Tag Archives: christian singleness

Your Money And Dating (Plus Bonus Material)

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The other day I was happened on a video win which Dave Ramsey was talking with Anthony ONeal about a recent dating experience he had.  First a quick background in case you are not familiar with Ramsey and his people.  The short version is that they help people get out of and stay out of debt.  Anthony works with younger folks and is a young single man.  One of the keys to getting and staying out of debt is having a budget . . . that you actually follow.  I’ve talked before about as a single person having a “dating” line item in your budget.  Suffice it to say that if you are single and want to date, then why not have a budget for that.

At any rate, here’s the story.  Anthony goes out with a young woman on a date.  They have a good time.  At the end of the date they both want there to be a second date.  The woman suggested that she would really like to go to a particular restaurant in town. Anthony says he will look into it.

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Lies Single Christians Believe

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The last couple of blogs I’ve been writing about the idea of not lying.  It’s funny even to type that.  But as we’ve been discussing, this is not always as simple as it seems. We’ve talked about not lying to ourselves, not lying to others, and not lying to other singles.

In the world of Christian singleness there are a ton of lies.  There are lies that the church has told singles, lies the enemy has told singles, lies that singles tell themselves, and lies that our current culture tells them.  I’ve written a lot about these over the years.  Rather than try to sum up that many posts in one new one I’m going to just list some and link to places where I’ve tried to be more honest and straightforward with the truth.  The list is not exhaustive and in fact if you think of more put it in the comments.  I’d love to see what I’m missing.  So here we go.  Lies singles have been told, thought and/or believed:

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Cohabitation Is Not God’s Plan

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One of the problems in our culture when it comes to singleness is that the word single is too broad.  It means far too many things.  As I’ve stated before here, this is especially a problem in Christian culture because there are varying scriptural instructions for different groups of unmarried people.  There are at least the following biblical examples of marital status: The married, the divorced, the widowed, those not yet married, those celibate by birth, those celibate because of the fall of man and those who are called and choose Celibacy for the Kingdom.  Needless to say, all of these are different.

But in our culture we have added a group that amazingly I’ve never directly addressed here at the blog.  That is those couples that live in cohabitation.

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Meekness Vs Weakness

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Recently I’ve been thinking some about virtue.  That is, what is virtuous and what isn’t.  For example, I’ve written about how being “nice” is not a virtue while being good is. All of this may seem like semantics or splitting hairs but it’s more than that.  How we view these things impacts how we live our lives.  It impacts how we view ourselves and our context, including if our context happens to be singleness.  I want to tackle a few more of these thoughts in the context of singleness.

Today I want to talk bout the idea of meekness.  Meekness is indeed a virtue.  So much so in fact that Jesus says in Matthew 5 that the meek shall inherit the earth.  But we are very confused in our culture, even in our Christian culture, about what meekness is.

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Suffering In Singleness

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One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the idea of suffering.  This has not been brought on because of personal suffering.  I am in a season right now where I don’t feel a lot personal suffering.  But I have had many seasons where I have.  This was especially true when I was single.

What has brought on these thoughts is that I have friends who have suffered and I’ve seen a lot of confusion in the singleness arena about the idea of suffering.  For example there is the idea that celibacy is too great a cross to bear.  That it is unfair that we are asking those who are not called to Celibacy for the Kingdom to suffer.  The idea that it is unfair to ask those who are unmarried and wish to be or those that are celibate due to the fall of man, to remain celibate is to ask them to suffer unfairly.

I want to offer a few thoughts here about suffering in general and then bring it back to singleness.

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The Image Of God Is Not Male Plus Female

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Many of you may remember the movie Jerry Maguire.  In it Jerry is a sports agent and his assistant Dorothy falls in love with him.  Jerry at first loves her but isn’t what one might call “in love” with her.**  But at the end, Jerry realizes that he and Dorothy belong together.  He goes to her and says, “You complete me.”  They live happily ever after.

Now from a theological standpoint, there’s all sorts of things wrong here.  As I’ve mentioned over and over here, what we often do in Christian culture is just take secular beliefs and dress them up into Christian ones.  For example we take the romantic idea of the one, dress it up and turn it into the “one God has for us.”  These examples go on and on.

But today I want to talk about the idea of two people completing each other.  We talk about this all the time. Many times we hear how a person couldn’t be who they are without their spouse.  We talk about how a person couldn’t do the ministry work they do without their spouse.  

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The Prosperity Spouse Gospel

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I see a lot of people these days critiquing the so called prosperity gospel.  This prosperity gospel takes several forms and extremes.  Sometimes it’s used to suggest that if I do certain things then God will give me worldly prosperity.  For example if I tithe then God will give me a lot of wealth.  Or if I give my life to Jesus, then my life will go the way I want it to.  The idea is that doing what God wants will alleviate my suffering in this world sort of runs counter to the idea of picking up my cross.**

This is of course not true.  Now it is true that God rewards faithfulness.  It’s important as we critique the prosperity gospel peddlers that we not lose that truth.  Otherwise we’d have to toss out a lot of scripture.  But God doesn’t promise rewards in the way that we often like to see them.  That’s the key distinction.

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The Singleness As A Gift Problem

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Today I want to revisit the idea of the “gift” of singleness.  I was reminded of how messed up our theology of singleness seems to be by this post at Relevant.

Now to be fair, the author says some good things so I want to point those out.  He rightly says that the Church is too focused on marriage as the only path.  He also rightly implies that the Church is terrible at dealing with single people.  And he even goes so far as to say that not everyone will or even should get married.  Amen!

However, the problem here is that he links the gift of singleness to all people that are not married.  This idea is rampant and it’s bad.  It’s terrible theology, and it leads to confusion. Now I’ve written about this a ton, but like I said, we need to keep revisiting this.

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Charlize Theron, Tim Tebow, and The Single Christian

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So recently Charlize Theron stated in an interview that she was shockingly single.  She said she was available and that someone just needed to grow a pair (Christian leaders would say “Man Up”) and ask her out.

As soon as I saw this story I started laughing.  I laughed for two reasons.  First, I knew that a bunch of people would ask her out through various means and second, that she was completely full of it.

And . . . that is exactly what happened.  A good looking man from Kansas City (shout out to my home town) sent in a video asking her out.  She signed a picture for him.  Uh yeah, not what he had in mind.  You can see both her original statement and the guy asking her out in this video here.  It’s great.

There is so much great material here it could probably be 5 posts but I’m going to break it down in one and look at what we can learn from it.

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The Best Men On The Internet

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The other day I saw a post on social media as a message to married men.  This message was in line with most Christian messaging to men that I’ve seen over and over. The basic message of most of these types of posts are:

  • You will know how well you are loving your wife by how she feels (does she feel loved, supported, empowered etc)
  • You are to be a servant leader not a manipulator or ruler.  In other words you’re not in charge.
  • Be willing to be wrong even if you’re not really wrong.  Her truth is the best truth.
  • Selective reading of Ephesians 5 focusing on how you should love your wife (which is  correct however that’s not all that Ephesians 5 says).
  • Basically – your wife is your grade card

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