A woman emailed me recently in response to my “Top 10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Got Married“. One of the things listed there was about marriage being a Christian’s highest calling. She had issues with that. This Woman asked in her email if she ought to think of herself as a second-class citizen because she is single. Having been single for 37 years until a couple of years ago, I can sense the pain and confusion in her question. Thus, I want to share my honest response with as much grace as I can.
Was I a second-class Christian before I got married? Wholeheartedly I say, Absolutely not. A common misconception people have is that somehow being single makes one a second-class Christian or not able to have as fruitful of a relationship with God. Even the great Apostle Paul says that it is better to be single so as to not have divided priorities as when you are married. Genesis 1:26 says that we are image bearers of God. Therefore, every person has the right to equal dignity and intrinsic value; thus what they do for the Lord has equal value and honor — single or married. 1 Corinthians 7:17 tells us “Nevertheless, each person should live as a believer in whatever vocation (other translations use the word “situation”) the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has called them…”. 1 Corinthians 7:17, Corinthians 10:30-31, and Colossians 3:22-23 together offer evidence that God ordains each believer to their own unique calling as an individual and each person must do it with excellence for God’s glory.
If your current status is Single then Paul tells us it is better to remain that way so that you can devote more of your time and energy to serving God more than a married person would be able to. Paul also says that if you have lustful desires then it is better that you marry as to avoid fornication. The thing to consider is that it is very rare for a Christian to truly have the gift of Singleness, that is, not having sexual desire for the opposite gender and no desire to marry. The majority of Christians are ordained to marry at some point in time. Single people and married people however, both have the same call to love God, love others, and share The Gospel. For a single person, with no spiritual and practical obligations to maintain a household with and for people who depend on you, your callings are of a more wide range of possiblities. You can travel the world for mission work, you can manage a committee that meets frequently at church, you can meet up with co-workers to talk for hours over coffee in an attempt to witness to them, you can start a Gospel-centered non-profit (which is what I did for a long time when I was single). The possibilities are unimaginable. For a married couple — who are one flesh — marriage union is the highest calling, again because of what it represents… not our ministry, our careers, serving our community, or the buddies we disciple (although they’re very important, they are not what God commands us married folks to put at top priority). With all of that being said, what I am hoping to effectively communicate to you is this: your highest calling is wherever God has ordained for you to be currently whether you are single or married… it’s just that when you do get married, as one flesh, your highest calling then becomes being a wife/mother, husband/father. In other words, your highest calling is stewarding the hearts and lives of your family well. That gets prioritized over every aspect of your life including ministry — not that ministry, church life, witnessing and community service is not extremely important and should be woven into family life, but the marriage and household is even more important than the most important facets of a married person’s life (second to one’s walk with Jesus obviously). Here’s why…
The Bible highlights marriage as being one of the qualifications of a Pastor or Elder. Marriage is also, by God’s design, a prerequisite for being a parent (one of many fruits of a marriage union) because being a parent has the monumental responsibility of training up the next generation of Believers. Is there grace given to single-mothers, divorcees, etc? You bet. Can a believer who is a divorcee, widow, solo parent glorify God and raise up godly children? Of course. But is that God’s intended design? I’ll let Matthew 19 answer that. In the beginning verses within Matthew 19, the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus with a question about divorce. Jesus’ response to them, spoken with the authority of God Himself, was that Moses indeed was allowed to permit divorce because of the hardened hearts of the persons who pursue divorce “but it was not that way in the beginning”. It was not part of God’s design for His good and perfect purposes. In that same chapter, Jesus also mentioned that some eunichs did not become eunichs by their own choice. In this example, Jesus said “The one who can accept this should accept it”. The one who is able to walk out the truth that God designed marriage to be permanent, between a man and woman, should commit to walking in it with excellence. In a spiritual sense, we apply this to those who did not choose to become single (i.e. a single parent whose spouse abandoned the family). If you are currently in a place of singleness, obviously, you cannot be expected to uphold the calling of a married person perhaps until you get married for the first time or remarried.
