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Here's another tension that often makes our lives complicated in the church today when we're thinking about Christian sexuality, when we're thinking about marriage, and when we're thinking about singleness, it's that we find ourselves caught in this tension between what I call like the garden and the city.
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It's the gap between the Garden of Eden and Genesis 1 and the New Jerusalem at the end of Revelation.
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And in my experience as a pastor and as a Bible scholar, what I've found is that a large percentage of Christian teaching, preaching, and rhetoric about human sexuality tends to focus on or prioritize the Garden of Eden.
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A lot of times the conversation goes something like this.
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We ask ourselves, like, what's the natural form of human sexuality?
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And when we look around at the culture that we find ourselves in, whether it's America in the modern West or Australia, where I lived for a few years, or Southeast Asia, Christians tend to ask themselves whether the sexual and institutions that they see in the world around them are like or are unlike the sort of sexual life that we assume is mandated in the Garden of Eden.
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So in our case today, on a campus like the University of Wisconsin, there's a lot of Christians who are trying to give responses to gender theory and to folks like Judas Butler, say, who would present gender as a spectrum?
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A lot of Christians run right to Genesis 1 and say, well, there's evidence that a better way to think of human sexual identity is binary, male and female.
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Or since the 1960s and the decline of traditional marriage, as it's sometimes called, we run back to Genesis 1 and 2, and Christians will point to the union of Adam and Eve, the coming together of two people into one new unit.
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We see that as a good resource for explaining the importance of, again, quote, traditional marriage is a lifelong union of man and of woman.
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Now, in what follows here, I am not interested in disputing the authority or the value of Genesis.
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I think that is an incredibly helpful source for thinking like a Christian about human nature and about human sexuality.
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But my goal is to prioritize the new Jerusalem because that's the sort of logic that I think we find in texts like 1 Corinthians 7 and Matthew 22, where we run not to creation, but to new creation and use new creation as the primary source for our logic of how we think about and go about practicing our sexual lives.
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Paul, in particular, he indicates that sexual ethics is about living the resurrected life now.
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So join me in thinking backwards for a few minutes, because in the same way that singleness is better than marriage, not because marriage is bad, it's good, but singleness is better.
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The New Jerusalem is better than Eden.
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The technical term I'm gonna use to describe this is called, quote, realized eschatology.
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That's just the fancy word that Bible scholars and theologians use.
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I'm gonna define it more in a few minutes.
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But what I want us to see is how when Paul goes about explaining Christian singleness, he doesn't start from the Garden of Eden.
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He starts from the new Jerusalem, the life of the resurrection, thinks backwards from there to talk about the singleness.
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Christian singleness is a manifestation of the resurrection life here, now, and in our midst.
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And once we grasp that, then we're going to be in a position to appreciate, to really appreciate the witness of Christian singles in our midst in our churches.
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All right.
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So first off, realized eschatology.
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If Paul is reasoning backwards from the resurrection to the present, this is kind of the structure of his argument.
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Like at the most basic level, I can't quite make it any simpler than this, though I've tried.
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So first off, you have to say with Paul that the Holy Spirit reveals the nature of the resurrected life by what we call gifts of the Holy Spirit.
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One gift of the Holy Spirit is singleness.
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Therefore, singleness is the best and the truest revelation of the resurrected life, so far as human sexuality is concerned, at least before the resurrection actually happens.
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So think back to 1 Corinthians 7, that one crucial word in 1 Corinthians 7-7, gift, charisma.
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Each one has their own gift.
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Paul's clear, his gift is the gift of singleness.
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This is the big picture, the realized eschatology that makes sense of what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 7.7.
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Start with me here, like not in Corinth.
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Go back with me to the book of Acts, to the day of Pentecost.
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The disciples waiting in the upper room, sound of a rushing wind comes, tongues of fire descend.
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Everybody starts praying and prophesying in tongues.
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It's a massive cacophony.
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Everybody out in the streets of Jerusalem is super confused because they hear these people speaking in languages that they shouldn't know, but that they know because they're here visiting Jerusalem from various parts of the Roman Empire.
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And then Peter eventually has to get up, shout them all down, and explain what's going on.
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And he explains what's going on by quoting the prophet Joel.
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In Joel chapter 2, Joel says, and I'm quoting, in the last days, that's a key phrase, last days, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.
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Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.
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Even on the male and female slaves, in those days I will pour out my spirit.
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These are the last days.
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The end is breaking into the present, and you can see it right there in the witness of these Christians running around prophesying with their hair on fire.
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That's the kind of logic that we find repeating itself again and again and again throughout the New Testament.
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That this vision of the end of time, the resurrected life, the new Jerusalem, whatever is going to be there in the future, breaking into the like our reality here and now.
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Like it's a taste of the future now.
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It's not the whole thing yet, but it's the real thing.
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Like Hebrews 6, 5.
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The author of Hebrews calls the spirit at work in the midst of the community, quote, the powers of the age to come.
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So and he says that the community is tasting them.
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That's his metaphor, the palate.
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Like you're tasting of the powers of the age to come.
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So it's here.
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You're experiencing it now, viscerally.
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But it's not the powers of this age, it's the powers of that age, but it's also here now.
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Like, can you feel the tension in this?
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All right, if that's Acts, if that's Hebrews, what about Paul?
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A couple of places in Paul where you see this lot.
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The first one in Romans 8, Romans 8, 23, Paul, when he's talking about the Holy Spirit, he calls the he calls the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the Christian communities the first fruits of the resurrection.
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So I don't know if any of you are gardeners or if you go to like you pick farms, but the first fruits of the harvest.
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When you go to an orchard, like in the state where I grew up, in the state of Michigan, and you pick an apple for the first time, or you pick a blueberry for the first time in the season, you are tasting in part the whole harvest that's about to come.
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Now, when you look out at the rest of the field, let's say it's a blueberry field, what you see is miles and miles and acres and acres of still green berries, but you can find a few blue ones.
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Paul's saying that's what the Holy Spirit is like here and now in the community.
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It's first fruit.
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More is coming.
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It's not here in fullness yet, but some of it is, and it's real.
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Okay, skip away from Romans to 2 Corinthians.
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If you look at 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 5, this is another one of Paul's favorite words to describe this reality.
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He calls the Holy Spirit to quote down payment.
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The Greek word is Arabon on the resurrected life.
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You find the same word in Ephesians chapter 1, where what you know, what's a down payment?
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If any of you have ever bought a house or a car or something good size, you know that one of the ways you guarantee that the transaction is going to happen is that the person doing the buying makes a down payment on what the full purchase price is going to be.
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Paul says, in this case, it's like, it's more like God is the one doing the buying.
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God has made you a promise of a resurrected life where you're going to share with Jesus in resurrection, new life, eternal life, new creation forever.
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And here's how you know he's going to keep that promise.
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The Holy Spirit's present with you now.
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Like the same.
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The spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is now giving life to your mortal body.
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That's a down payment.
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It's not the whole thing.
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You're not resurrected.
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And like, unless Christ returns, all of us are going to die.
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They will lower us into our graves and we will awake the resurrection.
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But the way we know that God's promise is faithful and true is that Paul says, you experience, you have the down payment here with you now, the Arabon that is the Holy Spirit.
