Singleness: How Do I Stop Desiring to Be Married?

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Warning, the following message may be offensive to some audiences. These audiences may include, but are not limited to, professing Christians who never read their

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Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

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God is hanging over our heads. They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed, and they will perish.

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Welcome to Bible Bashed, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

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Listen and enjoy this latest episode as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions. Here's Pastor Tim.

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On this episode of Bible Bashed, we will be answering the question, How do I stop desiring to be married? Now, as I've communicated with people who are unwillingly single over the years, and even think back to my own experience of being unwillingly single, one of the things that is very common to that experience is that there are many individuals who just get tired of being unwillingly single.

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It gets tiring asking God for the blessing of marriage over and over and over again, only to experience the heavens as silent.

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It can be that plenty of people in that kind of situation are essentially desperate for God just to take away this desire so that they stop having to experience the sorrow that comes from having an unmet desire.

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They may, in that kind of moment, pray something along the lines of, Lord, please either give me a spouse or take away this desire to have a spouse.

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Now, it's often very dangerous to make demands of God or ultimatums of God.

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God is the kind of individual who does whatever he pleases in the heavens, and no one can say to him, you know, what have you done, or why has your hand accomplished this particular purpose?

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And so we need to be very cautious in how we speak to God, especially in these moments where we are praying to him and asking him to do certain things that he seems to be unwilling to do in the moment.

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Now, at the same time, what are we to make of this kind of question? How do

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I stop desiring to be married? Now, one of the things to realize is that the Bible tells us to put to death evil desires or put to death what's earthly in you, which includes evil desires.

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And the desire to be married is not an evil desire. So we should seek to mortify bad desires, but then we should seek to vivify good desires.

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So there are desires that we should put to death, and the desire to be married is simply not one of those desires that we should put to death.

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The Bible says it's not good for man to be alone, so God will make a helper fit for him. And God blessed mankind and said,

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Be fruitful and multiply, build the earth and subdue it. There is a type of person like Jacob who is going to wrestle with God for a blessing.

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He's going to take hold of the heel of God and not let go until God blesses him with his desire.

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And then there's the kind of person who's going to roll up in a ball and just essentially give up and ask God to take away the desire.

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We ought to be the kind of people who are more like Jacob or Israel, who are wrestling with God for blessings, instead of the kind of individual who just in a simplistic way or in a quick way just surrenders blessings and basically draws dramatic conclusions from the current providence that God has introduced into our own life.

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Now, there are many people who are unwillingly single who basically just jump to all sorts of dramatic conclusions along these lines and essentially saying, concluding that God obviously wants me to be single, and so therefore, why won't

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God just take this desire away from me? But then these are the kind of things that are a reflection of pride and arrogance.

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As fallen human beings, we don't know the future. We have creaturely limitations which are imposed upon us.

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We don't know what a day will bring. We don't know ultimately what God's plan is for us in any given moment, whether or not that's going to be singleness forever or marriage is going to involve that in any way.

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Typically speaking, often individuals who are single for many, many years and unwillingly so, all it takes is just for God just to introduce them to an individual, and marriage can happen in a pretty quick and surprising way.

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What you don't want to do is you don't want to have to eat a bunch of pro and ask a lot of forgiveness afterwards because you, in some dogmatic way, declared the secret things of the

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Lord, His plans for you for the rest of your life, and distrusted His character. The truth is that we can trust

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God. He's good, and He has good plans for us, and it might be that He has introduced periods of singleness into our life for longer than we want, but we can say nothing about His ultimate plans for us.

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He may or may not wish for us to be married, and any attempt to decisively predict the future is ultimately engaging in the sin of divination or being a false prophet as far as that's concerned.

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We can't look to God's actions in the past as decisive proof about what His actions in the future will be.

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We don't know what a day will bring, and so we don't know what He's going to do. But then in terms of this question, there's no need to stop trying to desire to be married.

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In fact, the faithful Christian is going to wrestle with God, and they're going to hold on to these good desires, and they're going to keep on presenting their petitions to God, knowing that God's a good

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God and a God who knows what we need of even before we ask. Now, many people want to surrender these kinds of desires because it can be painful to pray for the same thing over and over and over again and not experience an answer to it.

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But if we trust the Lord, we know that His plans are good for us. We know that persistence in prayer is one of the means that God uses to accomplish

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His purposes. And it might be that we are the type of individuals who typically give up too quick as it relates to these blessings that God has for us.

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And it might be that God makes an individual experience long years of singleness with persistent prayer in order that His plan to actually answer that in the future will be met with thanksgiving and rejoicing and appreciation of the kind of gift that He has given to them, which would not be present if He gave that same gift to them the first time that they asked.

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It is the case that many people who experience long years of singleness do appreciate marriage much more than those to whom it comes easy.

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So that can be the case. And it could be that God has plenty of plans in withholding this blessing for a period of time.

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Now, again, we don't know the ultimate plans of God. There are no promises to the individual Christian that if you ask,

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He will give us everything that we want whenever we want it on our timetable or if at all.

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But God is blessed in us bringing good desires to serve Him to His face.

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And we would do well to remember plenty of examples in church history of individuals who prayed over and over and over again for certain good things and did not withdraw those requests but persisted in those requests, even at times when they never received those good desires.

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So you think about plenty of situations in church history where individuals were praying for the salvation of a loved one their whole life.

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And God was honored in that, even though God never brought about the salvation of the loved one. There are plenty of areas in our life where we should persist in prayer.

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We should be praying for our family that they be saved repeatedly again and again and again. We should beg

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Him to act. And we should do so in a persistent way without doing so in an all -consuming way where we refuse to take care of the responsibilities that God has given us, but in a regular and a persistent way we should continue to bring our requests before the

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Lord. And there are plenty of the patriarchs who died in faith not receiving the promises. And there might be many times when

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God withholds blessings from us, but we're purified in the process of bringing our requests before the

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Lord and learning to develop a kind of character that trusts the Lord no matter what He does. So for many people,

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God is going to use their persistence to ultimately give them a spouse. For some people,

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God might use their persistence in order to refine their character, help them to trust in Him, help them to learn to live to His glory and not just to their own personal happiness.

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God has plenty of plans in our persistent prayer. But as individuals, we should never try to mortify a good desire, but hold on to those good desires and then trust in the

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Lord to answer them in His own way, in His own timing, as He sees fit. This has been another episode of Bible Bashed.

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Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.