting to hear what you have to share.

God bless you. Thank you. Thank you, Jamila, for that introduction. It is nice to see all the faces. Hi, Mom.

And so thank you for turning on your cameras. It helps to see faces. There's faces here on the screen, and I have some in the flesh faces sitting here in my living room too, so that feels really good. So I heard a story once about a little girl who went to the zoo and saw a giraffe for the first time. And it was just unlike any animal she had ever seen before. She had seen monkeys, she had seen bears, she'd seen dogs and cats, but this had like long skinny legs, long skinny neck, and she just had never seen such a thing before. She had no categories for it. It just looked strange. And she looked at it for a while, and then she looked at her mom and she said, "Mommy, what's it for?"

And I think that's a good comparison sometimes for how we think about singleness. It is just, we wonder, what's it for? It doesn't meet the expectations that we have. It's weird. It doesn't fit the categories we're used to, and we don't quite know what to do with it because we don't know what it's for. So the title of the talk today is God's purposes for singleness. So we're going to talk about singleness and what it's for.

I am not married, and I am going to be speaking to you as if I were speaking to an audience of unmarried women, but I realize that many of you are married. And if that's the case, please don't go away. Please stay.

Because I think the message that I have to share is just as vital for married women as it is for single women. Because the reality is that everyone is single at some point in their lives. Even if you are married now, the unhappy reality is that you are not guaranteed to remain so.

After a season of marriage, many women find themselves unmarried for whatever reason. And so I feel like understanding the role of the unmarried in the kingdom of God is important for everyone. And today I'm going to talk about the things that I have found to be most helpful, most encouraging, and strengthening as I have figured out how to think about singleness. And that is being able to get a big picture of God's purpose, His purposes for singleness. So I'm going to divide this talk into kind of three chunks and sort of three levels of purpose for singleness. So we'll start off with the big picture.

Here, just a minute. I need to turn on my stopwatch so I can see where I'm at with time. All right. So we're going to look at three levels of purpose. So the first one is the big picture.

Like the eternal view. If God is up in heaven looking out over eternity, what is His purpose for marriage and singleness? What is He trying to accomplish with that? And I say marriage and singleness because I hope by the time I'm finished talking, you will understand that it's all one great big package.

So I like to call that the cosmic view of marriage and singleness, the big picture, the eternal view. The second level then is what I call the medium picture, and that is God's purpose for singleness in the kingdom of God here on earth. So that's the medium view. And then finally, the little picture. What is God's purpose for singleness for me here right now?

So we're going to dive right in and talk about the big picture. This is a lot, so I'm going to say it a couple of times. So let's begin with the purpose of singleness in the big picture, the eternal view, the cosmic view, what God is going for, what God was going for when He created marriage and singleness. The purpose of singleness in marriage is to bear witness here on earth to the intimate relationship Christ and His bride will share in eternity.

I'll run that by you again. The purpose of singleness and marriage is to bear witness here on earth to the intimate relationship Christ and His bride will share in eternity. So we know what marriage is. We would call it, you know, if we were to define marriage, we would say something like a man and a woman committed to each other for life. But when we define singleness, we kind of end up defining singleness by what it is not. It is not being married, right? Which is kind of unfortunate, a little bit of a burn, but we'll deal with it.

So I'm going to begin, before I go further, and just define my terms a little bit. I'm going to use the terms singleness, celibate, unmarried, kind of interchangeably. And when I use those terms, I'm speaking to a Christian audience. So I mean, when I talk about people who are single or celibate or unmarried, I mean Christians who are unmarried and because of their Christian beliefs are sexually abstinent.

So just so you know what I'm talking about when I use those terms.

So I'm going to talk about, first of all, God's purpose for marriage. And you might be thinking, "Well, lady, I came to hear about God's purposes for singleness." Well, we're going to get there, but like I said, they're so connected.

And I feel like you need a proper understanding of marriage to really properly understand singleness, and you need a robust understanding of singleness in order to really understand marriage, right? So we're going to talk about both of them.

So what is the purpose of marriage? What was it created for? What was it created to do? What was it created to be? If I would ask you, I'd probably get several different answers, especially if you weren't listening a couple of minutes ago when I told you what the answer is.

So we would think of marriage as being a place for companionship, a sanctioned place for sexual activity, an ideal place to produce and raise children. But I mean, that all comes with marriage, but that's not really the point of marriage. It's not the big picture point.