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Now, when Paul starts to talk about the works of the Holy Spirit later in the book of 1 Corinthians, this is seven chapters after that point where he says each one of us has our own gift, in 1 Corinthians 14, the word he uses again and again and again and again and again and again to describe what the Spirit does in its gifts is charisma.
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He uses the same word to describe prophecy or tongues or healing or service that he uses to describe singleness.
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It's like what Pentecost and tongues were for Peter, singleness is for all.
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It's a manifestation of the resurrection life at the end of time, what will be when we receive the perfect bodies that breaks into the present now.
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And it feels a little bit out of joint because it is out of joint.
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It's the future, but it's now.
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It's already, but it's not yet.
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That's what we mean when we say quote realized eschatology.
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Eschatology is the fancy word that means last thing.
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Realized means it's already happening.
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It's still now, but you can realize in your experience of the spirit what will be then.
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It's like two times at once, two ages of creation all happening at the same time.
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And the mediator of that future is the experience of the Holy Spirit.
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Everybody tracking with that?
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If not, ask more questions because I want to clarify.
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That's really, really important.
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This is why singleness is amazing.
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This is why Augustine fell over and sobbed when he saw it.
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Because it was not natural, it was not even possible.
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But there it was, anyway.
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The only way he could understand it was that the grace of God, but by the power of the Spirit, was doing something in his midst that he couldn't understand or explain, but that he wanted.
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He wanted it.
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So just take a minute, think back to the conversations that you had during that break.
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Let yourselves dream, imagine the end, think about life in the resurrection.
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Think about like this is where I start.
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I think about the last funeral that I attended.
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And I think about the tragedy and sadness of it.
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Like for me, it was a cousin who died unexpectedly in his 20s.
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And, you know, to walk around that room and to see you know, not just to carry my own sadness and grief, but to see the brokenness on his parents' face and his sibling's face and his friends' faces.
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You have to feel the wrong of death, like that deep in your bones.
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And then you have to think of deathness.
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You have to think of the Lord Jesus coming out of the tomb on Easter Sunday, like who is himself the first fruits of the resurrection from the dead.
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Like his resurrection is the first, and we will all join him in it.
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Having died nevermore to die.
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Do you want that?
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Can you feel the hairs stand up on your arm when you contemplate deathlessness?
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Think about war.
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Um I'm I'm an old millennial guy now, so I'm still I'm old enough that a good number of my friends served it in uniform in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
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And I don't know if you've ever had the great and heavy honor of sitting with a combat veteran who's processing their PTSD.
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And when they realized that they were incredibly high functioning in their prime, the things that the experience of war did to them, and even worse for them, the things that they did to other people.
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I think of one of my friends, he would do anything, anything, not to see children die as collateral damage, but he saw it again, again.
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Now think about what the prophet Isaiah says when he talks about what life will be right like in the kingdom of heaven in the resurrection.
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Isaiah 2, 4, never again will they learn more.
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And I say, yes, even so come Lord Jesus.
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Like, do you long for that peace?
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Do you ate for that or sickness?
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Lots of us in this room today are sick.
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Like I live with chronic illness.
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I live with long-term injuries because like genetics plus athletics for me equals pain.
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Like my shoulders hurt.
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That's just how it is.
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Like tonight, one of my children is homesick just with the colds that kids get, but I mean, still stuck in bed, not doing anything but watching too much TV.
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I don't want to make light of it though, because lots of us know what it's like to watch helpless as the people that we love like gasp for air, struggle to breathe, while they fight through painful rehab after a horrific injury, or we watch people we thought we knew become unrecognizable as they lose their hair to chemo and to radiation.
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Like the horror of sickness and illness.
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And to that, Christ in the resurrection will say, No more.
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Isaiah 33, 24.
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No inhabitant of that kingdom will say, I am sick.
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There's a beautiful, beautiful story, a few pages in the confessions after Augustine's experience in the pear tree.
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Uh, Augustine, he develops a toothache that is, and I'm quoting here, so severe that I could not speak to him.
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And the thought entered my heart that I should urge all my own people to pray for me, to you, the God of every kind of healing.
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The moment we knelt down and begged this favor from you, the pain vanished.
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What was that pain?
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Where did it go?
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I must admit that I was terrified, my Lord and my God, for I had never in all my life experienced anything like that.
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So now, can you feel the wonder of the resurrection?
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With that in your mind and in your heart, with that sense of amazement, the single Christian life is as amazing as the Lord healing Augustine's toothache.
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It is every bit as much a manifestation in time of the life, of the truth, the power, the reality that will be in the kingdom of heaven.
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It's only by the gifts of the Spirit that God leads the church into recognition and understanding of what the resurrected life is going to be like.
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Like the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is now giving life to our mortal bodies.
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Like the toothache is a foretaste of divine health as God feels it.
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And for the single Christian, celibacy, sexual renunciation, when it's a gift of God, is a foretaste of undivided union with Christ, of a life that recognizes actually the only need that another human being has is for the Lord.
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And that to have the Lord is actually to have enough, like not just as rhetoric, not just as a happy idea, not just like Jesus plus me equals a majority, but like to actually have a life of union with God that makes everything else truly, properly unnecessary.
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That is the witness of the single life.
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That's why Augustine was amazed.
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That's why I am amazed, and why I hope more of you will leave amazed tonight than walked in.
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So let's say, for the sake of argument, hypothetically, that at this point in the night I've actually convinced some of them.
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Let's say that you now think, like Augustine thought, that Christians who renounce sexual activity, the ones who dedicate themselves more wholly to Christ, are actually pretty amazing.
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That you see God in Christ and by the power of the Spirit at work there in a way that maybe you didn't realize was God at work, but wow.
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You see Christ upholding them and strengthening them with a power that you know you don't actually possess, and you're pretty sure they don't either.
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So, what I want to do is use my remaining time to consider some of the practical implications of this, this like teaching about Christian singleness, because at the end of the day, I love theology, I love church history, but Christian theology at its best is always a recommendation for how to live.
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It's a statement about what is true so that we know how to behave in the world.
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So if Paul's right, 1 Corinthians 7, and if Augustine is right in his confessions, what should our day-to-day Christian lives look like and what should the churches around us look like?
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Now, the first thing I've got to say is that this is the point where this really again becomes deeply personal for me, because in the end, this is always a pastoral topic.
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I may not be a single Christian, but I see the faces of the single Christians that I love when I when I whenever I have this conversation in any form.
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So this is what I want to say to those people who I love and to any single Christians who are here tonight, and to any single Christians that any of you might happen to talk with after this.
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In the first place, please hear this extremely, extremely clearly.
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If you are a single Christian, there is nothing wrong with you.
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If you are a single Christian, you are not half a Christian because you are not married.
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You are not an incomplete disciple of Jesus because you have no spouse.
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You are reasoning about your own nature, not from the perspective of Eden, where you are an Adam in search of an Eve or an Eve in search of an Adam, but from the perspective of the new Jerusalem, the heavenly city, the resurrected life where Christ is all in all, and marriage has passed away.
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Think backwards.
