1 Corinthians 7 | Pastor Drew

Today, we'll be looking into 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and talking about marriage and singleness and sexuality, and yet I think it is appropriate to acknowledge the month that we are in.

1 Corinthians 7 · chapter mention

We are in a month called Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

And so before I even dare to preach anything from this next text, I want to pause for a moment and acknowledge something about the world that we live in.

We acknowledge that we live in a world where bodies are not always honored, where desire is often distorted, and where people have been harmed.

For some in this room, this is not some abstract idea.

It is personal, very personal.

It is carried in your story, it is carried in your body.

It's carried in your memory.

And we do not ignore that.

God created you, us in his image and likeness, body and soul, with dignity and with worth.

God, you created us in your image.

And yet we confess, instead of honoring and serving, we have also assaulted and dominated.

We have followed the patterns of this world, misused what you created for good, and failed to love others as image bearers.

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

And we remember this good news that you were bought with a price.

I was bought with a price.

We were bought with a price, not with silver or gold, but through Jesus Christ, who died for our sins, was buried, and was raised.

God of mercy, would you meet us here with truth, with grace, and with healing?

Today is First Corinthians chapter seven.

We continue to build on a foundation that will endure the fire as we're working through the book of First Corinthians.

How do we live in the life that we have?

Church, for weeks we've been asking, what are we building with?

Paul has talked about the foundation, the fire, the field, the temple, holiness, conflict, and the body.

But now he is no longer just asking what we are building.

Here he presses deeper and he's asking us how we live as a people who belong to Jesus Christ.

And now the question gets personal.

What do I do with my desires?

What do I do with my relationships?

Should I stay?

Should I go?

Is marriage better?

Is singleness better?

Church, this isn't again some abstract idea.

This is about your body, your relationships, and your everyday life.

And underneath all of it, again, you were bought with a price.

We belong to Jesus Christ.

Holiness is not a sidebar, it's how we live.

And it has very good boundaries that invite us into wholeness, into goodness, into flourishing.

And yet, before we move into the text, we've got to understand something else here.

As Paul talked about in chapter two, this conversation about desires, sex, and marriage is not just personal and it's not just cultural, it's very spiritual.

He speaks about this present world, the cosmos, not as something that's neutral, but as an age shaped by rebellion against God.

Cosmos is not the physical world.

He's talking about these ideologies that are out here floating around in the world that we're just taking in.

Oh, you know, a man gotta do what a man gotta do.

Is that the man or is that God?

We gotta talk about that.

Right?

I got to get my needs met to get married.

The Bible says commit.

So you don't burn with this passion and lust.

Not hell, but you don't have this burning desire in you.

Commit to marriage.

I know it might be scary, but you'll never know what healing looks like until you learn how to commit.

Paul speaks about this present world, the cosmos.

It's not something that's just neutral, but it's these ideologies that we're taking in that rebel against God.

The struggle over your body is not just about self-control, it's about which world is shaping you.

The spirit of this age, again, I said your body belongs to you.

Your desire is to find you.

Sex is something casual.

Do all you want with whoever you want.

As a matter of fact, in the culture of manhood, you actually get reward points for it.

I can tell you, I'm telling on the men.

We get reward points.

It's like a badge of honor, it's like a trophy.

And then we wonder why we have a hard time in our relationships and marriages because we've never learned what it means to be faithful or to have self-control.

Or I always gotta have me some.

No, you need to learn how to fast and have some self-control.

That's what needs to happen.

You need to learn how to honor God with your body.

And part of the problem is many of us opened up that can of worms a long time ago.

And we didn't learn how to honor it.

And women struggle with the same thing, too.

Come on, sisters.

Don't play with me.

You know, apart from some of the violence and things that have happened.

Now, I let's just be honest here.

You know, I wasn't by myself in this.

Right?

And we got to be a place that redeems the narrative and talks about the goodness of sex and marriage and the challenges and the dangers of what happens when we allow our bodies to take over, not just with sex, but also with food and other things.

But again, food and sex are two different things, as Christy mentioned that last week.

If you didn't listen to the message, I would very much encourage you to listen to her message last week.

But the kingdom of God says something different.

Your body belongs to God, your desires must be formed.

Sex is covenantal.

This is why many of us are still having so much, so many problems because we made all of these covenants with all these other people that we were never committed to.

And we wonder why we're allowing our bodies to control us rather than the Spirit of God, who is supposed to have authority over our bodies, and yet we have to cooperate with the Spirit of God and say, Yes, I do.

Your life is not your own.