So the Bible, if we're going to back up and look at what the Bible says about marriage, the Bible begins and ends with marriage, and it uses the language of marriage all through the middle as well. Ray Ortland in Sam is quoted by Sam Albury in his excellent book, The Seven Myths About Singleness, which you should read.

Albury quotes Sam, or sorry, quotes Ray Ortland, saying, "Marriage is the wraparound concept of the entire Bible." So in Genesis 1, God creates the world. And as He creates, we see Him creating many pairs of complementary things. We have the heavens and the earth. We have light and darkness. We have day and night, sea and dry land. And then creation culminates in a pair of humans, male and female.

And the creation culminates in a wedding. And then the story of the world begins pretty soon. Sin enters the picture and chaos ensues. And then we've got the story of the Bible. And then the chaos brought by sin climaxes in the drama and terrors of the book of Revelation.

And at the end of the book, God wins. And Revelation 19 speaks of the marriage supper of the Lamb. And then Satan is destroyed. And then in Revelation 21, the last chapter in the Bible, it speaks of heaven coming down to earth as a bride adorned for her husband. And if you remember, back in the creation, heaven and earth were separated. And now, at the end of the world, heaven and earth come back together. They're rejoined. As Albury says, "Heaven and earth at last become united, and marriage is the language that best describes it."

So that was kind of the middle and the end of the Bible, the beginning and the end of the Bible. In the middle, then, marriage is often used as a metaphor. God uses marriage in the Old Testament as a metaphor to describe His relationship with His people. God describes Himself as a bridegroom, especially like in the prophets like Hosea and Jeremiah.

He describes Himself as a husband. I'm sorry, not a bridegroom, a husband with a wife, usually unfaithful, represented by Israel. So God uses the marriage metaphor to describe His relationship with Israel. Then in the New Testament, Jesus describes Himself as a bridegroom. And then finally, in Ephesians, Paul ends his recommendations for how to have a good marriage by saying, "I'm talking about marriage, but actually I'm talking about Christ in the church, and this is a great mystery." And it is.

All right. So that's kind of, you know, an overview very fast of marriage in the Bible. The Bible begins and ends and is full of the language of marriage. So what do we make of all this? I suggest that the real big picture purpose of marriage is sacramental.

So a sacrament is related to the word sacred. A sacrament I'm defining as a sign or a symbol. You could say an object lesson of a spiritual reality. It is something physical that we experience that represents something spiritual, something that's bigger that is spiritual. So marriage is a giant, elaborate, thousands of years long participated in by millions of people, a gigantic object lesson to show us the kind of relationship that God wants to have with His people.

So to make this a little more understandable, I've found it helpful to look at other sacraments that we're more familiar with and compare them, and it helps it make a little more sense. So one that we're familiar with is sacrifices in the Old Testament. So God's instructions to the Israelites were that when they sinned, the way that they could be restored to relationship with God, the way their sins could be atoned for was a sacrifice. So they would kill an animal to become right with God. Well, we all know that with a sacrifice, a dead animal is not the point, right? The point was that the Israelites needed to remember their sin and their need for God's mercy, right?

All right. Another sacrament you might have participated in yourself is communion. So when you participate in communion, the bread and the grape juice or the wine, depending on your denomination, are not the point. The point is you remembering Jesus suffering, right?

So when you participate in marriage, companionship or sex or children are not the point. The point is marriage is a sacrament that reminds the world of the deep love that Christ and His people have for each other. That's the point of marriage, right?

So if things are the way they ought to be, and they aren't usually, but marriage is supposed to be an intimate relationship between two unlike beings, a male and a female, right? They are supposed to know and love and serve each other deeply. And when I desire marriage, often what I desire, that's what I desire. I want to be known. I want to be understood. I want someone to be with. The intimacy is what I want when I long for marriage.

That intimacy, that being with, that being understood and known, that is supposed to be a picture of how Christ knows and loves His church and how His church responds in love to Him. So going back to the other sacraments that we talked about, we don't need to sacrifice lambs anymore. Jesus' sacrifice on the cross fulfilled that need.

When we are in heaven with Jesus, we will not need to participate in communion anymore. We don't need to be reminded of Jesus' suffering because His suffering will have been fulfilled and our salvation will be complete. So can you tell where this is going?

Jesus said that in the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. So one thing that will not be in heaven is marriage.