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If you, my friend, were actually a half-finished Christian, then that would mean that Paul was also a half-finished Christian, because he is super clear, his gift is singleness.
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If we're going to run through the history of the church, like if you were a half-finished Christian or an incomplete Christian, then so's Antony the Great, then so's Augustine, then so's the great theologian and abbess Macrina, then so even closer to our own days would someone like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or if you're a Protestant, so would Dietrich Von Hoefer be a half-finished Christian.
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Or how about the great Anglican preacher and author John Stott, who lived his whole life to the age of 90, unmarried, but saw singleness, celibacy as his vocation.
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You are not incomplete.
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Now, if that's the case, if you're not incomplete, then I also want to charge you, lean into discovering the joy that comes with the gift of singleness.
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Learn from Augustine's example.
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Learn from or lean on Christ for your holiness.
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If you try to white knuckle your own sexual purity and holiness from here until the time when the Lord returns or that takes you home, you will find very quickly the limitations of your own capacity.
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We are not talking about like a choice that depends solely on your willpower.
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We're talking about trusting in God to do what we could not do.
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Because we are actually looking for Christ to mediate to us by the power of the Holy Spirit the life of the resurrection.
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That is the only way in which this works.
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But there's great joy in the resurrection.
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In the same way that there's joy thinking about healing, and there's Joy thinking about the end of war, and there's joy thinking about the death of death in the work of Christ.
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So there's joy in singleness and actually finding that Christ is enough.
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Lean into what Paul calls undistracted devotion to the Lord.
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A couple ways that you can do that practice if you find yourself wondering.
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Like take a hard look at your devotional practices.
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What does prayer actually look like?
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What does the study of scripture actually look like?
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Do you fast?
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Do you serve?
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And like speaking of service, like this is one of the ways in which you actually have access to the body of Christ now.
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In the same way that you, the single Christian, are united with Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, so is every other Christian around.
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And the service that you offer to those other Christians who are also united to Christ is actually devotion unto Christ.
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This is why Jesus can say things like if anyone offers one of these little ones, even a cup of cold water in my name, they'll never lose their reward.
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And that whatever you did to the least of these, you did unto me, it's because you actually did it unto him.
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The small hidden works of love that you offer to other Christians, knowing that who you are actually serving is both that Christian and your common Lord, there's tremendous joy to be found.
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And I urge you, explore it, lean into it, leave us all in the dust in pursuit of your holiness so that we are like chasing after you breathless to catch up.
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Single Christians, but we married Christians need you.
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We need your example.
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And non-believers need non-believers today, like exact like Augustine, still exist.
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The ones who are looking for something true and powerful and who are exploring and who are looking at philosophy that's going to try to like help them reform their ways and live a more virtuous life, they're going to find, like Augustine did, that they that they fall short.
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That their power is insufficient.
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So then when they see the power of Christ in you, they will also come to Christ.
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Now, I want to at least acknowledge one really important counter-argument to everything that I've just said.
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I lived as single long enough in my life, and I still have enough single friends that I know this is a very real concern.
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It runs something like that.
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Wait a minute.
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Wait a minute.
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Is the guy holding the microphone seriously telling me that one of the greatest sources of mental, emotional, and physical suffering in my life is actually a good thing?
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Is that like supreme gaslighting telling me just to suck it up?
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And that actually what I think is worst about my life is really a good thing, and I should be grateful, I should just smile more.
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I really do not mean that.
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If that is you, first off, I think it's very, very likely in our culture, writ large, and also in the cultures that make up our churches, that your suffering is real and that it doesn't have to be that way.
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But I do believe this too, is that solving the problem that leads you to feel that way is not going to just fall on your shoulders.
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It's going to require solidarity with the community of the church around you, and that's where I want to turn now.
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So, to the church, maybe even to some of the leaders who will hear this, um, I will say that I know many pastors do the very best in their power to order the life of their church around the grace of God, regular access to the word of God, regular access to communion or the sacraments, depending on your tradition.
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But they recognize these pastors, good pastors, know deep in their bones that whatever they can give, God can give more, and they try to build a church community to make it easy for their flock to actually encounter the living God, not just them.
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Why is there a sermon at your church every Sunday?
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It's because we know whether we can articulate it or not, but we know that the wisdom of God that comes to us in Holy Scripture is greater than the merely human wisdom that any one of our pastors could generate for us on the fly.
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So we order our life not around the pastor's human wisdom, but around the word of God.
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Many of us, not all of us, confess that God heals the sick, like Augustine's toothay.
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But for people who actually believe that God heals the sick, that means that sometimes you have to anoint them with oil and take your hand out of your pocket and pray for them.
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You you actually have to order the life of your community around what you expect the gift of God to be, and to make a place where the gift of God can operate for the sake of the people of God.
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Okay, if single Christians are single because of the gift of God that's at work in their lives, then what is the place for that gift in the church of God around us?
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We have to engineer church communities that are about making a place for God to reveal Himself and reveal the resurrected life in our midst.
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So think back to what Augustine experienced.
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When Augustine moved to the city of Milan, he moved to a city where there were recognized communities of single Christians, communities of virgins.
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Right outside the walls of Milan, his pastor, the Bishop Ambrose, was in charge of a men's monastic community.
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And there are these women in the church who keep, you know, finding out that their fiancés don't want to marry them.
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So instead of going back on the ancient equivalent of pick your dating site, they decide I'm also going to live my life as a virgin forever.
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Like there are communities of virgins doing the Christian life, growing as disciples and unpainted devotion to the Lord.
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And that's just part of the normal life of the church in Milan and around the world.
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When Antony goes to become a monk, the first thing that he does is he takes his younger sister, because he's your only surviving family member.
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He takes his younger sister and he goes into the city of Alexandria, where there's a community of Christian virgins, and he entrusts his sister into the care of these Christian virgins.
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Now, you can only do that if there's actually a recognizable functioning community of Christian virgins.
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Think through the cities that you've lived in in the course of your life.
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Could you make a list of the healthy functioning communities of Christian virgins in the cities where you've lived?
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This will take some structural change.
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But what we would be doing by instituting structural change to make more places for single Christians in our midst is not just being kind to single Christians.
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We're making a place for God, the Holy Spirit, to show us the reality of the kingdom of heaven in our midst.
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Or how about this one?
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Don't just make a community for single Christians.
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Would you consider hiring a single Christian at your church?
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One of my best friends, he was actually the best man in my wedding, been a pastor for decades, and he is single.
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And if I told you the questions that search committees have actually asked him about his singleness, the assumptions about what he must be because he's a man in his 40s who's not married, the number of people who would never hire him because of their deep suspicion just of his singleness is really kind of amazing and frightening.
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But when you put single Christians in positions of leadership and you tell them that one of the things that you're eager for as a church is to make place for God to pour out all of his gifts, including the gift of singleness.
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So what do we have to do to organize our life to maximize on the gifts that God give us?
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Well, single leaders can do a lot.
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Finally, I'd also say this.
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What I've done in barely 60 minutes does not even come close to scratching the surface.
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And literally, if all you do when you leave here is you leave sharing that little bit of Augustine's wonder at the power of God in the lives of single Christians, and you think to yourself about the possibilities that what it might be that God wants to do in and through the witness of single Christians, then I'll have achieved my very modest goal.
