My last blog was a challenge to the social norms of men in our culture, in how they view their day. However, it was mostly applicable for men who are already married.
However, the central principle in this blog will be the same. How do you view your day? Is it about pushing through the dreary, boring, stressful parts to arrive at the ‘oasis’ of personal gratification? Or are our days lived out in faithfully seeking to serve others as God leads?
I started at marriage because in many ways, that is the easy one. Most people would not balk at the idea that a Christian man must be prepared to serve his wife and family when he comes in the door at night. However, the single man is a different story. Try convincing a young single man, even a Christian young single man, that they ought to fill their single evenings and weekends with serving others. Again, I’d like to go to the word of God to start this conversation.
1 Cor 7:32-34a
“I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.”
I may not be going, at this point, where you think I am going. Most may know that most often this verse is used to help singles to be content in their singleness, while inadvertently sending them into a pit of depression.
No, rather I want us to notice what is missing from this verse. Paul puts men into two categories: those who are married and worried about worldly things, and those who are single about focused only on the Lord. There is no category for those who are single and, ‘anxious about worldly things’.
But how many of us single guys could honestly say, “Yep, that’s what I’m going to miss about being single: having all of my time committed to the Lord (serving others and contemplative time)”? That definitely has not been my experience hanging out with single guys. Single, Christian men are by and large about balancing out making enough money for themselves, and having enough free time for themselves. Some will work more, some will spend time on themselves more, but generally, that is the time split: money for me, and time for me (or doing school for me, so I can make money for me).
Underneath this selfish lifestyle is an ideology that few would seriously admit to believing, but few, if any, of us single males are exempt from: “I’m single now, so I should enjoy it while I can”. This is not Biblical. This is not God honouring, and what it does, is cultivate marital failure.
Those single men who enjoy non-stop evenings of hanging out with other singles, video games, movies, etc., confess by their actions that they somehow believe that their spouse will be the catalyst the breaks open the time-hardened dam of selfishness, and let loose a flood of self-denying affection and service. Please.
If we stop and think about it for a second, we know, that just like any other un-fleshly quality, it must be cultivated. This cannot be done without the work of the Spirit of God in our lives, but I would submit to you that if there was ever a generation of men who were exceptionally gifted at quenching the Spirit of God in regards to His prompting to live for others, and to spend time with God, it is our generation.
Please think about this illustration. Imagine that at whenever point you started to be interested in girls, God led you outside to a patch of tilled ground and said to you: “I want you to tend this garden until you get married. The healthier the garden is when you get married, the better your marriage will be”. As the soft-hearted meditate on this, they will recognize that there have been some painful weeds that have made their way into that garden over the course of our lives. Pornography. Financial folly. Cowardice. They are weeds in that garden and we know it, and we hate it, and we are doing what we can to get them out of their.
But I want you to understand that this attitude of, “I’m single now, so I should enjoy it while I can,” is not just, staying with the garden illustration, going inside and playing video games while the garden goes to the birds. It is actively planting weeds in your garden. It is intentionally making your garden worse than it would be even if you just left it alone.
Now, I don’t want to set up your future wife as the idol that causes you to make every good decision in your life. The glory of Christ ought to be the highest motivation (among others), and if it isn’t, that is another big weed that we don’t have time to deal with here. But what I am saying is that if you seriously want to get married, you need to start to cultivate a successful marriage today.
So what would it look like if single guys started acting like they were married, in preparation for marriage? Well, for starters, more evenings committed either to the service of others, or to contemplative time with Jesus. Money managed in such a way that once needs were met and savings set aside, it was not a free-for-all. Practically, this could mean a lot. If you work eight hours a day, and make a descent wage where you are able to put away savings and be generous to others, then I would say you should look to the church. Use your time and income to serve the bride of Christ until you have your own bride and those resources become more limited. If you have an eight hour job and it does not pay well enough to put anything into savings or allow you to be generous, or pay your debts, then this life style might look like working 10 to 12 hours a day to make sure your debts are paid off, and/or you are saving for marriage/being generous with your money. I cannot cover all the possibilities. I would start by asking a wise, godly, married man what it might look like to use your time and resources in a way that cultivates selfLESSness, and not selfishness. Ask him how many ‘singleness habits’ he had to break when he got married, and if you dare, ask him how he spent his free time when he was single (this question will likely be more devastating depending on how old the man who chose to ask is).
As a final word, I’m not saying that we can never go out to a movie or hang out with friends again. But our rest should be intentional. Isn’t that we want? Lives that are intentional instead of following fleeting desires? Intentional rest means finding those things that restore you in order to get you healthy to serve, rather than just trying to strike the balance between working enough to get enough money to have fun when your not working. This is also something that is extremely difficult without someone older and wiser guiding you.
Let us all humbly seek the Lord on how we can further abandon the lies and idols of this culture that are destroying our marriages and families, and let us cultivate a loving, healthy, God honouring marriage today. I’m praying for you.