There will be lots of things we recognize in heaven. There will be people. There will be relationships. There will be cities. There will be streets. There will be travel. But there will not be marriage because we don't need it anymore.

Jesus and I, along with the rest of His bride, the church, will have the ultimate relationship. We will have a love that is completely free and open and intimacy that is free of awkwardness and misunderstandings and explanations, which even in the best marriage, even in the best friendships, like sometimes the awkwardness and the misunderstandings still happen, right? But it won't in heaven.

It will be a perfect, satisfactory, fulfilling relationship. And so any honest married person that you talk to will agree that even when marriage is really good, it is still not enough. It is still not scratching all the itches, if you will. It is not completely satisfactory. And it can't be because it is not the real thing, right?

Glenn Harrison, again, as quoted by Sam Albury, says it this way, "The Bible does not teach that there will be no marriage in heaven. Rather, it teaches that there will be one marriage in heaven between Christ and His bride, the church."

So when we get to heaven, we don't need marriage anymore because the picture that we've been drawing will be a reality. It will be a real thing, and marriage will go away. So every time a man and a woman get married and promise to love each other, whether or not they know it, and often they don't, they are reenacting God's story, reminding us of His love for His people and His desire to be with them forever.

So marriage is important because it is the primary metaphor, it's the primary way that God has chosen to show people what a relationship with Him is supposed to look like. So when you hear people talking about how terrible it is that the way that marriage is being maligned or whatever in our world today, yes, it is really terrible because marriage is such an important way God chooses to reveal Himself. So marriage is very important, but it is not the most important. It is just a picture. It is not the ultimate reality.

So there is the purpose of marriage, but what's the purpose of singleness? And I say it's the same as the purpose of marriage. We are all telling the same story. We're all drawing the same picture, whether we are married or not.

So when a husband and wife are faithful to each other, or sorry, I'm sorry, are faithful to the Lord by loving each other and being faithful to each other, and the most obvious way that we talk about this is sexually, they are illustrating in a temporary way. They're drawing a picture of the perfect love that will exist between Christ and His people in heaven. And when I or you, as an unmarried person, refrain from sexual activity because I'm not married, I'm drawing the same picture. I'm affirming the same reality.

Glenn Harrison, again, says that both single people and unmarried people, they both deploy their sexuality in ways that serve as a sign of the kingdom and the faithful character of God's passion. So if we look at the picture again, because we are more familiar with the picture, if you think of an engaged woman, you would expect her to show her commitment to her fiancé by declining to pursue romantic relationships with other men.

Even though she's not married to the guy yet, she is giving value to that relationship. She's affirming the reality of her relationship with her husband before he's even her husband, all right? That is what an unmarried woman, a celibate woman, is doing as well.

So Christian singleness or celibacy is, and this is Alburys' words, a way of saying that this future reality is so certain and so good that we can embrace it now. It's such a good line. I'm going to say it again.

Singleness is a way of saying that this future reality that I'm going to have a perfect, open, intimate relationship with Jesus in heaven, this future reality is so certain and so good that we can embrace it now. So that's one angle.

Another angle is that by being celibate, you are a picture to the world of what will be in eternity, a fulfilled and satisfying relationship with Jesus, unhindered by a relationship with a husband. And I'm not saying that married women can't have free and unhindered relationships with Jesus. They can. It's just stick with me on the metaphor here, right? So if you've ever seen an unmarried person who is happy and fulfilled in her life and not curled up in a ball wailing about how horrible it is that she doesn't have a husband, she's giving you a glimpse of what it's going to be like in heaven, an open, fulfilling relationship with Jesus without the husband in the picture.

So you might be saying, "Well, I guess my desires for marriage and all that goes with it are just dumb. I just need to get over it. I'll move on. I shouldn't be feeling this way because obviously I just missed the big picture." No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I am not trying to minimize the desires that we have. I don't think it's helpful to minimize those desires.

Those are good desires. They are holy desires. They are God-given desires. And we need to talk about them. We need to acknowledge them. They are not pointless feelings. They are not feelings that should be squelched. We need to acknowledge the feelings, but instead of letting them overwhelm us, we must realize, and again, I'm quoting Albury, that these desires don't need to be met in order for their purpose to be fulfilled. The desires don't need to be met in order for their purpose to be fulfilled. And I'm just going to acknowledge that that is not necessarily something that is fun to hear if you have really, if you're experiencing a lot of desire for marriage. The desire doesn't need to be met in order for its purpose to be fulfilled.