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But my friends, there is so much more.
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And the more you read, the more amazed you will become, and the more motivated you will be to make place for the special charism, the special gift of single people in your midst.
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So I want to conclude here.
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Remember, let's just run back through this.
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Jesus says that in the resurrection, we will all of us who attain to the resurrection of the dead be single.
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I am married now.
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I will not be married then.
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Not only that, Paul says that singleness is better than marriage, and that makes sense because in the same way that resurrection life and deathlessness is better than my life now.
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Well, I see the logic.
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It follows that however good my marriage is, my resurrected state, my singleness then will be better.
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And the tradition of the church, St.
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Augustine shows us that it's possible that you can build a church community throughout a city where single Christians are looked at as heroes and as exemplars of the power of God, not as objects of pity or display.
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Now, I've called this meeting singleness for everybody.
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So again, let's remind ourselves why that's the case.
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In the first place, singleness is for everybody because every Christian, married or not, needs the witness and the power of God that's exemplified in single Christians.
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I need your witness, a married Christian, single Christians, I need you.
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Other Christians, married and single, they need to be in fellowship and communion with you to learn from you about what God is bringing to them in the resurrection from.
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The church, the body of Christ, badly needs the gifts that we can give.
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In a world where we look around and we think to ourselves, I will only be happy if I have these people in my life, if I have this house, if I have this car, if I have this location.
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Your witness says to all of us, no, Christ is God.
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In time we'll all be like the angels.
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For now, you are, and we need to be reminded right now.
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I think we'll see about this last picture here.
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It's uh it's a picture it's a picture of what we often call the quote, wedding supper of the lamb.
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We've got a lamb standing there at the altar, standing as if slain, the angels are praising him.
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Who's the lamb looking at?
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He's not looking at any of the angels.
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He's not looking down at the cup to make sure that his blood is accurately pouring into the cup.
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Right?
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Like the lamb is staring straight at us.
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The lamb is like breaking the fourth wall here.
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You in this picture are part of the picture.
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You are, and we all of us are standing in the place where the bride stands at a wedding.
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The lamb is inviting us to walk to the altar and meet him, to be united with him forever.
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We are all, every Christian, walking towards the same altar.
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But the truth of the matter is that some Christians are already there.
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Some Christians, the single ones who share in the grace of singleness, the gift of singleness, are there.
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They're standing there face to face, unified forever.
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The rest of us could watch them.
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And it should encourage us to make the same dedicated walk toward Christ at the altar.
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Because the lives of those single Christians and the goodness of their union with Christ tells us that there is something there that we want and that we need and that we should hope for and that we should pursue.
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So hear the words of John the Revelator from Revelation 19, verses 6 to 9.
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Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters, and like the sound of mighty thunder peals, crying out, Hallelujah, for the Lord God the Almighty reigns.
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Let us rejoice and exalt and give him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.
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To her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure, for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
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And the angel said to me, Write this blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
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Here's another tension that often makes our lives complicated in the church today when we're thinking about Christian sexuality, when we're thinking about marriage, and when we're thinking about singleness, it's that we find ourselves caught in this tension between what I call like the garden and the city.
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It's the gap between the Garden of Eden and Genesis 1 and the New Jerusalem at the end of Revelation.
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And in my experience as a pastor and as a Bible scholar, what I've found is that a large percentage of Christian teaching, preaching, and rhetoric about human sexuality tends to focus on or prioritize the Garden of Eden.
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A lot of times the conversation goes something like this.
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We ask ourselves, like, what's the natural form of human sexuality?
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And when we look around at the culture that we find ourselves in, whether it's America in the modern West or Australia, where I lived for a few years, or Southeast Asia, Christians tend to ask themselves whether the sexual and institutions that they see in the world around them are like or are unlike the sort of sexual life that we assume is mandated in the Garden of Eden.
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So in our case today, on a campus like the University of Wisconsin, there's a lot of Christians who are trying to give responses to gender theory and to folks like Judas Butler, say, who would present gender as a spectrum?
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A lot of Christians run right to Genesis 1 and say, well, there's evidence that a better way to think of human sexual identity is binary, male and female.
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Or since the 1960s and the decline of traditional marriage, as it's sometimes called, we run back to Genesis 1 and 2, and Christians will point to the union of Adam and Eve, the coming together of two people into one new unit.
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We see that as a good resource for explaining the importance of, again, quote, traditional marriage is a lifelong union of man and of woman.
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Now, in what follows here, I am not interested in disputing the authority or the value of Genesis.
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I think that is an incredibly helpful source for thinking like a Christian about human nature and about human sexuality.
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But my goal is to prioritize the new Jerusalem because that's the sort of logic that I think we find in texts like 1 Corinthians 7 and Matthew 22, where we run not to creation, but to new creation and use new creation as the primary source for our logic of how we think about and go about practicing our sexual lives.
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Paul, in particular, he indicates that sexual ethics is about living the resurrected life now.
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So join me in thinking backwards for a few minutes, because in the same way that singleness is better than marriage, not because marriage is bad, it's good, but singleness is better.
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The New Jerusalem is better than Eden.
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The technical term I'm gonna use to describe this is called, quote, realized eschatology.
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That's just the fancy word that Bible scholars and theologians use.
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I'm gonna define it more in a few minutes.
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But what I want us to see is how when Paul goes about explaining Christian singleness, he doesn't start from the Garden of Eden.
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He starts from the new Jerusalem, the life of the resurrection, thinks backwards from there to talk about the singleness.
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Christian singleness is a manifestation of the resurrection life here, now, and in our midst.
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And once we grasp that, then we're going to be in a position to appreciate, to really appreciate the witness of Christian singles in our midst in our churches.
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All right.
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So first off, realized eschatology.
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If Paul is reasoning backwards from the resurrection to the present, this is kind of the structure of his argument.
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Like at the most basic level, I can't quite make it any simpler than this, though I've tried.
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So first off, you have to say with Paul that the Holy Spirit reveals the nature of the resurrected life by what we call gifts of the Holy Spirit.
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One gift of the Holy Spirit is singleness.
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Therefore, singleness is the best and the truest revelation of the resurrected life, so far as human sexuality is concerned, at least before the resurrection actually happens.
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So think back to 1 Corinthians 7, that one crucial word in 1 Corinthians 7-7, gift, charisma.
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Each one has their own gift.
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Paul's clear, his gift is the gift of singleness.
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This is the big picture, the realized eschatology that makes sense of what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 7.7.
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Start with me here, like not in Corinth.
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Go back with me to the book of Acts, to the day of Pentecost.
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The disciples waiting in the upper room, sound of a rushing wind comes, tongues of fire descend.
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Everybody starts praying and prophesying in tongues.
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It's a massive cacophony.
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Everybody out in the streets of Jerusalem is super confused because they hear these people speaking in languages that they shouldn't know, but that they know because they're here visiting Jerusalem from various parts of the Roman Empire.
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And then Peter eventually has to get up, shout them all down, and explain what's going on.
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And he explains what's going on by quoting the prophet Joel.
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In Joel chapter 2, Joel says, and I'm quoting, in the last days, that's a key phrase, last days, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.
