The 40 Day Challenge Part 2: Run To

When you’re single, almost anything can become a reminder of your aloneness. Valentine’s Day candy sales, sermon illustrations about marriage, engagement photos on Facebook and Instagram… all of these can be triggers for feelings of loneliness or bitterness, even if you know you don’t need a relationship to be fulfilled.

The reality for most people is that they still desire marriage and companionship—and it’s a God-ordained desire.

Longing is universal. As Genesis 2 illustrates, creation was incomplete until God created Eve to accompany Adam, a story which culminates in Genesis 2:24’s proclamation, “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two become one flesh.” Elizabeth de Smaele, in her talk Holy Longing, points out that even our sexuality is Imago Dei, made in the image of a God who is relational and calls us into relationship. Marriage was created by God for humankind as a reflection of that longing, so of course, singles long for marriage. In Eden, mankind was whole. With sin came separation from our Creator and each other.

A Slippery Slope

Unfortunately, unless we recognize God as the fulfiller of our desires, we become obsessed with trying to fill the emptiness with other things. A photography student once explained, “We are forced to dance to the whip of our internal emptiness, be it spiritual, physical, mental, or sexual, and sometimes it makes us do strange or irrational things.”

For many this longing is transformed into lust and obsession. It often has its origins in innocent thoughts: “What would it be like to date that guy?” “She’s cute! I wonder if she’s seeing anyone.” But if you continue to feed those thoughts, they can rapidly degrade into sinful lust.

When all you have are thoughts, it doesn’t take much to bump those thoughts from the pure to the sinful, for the normal desire for a relationship to become a fantasy for self fulfillment.

In other words? Once Satan has a foothold, he is going to do what he can to get you to continue taking steps toward sin.

As Christians, many of us know this intellectually; we’ve heard the injunctions against physical impurity all of our lives, but for those of us who are perpetually single, we feel like we’re being denied. Porn, then, becomes a stop-gap for a relationship, an attempt to find our places as sexual beings, to meet our longings. We equate sex with happiness.

A New Hope

So then, if porn isn’t the solution for singles, what is? There are two, and both are critical.

First, singles (and, indeed, everyone) need to refocus and find their hope not in other people, but in Christ. Partially, this means embracing those longings for oneness as a picture of the longing for Heaven. Tim Keller explains, “Through the Spirit we have a foretaste of the future, and the taste of our future love, and the taste of our future grace, and the taste of that future, now, radically frees us in this world from the things of this world.”

Lore Ferguson Wilbert explores the pain of longing as a benefit, saying,

“Those who have wrestled deep with their prolonged chastity have experienced something of earth’s groans in wait for her Creator. A friend recently confessed struggles of waiting sexually for her upcoming wedding day. I was able to tell her the hunger pangs of longing she feels for her fiancé are akin to the hunger pangs we feel when we’re fasting. Those pangs teach us we’re waiting for a better feast. For the one fasting, the feast isn’t the break-fast, and for the virgin, the feast isn’t the wedding night. The feast is the marriage supper of the Lamb and an eternity spent with him.”

For those looking for more day-to-day hope, God has listed a number of other promises in the Bible:

• Our faith will be tested, but this testing will produce endurance, which produces character, which produces hope (James 1:3).
• He who began a good work us will be faithful to complete it (Philippians 1:6).
• Nothing we do and nothing that is done to us can separate us from God’s amazing love (Romans 8:35-39).
• Everything, whether pleasant or painful, works together for the good of those who love God (Romans 8:28). That especially includes our love life (or lack thereof).
• God will not allow us to be tempted beyond our abilities, but He will always provide a way to escape it (1 Corinthians 10:13).

As followers of Christ, we are followers of a faithful God, one who will never leave us nor forsake us (Deuteronomy 31:8). We may not know what next week will look like, whether we’ll finally meet “the one” or whether we’ll stay single forever, but we do know this: God is faithful, and our future is secure. And while that doesn’t give us license to sin (Romans 6:1-14), it does mean we do not have to worry about our future (Matthew 6:25-34).

There’s one other key component to coping with longings: finding community. This isn’t a secret code word for finding a mate, but rather, finding lasting friendships. There are innumerable benefits, but a core one for singles is finding mutual encouragement among other singles. In Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye?, Carolyn McCulley explains,

“I’m training myself that whenever I feel alone in a crowd, I should look around for someone else who may be feeling the same way–so that I may be used by God to extend grace and kindness instead of being consumed by my own feelings.”

A single’s use of pornography—and the longings that lead to it—are often caused by an inward focus, a desire for personal fulfillment. By entering specifically into community, whether through a small group at church or a one-on-one strong friendship and accountability relationship (or ideally both), we are slowly drawn outward, away from our own sinful, selfish nature and into a fellowship that leads to growth and belonging.