Your body is not just physical, it is the spiritual ground where the two worlds are competing for your allegiance, and who and what you do shows who you are allegiant to.

What you do in your body shows what God and what master you serve.

This is not something where I can say that I believe in Jesus, but in my body, my heart's desires shape me and form me into something else.

No, what you're doing in your body is what you serve.

And we got to be honest with ourselves here, church.

These are not two different things.

We're one whole person, and our desires are distorted.

But the spirit invites us into something more.

And this is not only true of our individual bodies and desires, it's also true of our families.

One theologian says that the family can be understood as a principality, meaning it is a God.

God-given social reality with a vocation to praise God and serve human life, but it is also fallen, it can become distorted, and instead of serving human beings, our family unit can be a principality to enslave human beings, to harm us and bondage, to thoughts and ideas, to hate, to bitterness, to distorted sexuality, to oppression, to oppress other people, to oppress even those who go against the family way.

Our families can be used as principalities of darkness if we're not careful.

There's a quote to name it so as a principality means to recognize in the family a social reality with a life of its own, a God-given structure with a vocation to praise God and serve human life, indeed, a creature accountable to judgment, to the sovereignty of the word of God.

It also means that we acknowledge the family as a subject to the fall, as suffering a confusion and distortion of vocation, as regularly enslaving instead of serving human beings, capturing them in the bondage of death.

Any of our challenges in our life come from our families.

This is why Jesus over and over and over again calls his followers to an allegiance to the new family of God, the new creation, and that we are brought together and unified through the baptismal waters of Jesus Christ, not our biological blood.

Family is good, church.

Marriage is good, covenant is good, but family is not God.

And where family is distorted by the spirit of this age, it can become a place of control, domination, secrecy, abuse, and bondage instead of love, sacrifice, service, truth, and life.

This is why Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 7's matter.

He is not just giving marriage advice, he is bringing family, marriage, desire, singleness, divorce, and calling, vocation under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

The gospel does not destroy family, it redeems family by placing it underneath the rule of Christ.

I have five movements today.

There's 40 verses in this passage, and I dare not try to read all 40.

But I am going to read a few as I preach.

1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 1 through 5.

1 Corinthians 7:1–5

Now, concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman.

But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband.

The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband.

That's mutuality, by the way.

It's not domination.

The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

And likewise, and at the same time, that part.

Also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Stop depriving one another except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer and come together again, so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

But I say this by way of concession, not of command.

Yet I wish that all men were even as myself I am.

However, each man has his own gift from God.

Each person has their own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that manner.

So whether it's marriage or singleness, it's both a gift.

Let's be clear about that.

I'm gonna get there in a little bit, but I want to open it up.

He begins the statement it's not good to touch a woman.

That's not Paul, that's them.

Some believed in the church as we're addressing these myths.

If we're spiritual, then we should avoid sex altogether.

It's gotta be bad.

Even married couples, they were withdrawing from each other.

Paul says, that's not holiness, man.

That's confusion, that's perversion.

God created bodies, desire, and sexuality.

Sex is not sinful.

Sin distorts what God created as good.

Sin has distorted sex.

Paul says that the husband belongs to the wife, and the wife belongs to the husband in a world of unequal power.

Paul introduces mutuality.

This has to be mutually agreed upon.

Now, some people are having some abstinence in their relationship, the other partner ain't agreed to it.

And at the same time, we have to work through some of the things that have happened in our lives, some of the confusion, some of the pain to our bodies or our partners' bodies.

And so while we're working through that, the other spouse who might be getting confused or upset or frustrated at times needs to learn how to operate some self-control.

Because again, sex is not God.

It's a gift, but it is not God.

The gospel doesn't just save our soul, it reorders power in our relationships.

Holiness is not the absence of desire, it is the right direction of it.

So here, let's go to the next part: holiness in our relationships.

1 Corinthians 7, 10 through 11, he continues on.

But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband.

But if she does leave, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband, and that the husband should not divorce his wife.

Paul says, Not I, but the Lord.

The church is writing Paul.

Let me be clear about this.

The Corinthian church is sending Paul letters because they're having some issues and they're asking him to weigh in on these things.

They've invited him in to discern this with them.

This is discernment.

Sometimes people are inserting themselves into our lives, and we never ask for their discernment.

Amen?

They have openly asked Paul, they sent him a letter.

And he's now following up with what he believes to be true.

And he times he'll say, This is of the Lord, other times he'll say, This is not the Lord, but this is me.