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Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.
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Even on the male and female slaves, in those days I will pour out my spirit.
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These are the last days.
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The end is breaking into the present, and you can see it right there in the witness of these Christians running around prophesying with their hair on fire.
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That's the kind of logic that we find repeating itself again and again and again throughout the New Testament.
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That this vision of the end of time, the resurrected life, the new Jerusalem, whatever is going to be there in the future, breaking into the like our reality here and now.
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Like it's a taste of the future now.
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It's not the whole thing yet, but it's the real thing.
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Like Hebrews 6, 5.
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The author of Hebrews calls the spirit at work in the midst of the community, quote, the powers of the age to come.
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So and he says that the community is tasting them.
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That's his metaphor, the palate.
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Like you're tasting of the powers of the age to come.
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So it's here.
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You're experiencing it now, viscerally.
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But it's not the powers of this age, it's the powers of that age, but it's also here now.
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Like, can you feel the tension in this?
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All right, if that's Acts, if that's Hebrews, what about Paul?
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A couple of places in Paul where you see this lot.
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The first one in Romans 8, Romans 8, 23, Paul, when he's talking about the Holy Spirit, he calls the he calls the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the Christian communities the first fruits of the resurrection.
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So I don't know if any of you are gardeners or if you go to like you pick farms, but the first fruits of the harvest.
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When you go to an orchard, like in the state where I grew up, in the state of Michigan, and you pick an apple for the first time, or you pick a blueberry for the first time in the season, you are tasting in part the whole harvest that's about to come.
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Now, when you look out at the rest of the field, let's say it's a blueberry field, what you see is miles and miles and acres and acres of still green berries, but you can find a few blue ones.
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Paul's saying that's what the Holy Spirit is like here and now in the community.
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It's first fruit.
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More is coming.
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It's not here in fullness yet, but some of it is, and it's real.
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Okay, skip away from Romans to 2 Corinthians.
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If you look at 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 5, this is another one of Paul's favorite words to describe this reality.
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He calls the Holy Spirit to quote down payment.
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The Greek word is Arabon on the resurrected life.
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You find the same word in Ephesians chapter 1, where what you know, what's a down payment?
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If any of you have ever bought a house or a car or something good size, you know that one of the ways you guarantee that the transaction is going to happen is that the person doing the buying makes a down payment on what the full purchase price is going to be.
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Paul says, in this case, it's like, it's more like God is the one doing the buying.
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God has made you a promise of a resurrected life where you're going to share with Jesus in resurrection, new life, eternal life, new creation forever.
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And here's how you know he's going to keep that promise.
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The Holy Spirit's present with you now.
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Like the same.
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The spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is now giving life to your mortal body.
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That's a down payment.
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It's not the whole thing.
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You're not resurrected.
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And like, unless Christ returns, all of us are going to die.
00:09:52.480 --> 00:09:57.120
They will lower us into our graves and we will awake the resurrection.
00:09:57.440 --> 00:10:07.759
But the way we know that God's promise is faithful and true is that Paul says, you experience, you have the down payment here with you now, the Arabon that is the Holy Spirit.
00:10:08.159 --> 00:10:28.799
Now, when Paul starts to talk about the works of the Holy Spirit later in the book of 1 Corinthians, this is seven chapters after that point where he says each one of us has our own gift, in 1 Corinthians 14, the word he uses again and again and again and again and again and again to describe what the Spirit does in its gifts is charisma.
00:10:31.519 --> 00:10:40.480
He uses the same word to describe prophecy or tongues or healing or service that he uses to describe singleness.
00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:53.279
It's like what Pentecost and tongues were for Peter, singleness is for all.
00:10:53.919 --> 00:11:03.279
It's a manifestation of the resurrection life at the end of time, what will be when we receive the perfect bodies that breaks into the present now.
00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:07.840
And it feels a little bit out of joint because it is out of joint.
00:11:09.279 --> 00:11:11.360
It's the future, but it's now.
00:11:11.919 --> 00:11:14.559
It's already, but it's not yet.
00:11:17.200 --> 00:11:20.799
That's what we mean when we say quote realized eschatology.
00:11:20.960 --> 00:11:23.519
Eschatology is the fancy word that means last thing.
00:11:23.919 --> 00:11:26.240
Realized means it's already happening.
00:11:28.320 --> 00:11:34.480
It's still now, but you can realize in your experience of the spirit what will be then.
00:11:35.200 --> 00:11:41.600
It's like two times at once, two ages of creation all happening at the same time.
00:11:41.759 --> 00:11:44.960
And the mediator of that future is the experience of the Holy Spirit.
00:11:45.120 --> 00:11:46.320
Everybody tracking with that?
00:11:46.720 --> 00:11:49.120
If not, ask more questions because I want to clarify.
00:11:49.200 --> 00:11:50.399
That's really, really important.
00:11:57.279 --> 00:12:00.480
This is why singleness is amazing.
00:12:00.720 --> 00:12:05.360
This is why Augustine fell over and sobbed when he saw it.
00:12:05.679 --> 00:12:09.840
Because it was not natural, it was not even possible.
00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:11.679
But there it was, anyway.
00:12:12.080 --> 00:12:21.679
The only way he could understand it was that the grace of God, but by the power of the Spirit, was doing something in his midst that he couldn't understand or explain, but that he wanted.
00:12:21.919 --> 00:12:22.799
He wanted it.
00:12:23.039 --> 00:12:27.360
So just take a minute, think back to the conversations that you had during that break.
00:12:27.519 --> 00:12:32.720
Let yourselves dream, imagine the end, think about life in the resurrection.
00:12:32.879 --> 00:12:34.799
Think about like this is where I start.
00:12:34.960 --> 00:12:36.960
I think about the last funeral that I attended.
00:12:37.039 --> 00:12:39.360
And I think about the tragedy and sadness of it.
00:12:39.519 --> 00:12:45.919
Like for me, it was a cousin who died unexpectedly in his 20s.
00:12:46.159 --> 00:13:01.519
And, you know, to walk around that room and to see you know, not just to carry my own sadness and grief, but to see the brokenness on his parents' face and his sibling's face and his friends' faces.
00:13:03.279 --> 00:13:07.600
You have to feel the wrong of death, like that deep in your bones.
00:13:09.200 --> 00:13:11.039
And then you have to think of deathness.
00:13:12.159 --> 00:13:20.720
You have to think of the Lord Jesus coming out of the tomb on Easter Sunday, like who is himself the first fruits of the resurrection from the dead.
00:13:20.799 --> 00:13:24.799
Like his resurrection is the first, and we will all join him in it.
00:13:25.440 --> 00:13:28.000
Having died nevermore to die.
00:13:28.080 --> 00:13:28.879
Do you want that?
00:13:29.440 --> 00:13:35.039
Can you feel the hairs stand up on your arm when you contemplate deathlessness?
00:13:35.600 --> 00:13:36.559
Think about war.
00:13:37.360 --> 00:13:49.200
Um I'm I'm an old millennial guy now, so I'm still I'm old enough that a good number of my friends served it in uniform in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:13:49.360 --> 00:13:58.159
And I don't know if you've ever had the great and heavy honor of sitting with a combat veteran who's processing their PTSD.