We would desire that our desires would be fulfilled, right? But what I'm saying is that we need to look at these desires through the lens of the gospel. The actual purpose of those desires is not marriage. The actual purpose is to point us to the ultimate relationship we're going to have with Jesus in eternity.

The purpose, Alburys says, is to point us to the reality of the gospel. So I'm not saying this makes it easy. I'm not saying it makes it fun. I'm just saying when you understand the big picture, it can help you persevere.

These desires just are a reminder of what I'm really waiting for. And marriage can take an edge off the desires. I'm not saying that. But again, even in marriage, the desire can't be actually completely fulfilled because it's not the real thing.

So well, and I'm not trying to minimize. I'm not marriage bashing here or anything like that. I'm just saying I think you know what I'm saying. All right. So we've talked about the big picture of marriage and singleness. That was a lot. You can take a deep breath. So here on earth, we're called here to bear witness to draw a picture of the perfect intimacy that Christ and His people will share in eternity.

Both Christian singleness and Christian marriage play vital roles in this plan. Now I'd like to zoom in a little bit from the cosmic view and talk about something maybe a little more accessible, the global view. Still pretty big, but feels a little more a little easier to handle than eternity, right?

So let's talk about the kingdom of God here on earth. What is the purpose of singleness in the medium view, if you will? What is the purpose of singleness in the kingdom of God here on earth? So we're not in eternity yet. Jesus established His kingdom here on earth, and Christians here on earth are called to serve the King. We're called to expand the kingdom. There's work to be done. And again, both single and married people have vital roles to play.

So I'm going to suggest here that the purpose of singleness here in the kingdom of God on earth is to use the freedom of the season of being unmarried to grow the family of God here on earth. And I'm calling it a season because singleness is never an eternal situation. Even if you never get married, once you get into heaven, singleness is over, right? It's a season that ends. So we can use this season of freedom, relative freedom. I realize I should put a lot of qualifiers in there, but of being unmarried to grow the family of God here on earth. So again, we're going to back up and talk about the Old Testament view of family.

So the Old Testament Jewish community taught that marriage and children were extremely important. And by extremely important, I mean extremely important to the extent that if your husband died and you had not had a child, his brother was obligated to marry you and make so that you could have a child with him so that your husband's family line would not die out, right? It was a really big deal.

Rodney Clapp, who is quoted in Albert She's excellent book, Singles at the Crossroads, you should get this one too, she quotes Rodney Clapp saying, "For a Hebrew, not getting married was catastrophic." Assuring that the family line was carried out was of paramount importance. And we get glimpses of this in the stories of people like Hannah and Rachel, the shame of barrenness in that time. Well, then Jesus came, and like He did with so many other things, He turned the whole mentality on its head.

There was a situation Jesus was teaching a bunch of people. His mother and brothers were outside. They came and told Him, "Jesus, your mother and brothers are outside." And Jesus said, "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" Pointing to His disciples, who were probably scrawny adolescent boys, so I don't know how His mom felt about that. But pointing to His disciples, He said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and mother and sister." So Jesus is teaching here that the true family is the spiritual family.

Biological family takes second place in the kingdom of God.

Jesus emphasizes this when He says, "Anyone who loves their father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me." The spiritual family trumps the biological family every time. So as in the big picture view, so in this view, in the medium view, both single people and married people are vitally important.

Paul, when he talks about singleness in 1 Corinthians 7 and extols singleness, he says, "I wish everyone were as I am." And then in Ephesians, he talks about marriage and praises it. And it kind of makes you want to say, "Well, Paul, pick one, which is the most important." But the fact is both are equally important, and we need to honor them equally without disparaging one or the other.

So I feel like in our time and culture and church history, the pendulum has kind of swung to overemphasizing marriage and family. Marriage and family are good and important. I've been saying that, so I'm not trying to throw it under the bus, but I feel like we have sometimes emphasized it, even prioritizing it over the family of God. So that's a problem. But on the other hand, for me to sit back and get cynical and be like, "Well, have any of you guys read 1 Corinthians 7? Didn't you know that that's actually better?" That's not a helpful attitude either. So again, there are equally vital roles for both married people and single people, but this talk is about singleness, so I am going to focus on that.