And Paul also talks about how he's merciful because he understands Jesus' call to judge for Christians.

We're called to judge.

You know, remove the speck, the log out of your eye.

Before you help someone remove the sawdust, what he's saying is when we judge, we need to judge with mercy.

We need to remember who we are.

So then before you ever speak on somebody else's life or situation, let me say this.

I haven't always done this.

Sometimes I went in and inserted myself in a situation and caused harm at times.

And sometimes people have inserted themselves in my life and caused me some harm, right?

But the problem was it wasn't in humility and mercy.

We got to remember mercy when we judge.

And when we're talking about judgment, we're not talking about eternal judgment.

That's God's work.

We're talking about external judgment where we're trying to make a decision on what is going on and to come up with the best solution possible for that scenario.

That is called discernment.

We listen, we weigh the options, we listen to people, we see the different angles, there's different situations happening.

This is what Paul's trying to address here.

He's discerning with the body and church.

Oftentimes we try to discern decisions outside the body that ain't got nothing to do with the Lord.

It's just that you wanted to do what you wanted to do.

You found a couple people to agree with you, you went with them, they made the decision, and then you want to say, God told me to do this.

No, that was you.

You went and found the people that you knew would tell you the things that you wanted to hear, and then you said, okay, they told me this, it must be God.

We also need to listen to people who might not necessarily agree with us, but love us and call us to something different.

You know, there's a political party, there's political parties that play this game.

And if you were in that poverty simulator or that poverty workshop yesterday, you would have heard Sylvia say that in times of crisis, what people end up doing is they're looking for stability, and so they'll gravitate towards what they deem to be stable even though they haven't discerned it, but at least they're weighing in on this and they're saying something it could be wrong, and then you just jump on it.

That's what happens in politics, too.

This is why we don't find tribalism in political parties.

So with that, it's important, he says, not I, but the Lord.

And then he quotes Jesus.

Mark, Mark's right here.

He said to them, Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.

And if she herself divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery.

Right?

In Roman culture, either spouse could initiate divorce.

Divorce was very common to the Corinth, by the way, and often easier than many people realize.

Marriage could become fragile when preference, status, or convenience change.

Again, you know, I'm out of here.

In Jewish debate, some interpreted Deuteronomy 24 broadly and allowed divorce for many reasons, while others took a stricter view.

Men usually held more legal power.

When you read 1 Corinthians, you gotta understand a lot of context.

There's two books in the Bible that have a lot of commentary on cultural background, whole lot.

Revelation, 1 Corinthians.

Because you gotta understand so much of the things.

Some of that stuff don't apply to us, but we got to work through it and tease it out.

And so in the Greco-Roman world, marriage was often tied to household stability, inheritance, status, and social arrangement.

The covenant could easily be treated like a contract.

And so the world treated covenant like a contract, but contracts can be broken when they stop working.

Jesus and Paul say marriage is covenant, it is not disposable.

But notice how Paul teaches here.

He says, Not I, but the Lord.

Then later he says, I, not the Lord.

That might sound a little bit confusing.

It's okay to be a little confused.

Is Paul contradicting himself?

Is one part less authoritative than the other?

No.

Paul is distinguishing between what Jesus directly taught and how he is now applying the wisdom of Christ to a new situation.

It's called discernment.

Church, we ought to be a church that discerns things together.

Not just make quick decisions or not just put a decision off on one person, but we ought to be making Decisions collectively and discerning together, which requires humility, by the way.

When Paul says, not I, but the Lord, he is saying Jesus already spoke clearly on this.

When Paul says I, not the Lord, he is saying Jesus did not address this exact situation directly.

So I am applying the wisdom of Christ to it.

This is not less authority, it's spirit-led discernment.

Faithfulness is not only knowing what Jesus said, it is learning how to live what Jesus taught in situations he did not directly address.

Holiness is not about just obeying commands, it requires discernment in real life.

And God gives commands to anchor us and to hold us to the foundation, and the Spirit gives us wisdom to guide us when life is complex.

1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 12 through 15, he says, But to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her.

1 Corinthians 7:12–15

And a woman who has an unbelieving husband and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away.

For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband, for otherwise your children are unclean.

But now they are holy.

Yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave.

The brother or sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God called us to peace.

For how do you know a wife whether you will save your husband, or how do you know a husband whether you save your wife?

Only as the Lord has assigned to each one, and as God has called each, in this manner, let him walk, and so I direct in all the churches.

Paul now is addressing something new.

See, early on, these folks were not Christians before they got married.

The gospel was new.