00:13:58.879 --> 00:14:09.679
And when they realized that they were incredibly high functioning in their prime, the things that the experience of war did to them, and even worse for them, the things that they did to other people.
00:14:15.360 --> 00:14:22.879
I think of one of my friends, he would do anything, anything, not to see children die as collateral damage, but he saw it again, again.
00:14:25.679 --> 00:14:32.960
Now think about what the prophet Isaiah says when he talks about what life will be right like in the kingdom of heaven in the resurrection.
00:14:33.200 --> 00:14:36.639
Isaiah 2, 4, never again will they learn more.
00:14:37.679 --> 00:14:40.639
And I say, yes, even so come Lord Jesus.
00:14:40.799 --> 00:14:42.159
Like, do you long for that peace?
00:14:42.240 --> 00:14:44.480
Do you ate for that or sickness?
00:14:44.639 --> 00:14:47.200
Lots of us in this room today are sick.
00:14:47.440 --> 00:14:49.360
Like I live with chronic illness.
00:14:49.519 --> 00:14:54.559
I live with long-term injuries because like genetics plus athletics for me equals pain.
00:14:54.639 --> 00:14:56.480
Like my shoulders hurt.
00:14:56.720 --> 00:14:58.240
That's just how it is.
00:14:58.480 --> 00:15:08.639
Like tonight, one of my children is homesick just with the colds that kids get, but I mean, still stuck in bed, not doing anything but watching too much TV.
00:15:10.399 --> 00:15:29.919
I don't want to make light of it though, because lots of us know what it's like to watch helpless as the people that we love like gasp for air, struggle to breathe, while they fight through painful rehab after a horrific injury, or we watch people we thought we knew become unrecognizable as they lose their hair to chemo and to radiation.
00:15:30.080 --> 00:15:34.000
Like the horror of sickness and illness.
00:15:34.080 --> 00:15:37.759
And to that, Christ in the resurrection will say, No more.
00:15:38.159 --> 00:15:39.919
Isaiah 33, 24.
00:15:40.080 --> 00:15:43.919
No inhabitant of that kingdom will say, I am sick.
00:15:45.919 --> 00:15:53.120
There's a beautiful, beautiful story, a few pages in the confessions after Augustine's experience in the pear tree.
00:15:53.360 --> 00:16:00.320
Uh, Augustine, he develops a toothache that is, and I'm quoting here, so severe that I could not speak to him.
00:16:00.559 --> 00:16:07.600
And the thought entered my heart that I should urge all my own people to pray for me, to you, the God of every kind of healing.
00:16:07.919 --> 00:16:12.320
The moment we knelt down and begged this favor from you, the pain vanished.
00:16:12.639 --> 00:16:13.919
What was that pain?
00:16:14.080 --> 00:16:14.960
Where did it go?
00:16:15.200 --> 00:16:22.480
I must admit that I was terrified, my Lord and my God, for I had never in all my life experienced anything like that.
00:16:23.840 --> 00:16:28.720
So now, can you feel the wonder of the resurrection?
00:16:29.360 --> 00:16:40.639
With that in your mind and in your heart, with that sense of amazement, the single Christian life is as amazing as the Lord healing Augustine's toothache.
00:16:40.960 --> 00:16:50.080
It is every bit as much a manifestation in time of the life, of the truth, the power, the reality that will be in the kingdom of heaven.
00:16:50.159 --> 00:16:58.799
It's only by the gifts of the Spirit that God leads the church into recognition and understanding of what the resurrected life is going to be like.
00:16:59.519 --> 00:17:06.880
Like the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is now giving life to our mortal bodies.
00:17:07.039 --> 00:17:11.119
Like the toothache is a foretaste of divine health as God feels it.
00:17:11.279 --> 00:17:29.200
And for the single Christian, celibacy, sexual renunciation, when it's a gift of God, is a foretaste of undivided union with Christ, of a life that recognizes actually the only need that another human being has is for the Lord.
00:17:29.359 --> 00:17:47.680
And that to have the Lord is actually to have enough, like not just as rhetoric, not just as a happy idea, not just like Jesus plus me equals a majority, but like to actually have a life of union with God that makes everything else truly, properly unnecessary.
00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:50.559
That is the witness of the single life.
00:17:52.880 --> 00:17:54.880
That's why Augustine was amazed.
00:17:55.039 --> 00:18:00.079
That's why I am amazed, and why I hope more of you will leave amazed tonight than walked in.
00:18:00.400 --> 00:18:06.319
So let's say, for the sake of argument, hypothetically, that at this point in the night I've actually convinced some of them.
00:18:07.440 --> 00:18:16.319
Let's say that you now think, like Augustine thought, that Christians who renounce sexual activity, the ones who dedicate themselves more wholly to Christ, are actually pretty amazing.
00:18:16.720 --> 00:18:25.359
That you see God in Christ and by the power of the Spirit at work there in a way that maybe you didn't realize was God at work, but wow.
00:18:26.640 --> 00:18:33.359
You see Christ upholding them and strengthening them with a power that you know you don't actually possess, and you're pretty sure they don't either.
00:18:33.599 --> 00:18:51.200
So, what I want to do is use my remaining time to consider some of the practical implications of this, this like teaching about Christian singleness, because at the end of the day, I love theology, I love church history, but Christian theology at its best is always a recommendation for how to live.
00:18:51.680 --> 00:18:56.400
It's a statement about what is true so that we know how to behave in the world.
00:18:58.960 --> 00:19:09.200
So if Paul's right, 1 Corinthians 7, and if Augustine is right in his confessions, what should our day-to-day Christian lives look like and what should the churches around us look like?
00:19:09.599 --> 00:19:18.079
Now, the first thing I've got to say is that this is the point where this really again becomes deeply personal for me, because in the end, this is always a pastoral topic.
00:19:18.240 --> 00:19:28.640
I may not be a single Christian, but I see the faces of the single Christians that I love when I when I whenever I have this conversation in any form.
00:19:31.440 --> 00:19:40.319
So this is what I want to say to those people who I love and to any single Christians who are here tonight, and to any single Christians that any of you might happen to talk with after this.
00:19:40.480 --> 00:19:44.319
In the first place, please hear this extremely, extremely clearly.
00:19:44.559 --> 00:19:47.599
If you are a single Christian, there is nothing wrong with you.
00:19:48.640 --> 00:19:53.039
If you are a single Christian, you are not half a Christian because you are not married.
00:19:53.279 --> 00:19:57.359
You are not an incomplete disciple of Jesus because you have no spouse.
00:19:57.599 --> 00:20:13.920
You are reasoning about your own nature, not from the perspective of Eden, where you are an Adam in search of an Eve or an Eve in search of an Adam, but from the perspective of the new Jerusalem, the heavenly city, the resurrected life where Christ is all in all, and marriage has passed away.
00:20:14.160 --> 00:20:15.680
Think backwards.
00:20:16.960 --> 00:20:27.440
If you, my friend, were actually a half-finished Christian, then that would mean that Paul was also a half-finished Christian, because he is super clear, his gift is singleness.