So again, the purpose here is to use this season, and like I said, it's just a season. It will end to grow the family of God. To quote my friend Jana, "Instead of looking at the disadvantages of singleness, we need to look at the ministry of singleness." So in the beginning, one of the responsibilities that God gave to humans was to be fruitful and multiply. It's called the creation mandate. And one of the great griefs of singleness is that in the will of God, childbearing is not an option. And I'm not saying that, and that is a great grief, and I'm not minimizing that grief at all.

But I do want to look at it through the lens of the gospel, all right? So as Christians, we are not shut out of family and children, right? So I remember the first time it hit me between the eyes that I was maybe never going to bear a child.

It was really hard. I cried for a week.

But that's not where it stops when you are a believer. So let's look at that grief through the lens of the gospel. There is more to being fruitful and multiplying than giving birth to biological children. Those who are married often need to focus their nurturing energies on a pretty small group of humans, their own children. And I am absolutely in favor of that. Please do that, right?

But those who are celibate are free to love many people well. We can love a much more diverse group of people. We can focus energy on a more diverse group of people than a married woman with children typically can. This is not to say that married women with families can't nurture spiritually as well. That's a large part of their job as well. But I'm talking specifically about singleness here, so stick with me.

Albert She again quotes a nun who was talking about the freedom that she found in celibacy, the freedom to love many well. He quotes her as saying, "We're not making babies, but we can make relationships." It's a great line. We're not making babies, but we can make relationships. There is more to being fruitful and multiplying than giving birth to biological children.

Jesus calls us to make disciples. If you look at your desire to bear children through the lens of the gospel, through the eyes of faith, through the eyes of Jesus, you'll see that nurturing spiritual life is just as vital, maybe even more than nurturing physical life. Alburys says we cannot fulfill the original intention of the creation mandate without reaching people with the gospel and building them up in Christ.

Paul in the Bible was celibate, and he speaks of Timothy and Titus as his sons in the faith. He calls Timothy my true son in the faith. He wasn't just saying, "Yeah, he's like one of my kids." He called him his true son. He was a spiritual father. He brought Timothy to spiritual birth.

It was difficult. It was hard. It was labor. It was much effort and nurture. It was like he was his true son in the Lord. He wasn't a physical father. But as a spiritual father, he not only nurtured Titus and Timothy, he has impacted thousands of believers across generations.

And I'm not saying that all of us have to impact thousands of people, right? We're not tracking the numbers. But that is in Jesus' kingdom, in this spiritual reality that is the way that we can be fruitful and multiply. Isaiah 54 talks about this. And when I first was looking at it, I was kind of like, "Oh, I think probably this is like the barren woman he's talking to is metaphorical or something." But looking at it more, I think it is actually talking about barren women.

And maybe in the context of Israel or something, but I think it's very applicable to barren women today. Isaiah 54, "Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child. Burst into song. Shout for joy, you who were never in labor. Because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband," says the Lord. "Enlarge the place of your tent. Stretch your tent curtains wide. Do not hold back. Lengthen your cords. Strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left. Your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities. Do not be afraid. You will not be put to shame. Do not fear disgrace.

You will not be humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood. For your Maker is your husband. The Lord Almighty is his name. The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer. He is called the God of all the earth." So this is not the season to curl up into a ball because you have nothing to contribute.

This is a season with great potential for fruitfulness. Take this away. I mean it. But there are bigger things going on than what your hormones are telling you. The hormones are really loud, and I'm not minimizing that. When your body clock is ticking, it makes a lot of racket, right? So I'm not minimizing that, but I'm saying, "Let's forgive the mixed metaphors. Let's listen to our hormones through the lens of the gospel," right? Your hormones are saying, "My body clock is ticking. I must have a child." Jesus is saying, "Your childbearing years are not limited by your body clock."

I'm not saying this is easy, right? I'm not saying it's fun, and after this, you're going to be cruising and be like, "Oh, I'm going to have spiritual babies. It's all good. I'm not feeling any other." No, that's not the way it works.

We are physical beings, and we just feel the physical things, right? But we can get our metaphors right this time and say we can listen to our hormones through the ear of the gospel and remember the bigger picture that's going on.

All right. So by now, you might be thinking, "Wow, singleness is so much more important and significant than I thought. I can see how it would be a really important calling for someone else. Someone should do it, but I would rather it not be me." If that is where you're at, I get it.