These folks were married and then gave their life to Jesus.

Now, for us, many of us, we got married as Christians, but we sometimes we just didn't rightly discern, right?

We just didn't rightly discern in some situations.

Keep it real, we didn't discern rightly.

Let's go keep it real, y'all.

This time to laugh.

Insert laugh.

It's okay to say it because there's grace.

But Paul is addressing mixed marriages.

What happens when one spouse follows Jesus and the other does not?

Paul says, if they stay, remain.

Now, Paul's not ever saying stay in abuse, violence, oppression, mistreatment.

Paul's never telling anybody to stay under those conditions.

Let me just say that.

Just get that out the way.

Never says that.

As a matter of fact, get out.

I'll help you do it.

God often works through your presence before he works through your words.

This is why being close to people and just being present sometimes without saying anything is the biggest witness in the world.

Because when we die, I'm not gonna miss the people's words.

I miss their presence.

Because I can't get that back until Jesus returns and makes all things new.

The greatest thing that we miss about the people that we love is their physical presence.

Mothers, fathers, grandparents, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, best friends.

I've had a lot of loss in my life.

I miss a lot of people's presence right here.

I wish that I could be with them right now.

Presence is important.

Your faithfulness in the home matters, your patient matters, but your witness matters.

If they leave, Paul says, You are not bound.

This is important.

Paul is not casual about covenant here, and he is not rigid in a way that ignores abandonment.

Some people abandon a marriage before they actually leave.

Keep it real.

And some of y'all might be carrying some shame, thinking that you that that you feel bad or you were told bad, and sometimes the church, uh not some a lot of times, church got this wrong.

You in an abusive relationship, and the church is talking about stay.

Get out.

Get out! Clap right now, insert clap.

Get out.

God has more for you.

Holiness is not rigid, it is faithful and it is discerning, church.

Holiness now in your current life.

Let's hear this rhythm.

First Corinthians chapter 7, verse 17, says this.

1 Corinthians 7:17

Only as the Lord has assigned to each one of you, as God has called each, in this manner, let him walk, and so I direct in all the churches.

Verse 20 Each man must remain in that condition in which he was called.

Were you called while a slave, do not worry about it.

But if you were able also to become free, rather do it.

For he who was called in the Lord while a slave is the Lord's freedman.

Likewise, he who has who was called while free is Christ's slave.

You were bought with a price.

Do not become slaves of humans.

Brethren, sisters, each one is to remain with God in that condition in which He was, she or she was called.

Do you hear this?

Remain, remain, remain, remain, remain.

Some thought, if I change my situation, I'll be more spiritual.

If I just change my life, I'm gonna live my life.

If I change my wife, I'm gonna change my life, right?

So some of you have thought that.

And I promise you, you change your wife, it might get worse for you.

And vice versa.

If I get married, I'll be whole.

No, you won't.

You were already whole before you got married.

Not another human being makes you whole.

You were created in the image likeness of God.

God created you, God loved you, God died for you in Jesus Christ.

God sanctified you, restored you, God gave you, God's Holy Spirit.

You are already a whole human being.

Two people don't make a whole, two people make two holes.

Because it creates this dependency on other people.

Like you gotta have me a good woman, uh you need to grow up.

You need to get some accountability in your life, you need to open your life up.

Let people into your life.

Stop.

Your wife is not your mama, she can't be your mama.

And I know, fellas, some of us got some complex situations and issues with our mamas and our daddies.

What happens is when we don't get what we need, we're trying to find it in other people.

And the person who gets it is the person that's closest to us.

So then I'm trying to find my mama and girls, and girls are trying to find their daddy and me, and it wasn't neither one of us sufficient.

And even if you're married, your spouse still can't hold all of you.

You need community.

When God says it's not good for a man or woman to be alone, he's not talking about just marriage, he's talking about community and relationships.

We need other relationships even outside of our spouse.

This is the purpose of the church, but some of you are still trying to make your spouse be baby Jesus, and they can't do it, and you're still mad about it.

I'm telling you, they can't do it.

They can't carry that cross.

God never asked them to.

We need some support groups, men.

We got to grow in our emotions.

We need to come together as men and start talking about emotions.

We need to cry a little bit together.

Talk, be open, be vulnerable.

Because the statistics show that we're dumping our crap on women at an astronomical rate.

We got to mature and grow up, fellas.

I'm just talking to the bin right now.

Because I know we can.

I know God has more for us.

I'm not coming down on you, calling you out.

I want to call you in.

I want to call us in to something more and something better.