00:20:28.480 --> 00:20:51.599
If we're going to run through the history of the church, like if you were a half-finished Christian or an incomplete Christian, then so's Antony the Great, then so's Augustine, then so's the great theologian and abbess Macrina, then so even closer to our own days would someone like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or if you're a Protestant, so would Dietrich Von Hoefer be a half-finished Christian.
00:20:51.920 --> 00:21:02.559
Or how about the great Anglican preacher and author John Stott, who lived his whole life to the age of 90, unmarried, but saw singleness, celibacy as his vocation.
00:21:04.079 --> 00:21:06.400
You are not incomplete.
00:21:07.599 --> 00:21:15.920
Now, if that's the case, if you're not incomplete, then I also want to charge you, lean into discovering the joy that comes with the gift of singleness.
00:21:16.160 --> 00:21:18.000
Learn from Augustine's example.
00:21:18.240 --> 00:21:21.680
Learn from or lean on Christ for your holiness.
00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:34.480
If you try to white knuckle your own sexual purity and holiness from here until the time when the Lord returns or that takes you home, you will find very quickly the limitations of your own capacity.
00:21:34.720 --> 00:21:38.960
We are not talking about like a choice that depends solely on your willpower.
00:21:39.440 --> 00:21:44.960
We're talking about trusting in God to do what we could not do.
00:21:45.200 --> 00:21:51.599
Because we are actually looking for Christ to mediate to us by the power of the Holy Spirit the life of the resurrection.
00:21:51.759 --> 00:21:54.160
That is the only way in which this works.
00:21:54.240 --> 00:21:56.480
But there's great joy in the resurrection.
00:21:56.640 --> 00:22:06.000
In the same way that there's joy thinking about healing, and there's Joy thinking about the end of war, and there's joy thinking about the death of death in the work of Christ.
00:22:06.720 --> 00:22:10.480
So there's joy in singleness and actually finding that Christ is enough.
00:22:12.079 --> 00:22:17.440
Lean into what Paul calls undistracted devotion to the Lord.
00:22:19.200 --> 00:22:23.200
A couple ways that you can do that practice if you find yourself wondering.
00:22:23.279 --> 00:22:26.960
Like take a hard look at your devotional practices.
00:22:27.599 --> 00:22:29.440
What does prayer actually look like?
00:22:29.680 --> 00:22:32.880
What does the study of scripture actually look like?
00:22:33.440 --> 00:22:34.400
Do you fast?
00:22:36.079 --> 00:22:37.200
Do you serve?
00:22:37.440 --> 00:22:42.799
And like speaking of service, like this is one of the ways in which you actually have access to the body of Christ now.
00:22:42.960 --> 00:22:50.000
In the same way that you, the single Christian, are united with Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, so is every other Christian around.
00:22:50.400 --> 00:22:57.599
And the service that you offer to those other Christians who are also united to Christ is actually devotion unto Christ.
00:22:57.759 --> 00:23:05.119
This is why Jesus can say things like if anyone offers one of these little ones, even a cup of cold water in my name, they'll never lose their reward.
00:23:05.200 --> 00:23:10.160
And that whatever you did to the least of these, you did unto me, it's because you actually did it unto him.
00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:24.240
The small hidden works of love that you offer to other Christians, knowing that who you are actually serving is both that Christian and your common Lord, there's tremendous joy to be found.
00:23:24.480 --> 00:23:33.680
And I urge you, explore it, lean into it, leave us all in the dust in pursuit of your holiness so that we are like chasing after you breathless to catch up.
00:23:35.039 --> 00:23:39.519
Single Christians, but we married Christians need you.
00:23:39.839 --> 00:23:41.359
We need your example.
00:23:41.759 --> 00:23:46.960
And non-believers need non-believers today, like exact like Augustine, still exist.
00:23:47.200 --> 00:24:01.279
The ones who are looking for something true and powerful and who are exploring and who are looking at philosophy that's going to try to like help them reform their ways and live a more virtuous life, they're going to find, like Augustine did, that they that they fall short.
00:24:02.720 --> 00:24:04.640
That their power is insufficient.
00:24:04.880 --> 00:24:10.079
So then when they see the power of Christ in you, they will also come to Christ.
00:24:13.920 --> 00:24:19.920
Now, I want to at least acknowledge one really important counter-argument to everything that I've just said.
00:24:20.720 --> 00:24:29.359
I lived as single long enough in my life, and I still have enough single friends that I know this is a very real concern.
00:24:29.519 --> 00:24:30.559
It runs something like that.
00:24:31.359 --> 00:24:32.400
Wait a minute.
00:24:32.720 --> 00:24:33.599
Wait a minute.
00:24:33.920 --> 00:24:44.000
Is the guy holding the microphone seriously telling me that one of the greatest sources of mental, emotional, and physical suffering in my life is actually a good thing?
00:24:44.559 --> 00:24:48.960
Is that like supreme gaslighting telling me just to suck it up?
00:24:49.039 --> 00:24:54.799
And that actually what I think is worst about my life is really a good thing, and I should be grateful, I should just smile more.
00:24:57.039 --> 00:24:58.799
I really do not mean that.
00:24:59.119 --> 00:25:13.759
If that is you, first off, I think it's very, very likely in our culture, writ large, and also in the cultures that make up our churches, that your suffering is real and that it doesn't have to be that way.
00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:21.119
But I do believe this too, is that solving the problem that leads you to feel that way is not going to just fall on your shoulders.
00:25:21.279 --> 00:25:26.799
It's going to require solidarity with the community of the church around you, and that's where I want to turn now.
00:25:27.119 --> 00:25:51.920
So, to the church, maybe even to some of the leaders who will hear this, um, I will say that I know many pastors do the very best in their power to order the life of their church around the grace of God, regular access to the word of God, regular access to communion or the sacraments, depending on your tradition.
00:25:52.160 --> 00:26:07.200
But they recognize these pastors, good pastors, know deep in their bones that whatever they can give, God can give more, and they try to build a church community to make it easy for their flock to actually encounter the living God, not just them.
00:26:11.359 --> 00:26:14.559
Why is there a sermon at your church every Sunday?
00:26:15.359 --> 00:26:29.119
It's because we know whether we can articulate it or not, but we know that the wisdom of God that comes to us in Holy Scripture is greater than the merely human wisdom that any one of our pastors could generate for us on the fly.
00:26:29.200 --> 00:26:34.160
So we order our life not around the pastor's human wisdom, but around the word of God.
00:26:36.960 --> 00:26:44.720
Many of us, not all of us, confess that God heals the sick, like Augustine's toothay.
00:26:46.079 --> 00:26:53.839
But for people who actually believe that God heals the sick, that means that sometimes you have to anoint them with oil and take your hand out of your pocket and pray for them.
00:26:54.400 --> 00:27:06.240
You you actually have to order the life of your community around what you expect the gift of God to be, and to make a place where the gift of God can operate for the sake of the people of God.
00:27:09.599 --> 00:27:24.319
Okay, if single Christians are single because of the gift of God that's at work in their lives, then what is the place for that gift in the church of God around us?
00:27:25.359 --> 00:27:36.880
We have to engineer church communities that are about making a place for God to reveal Himself and reveal the resurrected life in our midst.