The very crown of what makes marriage the highest calling for Christians: to illustrate marriage as being a living, breathing example of The Gospel and the appropriate response to The Gospel (see Ephesians 5:22-27) as well as a shadow of a representation of The Trinity (see this article for more on that). In Genesis, when God created Woman from Man’s rib and gave her to him as a Father gives His daughter to a man — entrusting and blessing him with His daughter — God instituted the first marriage. He designed it to be between male and female, and He designed it to be an unbreakable, permanent covenant on this earth; a shadow of the covenant He would have with His people. That covenant of which I am speaking is the marvelous eternal covenant we have with God because of Christ’s redemption of us on The Cross. As I said in the article about marriage being the highest calling from God, He made three major covenants. The first being the Abrahamic Covenant. Secondly, God grafted us Gentiles into the family of Abraham with the New Covenant. Thirdly, God created the sacred covenant of marriage. In short, covenants with God are a big deal!
Marriage is also where God does His mightiest and transformative sanctification work in the individuals’ hearts. Yes, meaningful and deep sanctification certainly happens in a single person’s life as it had in mine when I was single. But one must understand why sanctification is so much more profound in the married person’s heart and life. Think about it. God puts two broken, sinful albeit redeemed Christians together under one roof to do life with for the rest of their lives. Two people who have their own preferences, background, thought processes, etc. are to navigate the nuances, the highs and lows of life together united as one in mind, body, and spirit. If you have a romanticized view of marriage then this would excite you. If you have a more realistic, and frankly, biblical view of marriage the thought of living with and doing life with a fellow inheritor, a fellow sinner should be very unsettling. Oh, but you pursue Christ individually and together as the one flesh that you are… the humility, the wisdom, and the joy you will see at the other end of the tribulations of married life is glorious! The more each person is conformed to the likeness of Christ, with the foundation of good theology, the more unified the couple will function through the inevitable challenges of life. Even for mature Christians, that process of coming together in true Christ-like unity can be very painful and frustrating. In marriage, you have been given a person whose heart you are called to steward and will be held accountable to God for it, doubly-so for the husband (See Ephesians 5:25,28, 33 and Malachi 2:14a). All of these evidences and more found in scripture supports the high standards and regard of marriage that God upholds. What about the single mother with children? I bring you back to 1 Corinthians 7:17. God’s perfect, original design for men and women was to be married as an expression of His covenantal love and commitment to His people. Sin infiltrated and continues to taint what God created and intended as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Sin does not characterize regenerate Believers, but Christians do still sin and make decisions (or fall victim to consequences of sinful decisions) that are not aligned with God’s design. You see, it is not that being single makes one a second-class Christian. We are all in need of God’s daily grace, all on equal plane with presenting Christ’s righteousness to The Father so that our prayers are heard. Marriage does not make a Christian more valuable in God’s eyes. Marriage ‘is’ designed by God to be truly a sacred union that encompasses much depth of meaning and purposes of God to further His Kingdom through the nuclear family. The marital union creates new life — physically with children and spiritually by joining two people together as one flesh so that within the marriage there are the two individuals who have their own relationship with God and there is also the marital union which is a whole new entity, if you will, with its relationship with God that also requires diligent and intentional nurture. Even at many wedding ceremonies these days, the couple recite their own vows that they’ve written where the language sounds beautiful, but the individuals conform the marriage union to their own ideas of what marriage should be, rather than conforming themselves to God’s design and intentions for marriage. We have reduced marriage in our culture as a romantic movie that we want to see played out in our lives, not the God-honoring, pride-crushing, cross-bearing refiner’s fire that it was meant to be.
If after reading this you still think of “marriage is God’s highest calling” as an automatic placement of the single person into the category of “second-class” then I will state this last thing: when I was single and heard that marriage is God’s highest calling, I felt like marriage was this level-up of sorts in the Christian walk. At that point, I wanted to be married so desperately that it became an idol because I just wanted to be an “important” Christian. I wanted my life to mean something… but that was prideful. I had to practice contentment with my status in life, as 1 Corinthians 7:17 said. I had to take marriage off of the altar of my heart, as well as, the bitterness towards the concept of marriage as God’s highest calling that I was hanging onto. In other words, I had to ask God to crush my pride and ask God to grant me true repentance. After that moment, things changed in my heart. I no longer viewed marriage as a goal to obtain. I also stopped viewing it as unfair that marriage is biblically God’s highest calling yet I was not married. Marriage is the highest calling for a Christian, not because it was my idea or it was just something married people said to feel better than single Christians. It’s what the Bible says, and therefore, it is what God says and His ways are higher than what our fallible, sinful minds can comprehend.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:16-17)
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:15)
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