But we got to be open, fellas.

Now, women got work too.

And we talked about it another day.

I'm talking to the men right now.

If I become single, I'll be holy.

If I change my situation, then I can finally live for God.

No, that's not what's gonna happen.

Transformation doesn't come from changing your situation, it comes from belonging to Christ in your situation right now.

Paul goes on to say the gospel is in every chapter of Corinthians.

You were bought at a price.

It's a reminder that Jesus has paid the price.

Your life is not your own, and that is good news.

You don't belong to status, you don't belong to culture, you don't belong to the expectations of other people.

You belong and I belong, and we belong together to Jesus.

Now let's talk about our holiness and devotion.

29 and 31 says this.

But this I say, brethren, the time has been shortened so that from now on, those who have wives should be as though they had none, and those who weep as though they did not weep, and those who rejoice as though they did not rejoice, and those who buy as though they did not possess.

And those who use the world as though they did not make full use of it, for the form of this world is passing away.

The time is short, Paul is saying.

Ever since Jesus left, they've been thinking that Jesus was coming right back.

The end of the age, right?

So we gotta look back here.

Jeremiah 16, even Jeremiah, Jeremiah 16.

The prophet in the Old Testament in Jeremiah 16, 2.

Was it up there?

I know it was up there.

I hit save and see.

There it is.

You shall not take a wife for yourself, nor have sons or daughters in this place.

Israel had disobeyed God and they had been taken over and they were going into Babylonian captivity.

It was a rough situation.

God told Jeremiah not to marry because crisis was coming.

Judgment was coming so intensely that normal life rhythms were about to be disrupted.

These are moments in history where the urgency of God's work reshapes how people live.

Paul's not saying marriage is bad.

He is saying the age is shifting, the present form of this world is passing away.

Don't build your life on a system that is already fading.

We are living between these two worlds, the old world that is fading and the new world that has begun in Jesus Christ.

We're living into a new creation, a new thing.

The time is short, not because life doesn't matter, but because eternity has already begun to break into it.

And again, Paul teaches us discernment.

Anyway, some of y'all, or some of us, no matter how bad it is, still gonna do what you're gonna do.

Right?

Some of the stuff that we do is a coping mechanism for our trauma.

Yeah?

You want to talk about communities with lots of kids?

There's a good thing to be fruitful and multiply, but some of it is it's pleasure.

Sex is pleasurable.

And when you don't have a lot of self-worth, you haven't had a lot of opportunities, you were vulnerable at an early age and exposed to the world and not having the right kind of care that you needed.

What happens is you find out about that pleasure too early and you can't handle it.

I tell you about my life.

I've already shared it with you.

And part of what we end up doing is we get in a cycle, a pattern of pleasure because we have experienced so much trauma in our life, and it's like, at least this feels good.

Drugs, alcohol, sex, you name it, part of what we're doing is just treating our trauma with temporary things that don't work.

We cheapen it, but we're doing it because we're just trying to survive and cope.

This is not to shame anybody.

I am one of you.

I am him.

I've been there and I know if I'm not careful where I can still go.

It's me, oh Lord.

It's me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

I wish more pastors and preachers would say it too.

We wouldn't read them in the headlines.

I wish more men would speak up and say this.

Maybe we find some healing in this.

This stuff reshapes how we live.

He teaches us later on in the chapter, I have no command from the Lord, but I give my judgment.

Paul's not guessing, he's shepherding.

He is showing what it looks like to think faithfully when there is not a simple one-size-fit-all answer to the problem or to the situation.

So, guess what?

Marriage is good and singleness is good.

But devotion to Christ in either situation is the goal.

Now let's get down to the singleness and devotion, my favorite part today.

I'm gonna start 32 through 35.

But I want you to be free from concern.

One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how they may please the Lord.

But the one, please maybe how but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how they may please their spouse, or how he may please his wife.

And their interests are divided.

The woman is un who is unmarried, and the virgin is concerned about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit.

But one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

This I say for your own benefit, not to put restraint upon you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord.

Let me say this too.

See, it didn't say anything about men being virgins.

Let me show you how ideologies just continue to just go on up to the next generation, next generation, kind of spread like the gospel or not?

So there was an emphasis on women in this culture.

Could you imagine a couple thousand years ago?

There was an emphasis on the woman remaining pure and holy as a virgin, but that same emphasis wasn't on men.

Do you think there's a problem with that?

I'll say it yes.

And do you see how that problem back then shows up today?

I mean, some of the stuff that I've heard and that I've said at times in my life, like, you know, that person's been with too many people and I've been with all of these people.