00:27:37.200 --> 00:27:41.359
So think back to what Augustine experienced.
00:27:41.519 --> 00:27:48.799
When Augustine moved to the city of Milan, he moved to a city where there were recognized communities of single Christians, communities of virgins.
00:27:48.960 --> 00:27:55.279
Right outside the walls of Milan, his pastor, the Bishop Ambrose, was in charge of a men's monastic community.
00:27:55.440 --> 00:28:00.640
And there are these women in the church who keep, you know, finding out that their fiancés don't want to marry them.
00:28:00.799 --> 00:28:08.880
So instead of going back on the ancient equivalent of pick your dating site, they decide I'm also going to live my life as a virgin forever.
00:28:08.960 --> 00:28:18.720
Like there are communities of virgins doing the Christian life, growing as disciples and unpainted devotion to the Lord.
00:28:18.880 --> 00:28:23.519
And that's just part of the normal life of the church in Milan and around the world.
00:28:28.720 --> 00:28:34.960
When Antony goes to become a monk, the first thing that he does is he takes his younger sister, because he's your only surviving family member.
00:28:35.200 --> 00:28:44.240
He takes his younger sister and he goes into the city of Alexandria, where there's a community of Christian virgins, and he entrusts his sister into the care of these Christian virgins.
00:28:44.480 --> 00:28:50.400
Now, you can only do that if there's actually a recognizable functioning community of Christian virgins.
00:28:50.640 --> 00:28:54.319
Think through the cities that you've lived in in the course of your life.
00:28:56.480 --> 00:29:05.519
Could you make a list of the healthy functioning communities of Christian virgins in the cities where you've lived?
00:29:06.640 --> 00:29:09.519
This will take some structural change.
00:29:10.319 --> 00:29:21.359
But what we would be doing by instituting structural change to make more places for single Christians in our midst is not just being kind to single Christians.
00:29:21.599 --> 00:29:28.319
We're making a place for God, the Holy Spirit, to show us the reality of the kingdom of heaven in our midst.
00:29:28.880 --> 00:29:29.920
Or how about this one?
00:29:30.079 --> 00:29:32.640
Don't just make a community for single Christians.
00:29:32.880 --> 00:29:36.400
Would you consider hiring a single Christian at your church?
00:29:38.559 --> 00:29:46.319
One of my best friends, he was actually the best man in my wedding, been a pastor for decades, and he is single.
00:29:46.480 --> 00:30:10.400
And if I told you the questions that search committees have actually asked him about his singleness, the assumptions about what he must be because he's a man in his 40s who's not married, the number of people who would never hire him because of their deep suspicion just of his singleness is really kind of amazing and frightening.
00:30:10.960 --> 00:30:24.079
But when you put single Christians in positions of leadership and you tell them that one of the things that you're eager for as a church is to make place for God to pour out all of his gifts, including the gift of singleness.
00:30:24.160 --> 00:30:28.960
So what do we have to do to organize our life to maximize on the gifts that God give us?
00:30:29.200 --> 00:30:32.720
Well, single leaders can do a lot.
00:30:36.000 --> 00:30:37.839
Finally, I'd also say this.
00:30:45.599 --> 00:30:50.799
What I've done in barely 60 minutes does not even come close to scratching the surface.
00:30:50.960 --> 00:31:10.720
And literally, if all you do when you leave here is you leave sharing that little bit of Augustine's wonder at the power of God in the lives of single Christians, and you think to yourself about the possibilities that what it might be that God wants to do in and through the witness of single Christians, then I'll have achieved my very modest goal.
00:31:10.799 --> 00:31:12.720
But my friends, there is so much more.
00:31:12.880 --> 00:31:24.079
And the more you read, the more amazed you will become, and the more motivated you will be to make place for the special charism, the special gift of single people in your midst.
00:31:27.839 --> 00:31:29.599
So I want to conclude here.
00:31:30.480 --> 00:31:32.799
Remember, let's just run back through this.
00:31:32.960 --> 00:31:38.240
Jesus says that in the resurrection, we will all of us who attain to the resurrection of the dead be single.
00:31:38.640 --> 00:31:39.599
I am married now.
00:31:39.839 --> 00:31:41.359
I will not be married then.
00:31:43.039 --> 00:31:53.279
Not only that, Paul says that singleness is better than marriage, and that makes sense because in the same way that resurrection life and deathlessness is better than my life now.
00:31:53.599 --> 00:31:55.440
Well, I see the logic.
00:31:55.599 --> 00:32:02.799
It follows that however good my marriage is, my resurrected state, my singleness then will be better.
00:32:04.720 --> 00:32:06.559
And the tradition of the church, St.
00:32:06.720 --> 00:32:19.279
Augustine shows us that it's possible that you can build a church community throughout a city where single Christians are looked at as heroes and as exemplars of the power of God, not as objects of pity or display.
00:32:20.000 --> 00:32:22.640
Now, I've called this meeting singleness for everybody.
00:32:23.119 --> 00:32:25.920
So again, let's remind ourselves why that's the case.
00:32:26.079 --> 00:32:35.920
In the first place, singleness is for everybody because every Christian, married or not, needs the witness and the power of God that's exemplified in single Christians.
00:32:36.319 --> 00:32:41.279
I need your witness, a married Christian, single Christians, I need you.
00:32:43.279 --> 00:32:52.880
Other Christians, married and single, they need to be in fellowship and communion with you to learn from you about what God is bringing to them in the resurrection from.
00:32:53.839 --> 00:32:57.519
The church, the body of Christ, badly needs the gifts that we can give.
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In a world where we look around and we think to ourselves, I will only be happy if I have these people in my life, if I have this house, if I have this car, if I have this location.
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Your witness says to all of us, no, Christ is God.
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In time we'll all be like the angels.
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For now, you are, and we need to be reminded right now.
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I think we'll see about this last picture here.
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It's uh it's a picture it's a picture of what we often call the quote, wedding supper of the lamb.
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We've got a lamb standing there at the altar, standing as if slain, the angels are praising him.
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Who's the lamb looking at?
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He's not looking at any of the angels.
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He's not looking down at the cup to make sure that his blood is accurately pouring into the cup.
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Right?
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Like the lamb is staring straight at us.
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The lamb is like breaking the fourth wall here.
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You in this picture are part of the picture.
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You are, and we all of us are standing in the place where the bride stands at a wedding.
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The lamb is inviting us to walk to the altar and meet him, to be united with him forever.
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We are all, every Christian, walking towards the same altar.
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But the truth of the matter is that some Christians are already there.
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Some Christians, the single ones who share in the grace of singleness, the gift of singleness, are there.
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They're standing there face to face, unified forever.
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The rest of us could watch them.
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And it should encourage us to make the same dedicated walk toward Christ at the altar.
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Because the lives of those single Christians and the goodness of their union with Christ tells us that there is something there that we want and that we need and that we should hope for and that we should pursue.
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So hear the words of John the Revelator from Revelation 19, verses 6 to 9.
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Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters, and like the sound of mighty thunder peals, crying out, Hallelujah, for the Lord God the Almighty reigns.
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Let us rejoice and exalt and give him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.
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To her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure, for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
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And the angel said to me, Write this blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