So sometimes being singleness is great, and sometimes being single is terrible. So how do we think about the suffering that results from singleness? And I'm just going to call it suffering because that's what it is, and sometimes it just helps to call it what it is.

All right. So let's get local now, and I mean like really local. So we've talked about the big picture of marriage and singleness in eternity. We've talked about how that is intended to showcase the relationship between Christ and His church. We've talked about singleness in the medium picture, how singleness can impact the kingdom of God, the growth of the kingdom of God. But now let's talk about me. Like I said, really local.

What is the purpose of singleness for me? And I'm going to say the purpose of singleness is for me to grow in holiness and become more like Jesus. So sometimes we hear our married friends be like, "Oh, man, I thought I was pretty good, and then I got married and had a baby." And yeah, getting up all night, it's just really showing up the selfishness in me, and, "Oh, I'm really getting sanctified right now." And sometimes we're like, "Well, I guess sanctification is for the married people." Actually not.

If the Lord has called you to be married, He's going to use marriage in your sanctification. If the Lord has called you to be single, He will use singleness in your sanctification. Wherever you are, this is where God is choosing to sanctify you right now.

So how do we grow in holiness and become more like Jesus right here, right now? I have two things. Take the long view and turn to the Lord in your suffering. So let's talk about taking the long view, and I've been talking about this the whole time. So I'm just going to break it down a little bit more. So Hebrews 12 says that Jesus, "Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls."

So how did Jesus suffer? Well, when He was on the cross, the cross was here, and He looked beyond the cross to the joy that was beyond the cross. And looking beyond the cross, looking to the joy beyond the suffering is what gave Him the perseverance to endure. That didn't mean that the cross was easy. It wasn't like Jesus is like, "Oh, the joy. Yes, all right. The cross, it's not going to bother me at all." No, the cross was horrible. It was terrible. It was terrible suffering. But because of what He could see beyond the cross, He was able to endure. That is keeping the long view in mind.

This is the way God is choosing to sanctify me right now. This might be a hard thing, but I can look beyond it and see the joy that it's coming, and I can endure it better because I understand that.

I talked to a pastor friend about this talk before when I was pulling it together just to run some ideas past him. And he got married a little later than most people do, so he was single for a while.

And he said that when he was thinking about this, his take on it was, "I could make the most of this time if I knew it was going to end sometime." Well, it is. You can make the most of this time. Even if it's difficult, you can make the most of this time because it is going to end sometime. So that was point one. Take the long view. How can I become more like Jesus in this season? Take the long view. Second, turn to the Lord in your suffering. So Isaiah 54 told us that your Maker is your husband. Well, what are husbands supposed to do? Well, many things, but also they provide and protect.

And if the Lord, your husband, who is your protector and your provider, is the Maker of the universe, you are not stuck with mediocrity. You are not stuck with inferiority. You are not stuck with vulnerability. You are not stuck with barrenness. If your Maker is your husband, you are going to be taken care of.

If you need the stories, talk to the single women who have been single for a long time, the ones who are 50 and 60, and even occasionally the ones who are 30. They will tell you the stories of how the Lord has been faithful and provided for them when they thought a good man would really have fit the bill, but the Lord provided other ways.

So turn to the Lord in your suffering. It's His job, as one of my friends told me recently. It's His job to take care of you, so depend on Him to do it. All right. And then instead of stuffing or squelching the loneliness or the sadness, acknowledge your suffering and let it point you to the Lord. So all of these things are to point us toward the Lord. That is looking at these difficulties through the lens of the gospel. So turn to Him instead of away from Him. Talk to Him about what is going on. I have found in the days when singleness is not my favorite thing, talking to the Lord about it, He has been a faithful friend.

He listens very well. So take the long view and turn to the Lord in your suffering. And that deepens as you share with someone in suffering, that deepens your relationship. And that is something that has been very helpful for me, is to talk to the Lord about the suffering I'm feeling and letting Him comfort me and provide for me in that.

So singleness, what's it for? I hope I've given you some new ways to think about what singleness is for, to think about its purpose. So I hope that this encourages you to see with eyes of faith and to spend this season of singleness, however long it is, growing the family of God, becoming more like Jesus, showing the world the kind of relationship that God wants to have with His people.

Thank you. Back to you, Jamila.

Oh, thank you so much, Jen. That was like very rich. And the thought that kept going through my head, there's a lot of thoughts going, but it really captured my imagination and my visualization, just thinking about that we're all reenacting God's story.