And who am I to say this?

This is stinking thinking, y'all.

This is this has caused a lot of harm and a lot of pain.

Well, we have this expectation for women, but men don't have the same expectation.

We're humans.

And it's good for all of us to be devoted to God in our bodies and to abstain from sexual immorality.

It's not a male or female situation, it's a human situation because it takes us to a place that we can't control and ends up controlling us.

We gotta recover this, y'all.

In our culture, singleness often is seen as something that's incomplete or temporary or less than.

We have idolized marriages and families.

Marriage and family is an idol in our society and world.

And marriage and family is good.

Singleness is also good.

In the church, we have idolized marriage at times.

Singleness is just as important.

But for Paul, singleness is not something second class.

It's a gift, it's a calling, it is a strength.

Singleness is not a deficiency, it is a demonstration of spirit-formed strength.

Those who live faithfully in their singleness are not ignoring desire.

They are not denying desire, they are offering their desires to Jesus.

Faithful singleness is one of the clearest acts of resistance against the spirit of the age.

In a world that says fulfill every desire, express every impulse, act on whatever you feel you do, singleness says that Christ is enough.

But marriage is also a place of formation.

There's a couple in our church, uh, Ryan and Michelle Kellermeyer.

Uh, Michelle, I remember when she first came here and she told me she I have her permission, by the way.

For those of you who want to know if I got her permission, I got her permission, baby.

You can double check with her after service if you want.

But I remember Michelle saying, I think her early 30s, and she said that she lived her life as a single woman.

Went to college, traveled the world, backpacked Europe, South America.

I mean, she she she she wasn't tied down, so she wasn't trying to please no man, she wasn't trying to find her wholeness in a man, she was living her best life.

I ain't she wasn't going, she wasn't going back and forth with nobody.

Right?

And I was like, man, I really admire this.

Because I've seen so many times where we're looking for identity in another person, and so we create this idol.

And so this brother named Ryan, who also is living a single life, too, he's living a single life in Philly, living his best life, right?

He wasn't going back and forth with nobody.

He puts his Mac down, which means that he starts to try to court her.

He puts his Mac in the streets.

He put his Mac down, that's what we used to say.

He put his Mac down, and Michelle really was like, I'm really kind of cool.

I'm living my best life.

You know, doing a little dance, right?

Huh?

She was doing a little dance, I'm living my best life.

So, so uh Brother Ryan comes along, and now we're a few years later, they're married, and they got a few kids, and here's a picture.

Now they're married with children, right?

But again, that's not any better than the singleness that they were experiencing.

And for those of y'all who are who are younger, a little younger than me, y'all probably don't remember this.

Do your research.

Some of these middle-aged folks would need to be represented in here too.

And so, all of that to say, both singleness and marriage require self-control just in different directions.

Marriage requires self-control and covenant, practice, sacrifice, patience, forgiveness, and mutual service.

Singleness requires self-control and availability, desire, loneliness, and devotion.

So Paul's concern is not whether you are married or single, his concern is whether you are devoted to the Lord.

The goal is not marriage, the goal is not singleness, the goal is devotion to Jesus in whatever situation you find yourself in.

So, church, we are living in between two worlds early on.

I don't know if you've seen Cupid.

This is from Roman culture.

That's still Valentine's Day, and that idea still shows up in our idolatry.

We're not much different than the Corinthians.

We got some differences, but we ain't much different from them.

Right?

This is the world.

This is the church.

Death and resurrection.

We live in between that world and resurrection.

The old world is fading, the new world has begun in Christ, and because of Christ, your body matters, your relationships matter, your desires they matter, your present circumstances matter, your calling matters, but none of them are ultimate.

Jesus Christ is Lord.

Jesus Christ is ultimate.

Jesus Christ is the good news to all humans, single or married.

So whether you're single, married, struggling, content, confused, or hopeful, God is not asking you to become anyone else before you belong to Him.

He is calling you to belong fully to Him right where you are.

I did a King Cineta yesterday.

15-year-old girl.

I met with her a few days ago.

Talked to her about her life and her future.

And she says, I want to travel 50 states by 50.

She says, I'm not really worried about family or marriage.

It'll happen one day, but I'm not looking for it right now.

I said, Wow.

She says, I want to, I want to enjoy life and experience life.

I think there's something to be learned from her.

Your body belongs to Christ, your relationship belongs to Christ, your life belongs to Christ.

And holiness is what it looks like to live like it, church.

Can the church say amen?