Singleness: Sanctification or Selfishness? Part I
- Daniel Fahringer
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Singleness. Whether you see it as a gift or a burden, a joy or a pain, how it is spent matters.* How it is spent has long-lasting effects, good or bad, on your entire life. How you spend your singleness affects not just you, but many others, including your family and church.
The season of singleness can produce in our hearts two significant pursuits: sanctification or selfishness. Will it be submission to God and His Word, or submission to your own desires? Will you seek to serve God, or serve yourself and your plans? Will you submit to His Lordship or the lordship you think you possess in life, but is entirely false?
Both of those pursuits can be manifested in our singleness in a given week, a given day, and I would dare say even in a given hour. Whether in marriage or singleness, you can pursue sanctification by God's grace, or you can indulge in the desires of the flesh. Both relationship statuses can be a platform for good or ill; here, I'll focus on the particularities of singleness. Let me first define how both selfishness and sanctification are manifested through the singleness season.
Selfishness in Singleness
One of the blessings many people will mention when discussing singleness is the freedom it brings. The freedom to travel and explore, the freedom to invest in friendships, the freedom to establish a career, and the freedom to pursue our passions and hobbies. Although these can all be blessings, my question is, what if they are not? What if they actually become opportunities for the flesh, far more so than we realize?
What if the ability to travel has become an excuse to avoid commitment and service in the church? What if traveling has become a way to show off our lives to the world and become a source of pride? What if travel has meant neglecting the family God has given us to do life with? What if travel has led us to neglect honoring and caring for our parents as they get older?
What if we have failed to invest in the friendships that God has given us, due to the freedom we have to pursue various things? What if we have neglected to pour into and encourage the brothers and sisters in the Lord who attend our church? What if the desire to invest in friendships has been no investment at all, but merely superficial moments with people who attend our church?
What if our stated goal to invest in friendships has become little to no contact with the people who should be encouraging, correcting, and edifying us through their conduct and life? What if this goal to pour into friendships has been a cover for our desire to be married and a way to avoid any ounce of commitment to a local church?
What if we celebrate our freedom and the friendships we have deepened, all while coveting the status of being married? What if this freedom is a cover for gratifying sinful desires and questioning the plan and work of God?
What if singleness and the joy associated with it have been a veneer for coveting, complaining, and a general lack of contentment?
What if our pursuit to establish a career has become our trust, instead of God, Whom we are called to trust with everything we have? What if the fruit of our career is our hope more than the God of this universe, and His Son who died for our sins? What if the pursuit of a career is leading you to separate and cut yourself off from the family of God and the nuclear family that you were born into, and who still live in the same place you grew up?
What if your career pursuit has led you to disobey God's commands and separate yourself from the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints? (Jude 1:3)
What if our hobbies and pursuits of exploring our personal passions are not that worthwhile in light of eternity? What if they are just excuses for our fleshly desires to take over? What if singleness is the stage where people celebrate themselves and run from where God has called them and stationed them to be? What if your singleness is for such a time as this? (Esther 4:14)
Has our singleness become the platform to publicly celebrate our rebellion against God in what we say, do, act, and dress? Has singleness led to the questioning of the character of God, His work, and plan in our lives?
Singleness without being tethered to the Word of God and submission to Christ will make these questions a reality due to our depraved flesh. So we must search our season of singleness with thoroughness and thoughtfulness, pulling out all the roots of bitterness, covetousness, lust, doubt, rebellion, and worry.
Sanctification in Singleness
Before considering the particularities of what sanctification looks like in singleness, please let me note a couple of items. First, we must remember that God, by His grace, brings about sanctification in our lives. Apart from His work and grace, sanctification doesn't happen.
Secondly, sanctification is not a box we can check like our to-do list. Sanctification is often very slow in our lives, wrought with pain and difficulty, while we mortify the desires of our flesh. It takes a long time, and there are no shortcuts or as-seen-on-TV products for our sanctification. It requires His grace, His work, obedience to His Word, and often much time in accordance with His will.
What will be the result of our singleness? What will we have accomplished in our singleness? What will we remember about our singleness? What will be the produce and the quality that we harvest from our years of singleness? Will we look back on our singleness with thankfulness to God, as we reflect on the work God did in our hearts and through us, or remember the mere thoughtless living of our days? Will we be able to look back on it with joy and gratitude, or will we seek to remove it from our memories? These are questions I believe we must ask and answer honestly and thoughtfully.
While God has given us much free time in our singleness, it also comes with great responsibility. We can spend it on our flesh, or spend it slaying our fleshly desires. The amount of time we have in singleness is honestly dangerous, for there are no excuses we can give to explain our lack of time. We have ample time to devote ourselves to reading and studying Scripture. This is the perfect time to obey the Word and fully commit ourselves to a local church with the time we have available. Plenty of time to love and serve the elderly, learn from their wisdom, and hear their epic stories of times past. Time to invest in our family, serve and love them, and hear stories of God's faithfulness upon past generations. We have plenty of time to accomplish the things before our very eyes, including the things the Lord has called us and commanded us to.
However, as we live and maximize these single years, do not get lost in the doing and forget what you are becoming. It is a tragedy if, in these years, we fail to learn to mortify sins in our lives and miss growing in the grace and knowledge of our Savior. (2 Peter 3:18)
"but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and forever. Amen." - 2 Peter 3:18 (LSB)
We wasted the single years if we don't look more like our Savior and if our feet aren't on the familiar narrow path of obedience to Christ. Seeds of sanctification by God's grace should have taken root in our lives and started to blossom into the glorious fruit of the Spirit. If that hasn't occurred in our single years, it was a waste.
Stay tuned for the second part of the article, which will be released soon.
**For more on singleness, listen to our episode on Kiss The Son Podcast titled "Is Singleness Good?" with Pastor Michael Clary. The link is available below. 👇
Works Cited
Scripture quotations taken from the (LSB®) Legacy Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2021 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc. LSBible.org and 316publishing.com.