And there's just so much to think in that and so many things that could be said, but I don't want to say all the things that could be said. So I'd love to hear from you. But does anyone have just a comment, a question, anything? Just going to open up this time right now. And you know it's great if you want to give a comment, if we can see your face. We love that. But if you want to just put it through the chat box, I have my helpers here that they will be looking at the questions that come in. So however it is, just love to hear from you.

It's been good, Jen. Thank you for sharing today. I really like how you, in many ways, united married and unmarried women. We have so much in common. We all need Jesus, really. And at the same time, also helped us married women understand single women better too. So I really appreciate it. Many rich quotes. Thank you.

Thank you, Lorraine.

We have so much in common. I love the way you said that. And that's actually what I was thinking. And as you were sharing, it kind of came to me. That's why I've always, yeah, I just have these people that are unmarried. I love them so much, and I learned so much from them. And maybe sometimes I even have a little bit of a hard time understanding why we wouldn't be able to connect. I mean, obviously, I guess maybe I'm not the polar opposite, right? Even though I'm a mom with nine children, because we just have so much in common because we're all reenacting God's story. So yeah, I love that thought, Lorraine.

I'm thinking about us being created male and female in the image of God and how together we create that picture. So do you have thoughts on single people in relationship with, well, so for single women in relationship with men, how we partner with them and what relationships with them look like in order to portray the image of God?

That's a great, great question.

Okay. Let me think about that, Abigail.

So the question is, how can we partner with men as unmarried women to build the kingdom of God?

Is that what you're saying? Yes. And so often with questions of singleness, we also talk about the importance of friendship. And so part of my question is also like cross-gender friendships.

That's a hard question.

I think that it is important for, okay, so same-gender friendships are extremely important. And I think that is often where a lot of our strength can come from. One of my friends quoted her mom, I think, saying that a woman can handle just about anything if she can talk to another woman about it.

So same-gender friendships are really a big deal. But it is also important to have input from men because it does make us, it does provide a different, it does provide a balance, a different perspective, things that we wouldn't necessarily think of.

So I don't know that I have a lot of specific answers for that one.

Is it Paul? Somebody gives advice to Titus or Timothy or somebody, he says, "Treat," doesn't he say something like, "Treat the younger women as sisters" or something like that?

Say no if I misquoted that. So I guess to think of them as brothers and to not, look, sometimes we're like, "Oh, I'm not married. I don't want anything to look remotely inappropriate. So I'm just going to avoid men altogether and never contribute if there's a man in the conversation." I don't think that's helpful or healthy either.

So I think understanding who I am in the Lord and that I have something to contribute and being willing and free to contribute when I am working. I don't know what you're talking about, like at work or just friendships in general. But

yeah, I'm not quite sure how to answer the question. I'm sorry. Does anybody else have something helpful to weigh in on here?

I don't feel like I have anything amazing to say here or particular experiences or anything, but a couple of things came to my mind in relation to relating well between genders, married, single. I think it's Matthew Milioni, a man from Boston that talked about even singles relating to each other. And he said, as for friendships and stuff like that, he said, even singles understanding how to relate to cross-gender. He said his encouragement was relating to it like as if you were a married person.

You were a married person, you would relate to that single. Say I'm a married woman, I would relate to that single boy in the same way as if I was, if you're married or single, it wouldn't make a difference. And I thought that was such a healthy perspective because it doesn't give singles the right to have special friendships outside of marriage.

If they're courting or something, it's different. But I don't know, I just felt like it's such a healthy, if you're married or single, you should be relating to men in the same way. Not your husband, of course, but like other men.

You can be friends, you can talk. And actually, I just thought of something. I will share my experience in Boston. We spent about a year in Boston. And I come from a conservative Mennonite. I was raised. That's how I was raised. And so for me, I wasn't comfortable. And I don't even really know why. If it was my personality more or it was kind of generally how it was that you didn't relate to men much.

I wouldn't have, I mean, unless it was someone I was particularly familiar with, a cousin or something, you didn't really relate much to men. And we went to Boston for the winter. And honestly, I was stretched greatly. And I guess somebody from there could hear this and realize this about me that they didn't even know. But anyway, I honestly feel like it changed my life and was one of the healthiest things that ever happened to me because there was a lot of people that weren't raised in Mennonite settings, men and women, and some that were. But I was amazed at how respectful and interactive even the single young men were.