First Corinthians- 7:27 -34 Considerations for Marriage

So today we're going to talk about what amounts to, I was trying to come up with a title, Considerations for Marriage. Actually, Paul is now going to start to talk more about the nature about marriage in the present time. He's been speaking up until this point to those who were already married and what to do in their relationship on both sides, whether you were both believers or one was a believer and one wasn't, because in the early church, you can certainly see how two people would hear the gospel, a married couple, and one of them would come to Christ and the other one wouldn't. Well, how does that relationship supposed to work out now? And Paul gave a lot of instructions about that. So today we'll be talking about, is Paul and what he says today, are they commands or are they just advice? Are there advantages to being married? Are there advantages to staying single? Answer, yes. Is it spiritual or carnal, my decisions? Are they gonna be made carnally or spiritually? Or as I live my life, whether I'm married or single, will I live spiritually or carnally?

And he's given advice primarily to unmarrieds, whether never been married or married before or widows or that kind of thing. The verses that we're gonna be talking about today are 1 Corinthians 7, 25, and probably we'll get down to verse 31, but I'm gonna read the first four verses and then try to put them in context. Paul says, now concerning virgins, I've no command of the Lord, but I give an opinion as one who by the mercy of the Lord is trustworthy. I think then that it is good in view of the present distress that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you released from a wife? Don't seek a wife. But if you marry, you have not sinned. And if a virgin marries, she has not sinned, yet such will have trouble in this life, and I'm trying to spare you. So verse 25.

Now concerning virgins, this word virgins is an interesting word. It's an old Greek word, and most of the time, it referred to unmarried females. more than likely young, but in some cases, it also referred to males, but not always. Normally, it was an unmarried single woman. If you look at the New Living Translation, it kind of helps you with the picture.

It says, now regarding the question about young women, and so Paul is answering questions now. He's in the mode where, You know, he's been given a list of questions, and as Roger was talking about the last couple weeks, a lot of what he's saying, what he was talking about were answers to questions. Well, he was obviously asked a question, what about young marrieds who are not yet married, young women who are not yet married? And he says, I don't have a command from the Lord for them, but the Lord in his mercy has given me wisdom that can be trusted, and I'm gonna share it with you.

So there are three major, I think, views here to identify who these single women were. One view is that they were the daughters of men in Corinth Church, and that these fathers had questions about giving their daughters in marriage. And a lot of marriages were arranged at that time. And daughters, you went to see their father, you didn't see them, you had to talk to the father.

The second view is that these young women could have been both men and women, and maybe they were living together in a spiritual marriage, which means they were living together without a sexual relationship. I'm not sure that that's accurate. I think the third view is the most accurate, and that is that young females who were engaged or thinking about becoming engaged, but they were getting pressure from the spiritual in the church to forego marriage. I believe the text supports this. And that constable said that. He said, I think the text supports this third view, and I think he's probably right. He has, Paul doesn't have any wish in this conversation to trap anybody or to put him in a situation where he's gently pushing them to go in one direction or another.

And that's really important because, I didn't think about it much until I became a Christian, but I came out of Catholicism, which has this whole thing of priests and nuns and brothers and people in singleness and the subtlety of the push when you're a high school young man to be a priest. I grew up in a good Irish Catholic family, seven kids, four brothers. You think the pressure was on one of us to become a priest? Sure was, sure was. But I told my dad finally when I was 17, I said, Dad, I like girls too much to be a priest. As I found out later, some of these priests like girls too much too.

So anyway, that kind of thinking leads to corruption. It leads to a system in Christendom that it's just not healthy. And boy, we have seen the unhealthiness of what a priesthood or nuns or an abbot or a convent or a monastery, those things are just, they're just not the way God would have us live, I don't think.

So when Paul gives an opinion, It's interesting. The opinion, you can say, it's not derived from any teaching or command that he got directly from the Lord about something. It's something framed in his own assessing the information, and he comes up with an opinion or a view, but it's not a command, and it's important to look at it that way. His opinion, his advice is, you could say it's an apostolic opinion. Well, if I say that to you, you're gonna say, well, his opinion is just as valid as if it were a command.

Not necessarily. So if you look back at a verse that Roger covered in 12 of chapter seven, he said, but the rest I say, not the Lord. that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her. So he's offering good advice there, but he's not condemning them. He is not condemning that everyone has to do the same thing.

He's saying this is advice. If you go to verse 17, he says, only as the Lord has assigned to each one as God has called each one in this manner, let him walk. And so I direct in all the churches, that's a command. I'm directing in all the churches. He gives an apostolic decision based on a command. In other words, circumcised or not, remain in the same calling, slave or free. He says, go do that now.

It's interesting, too, another point that Macaulay made here, that Paul gave his opinion only when he's asked. You won't find in the Scripture where he has a circumstance and no one asked him what he thought about it, but he lays his opinion out. He doesn't do that. He only gives an opinion when he's asked, and in this case, it's a response to a question found in these verses.

So when one is looking or contemplating marriage, there's a lot of factors to consider. And environment, we're going to take a look at that's one of them. He says, I think then that this is good in view of the present distress. that is good for a man to remain as he is. In other words, stay single. So here we have some external factors in making a decision as to whether a person should get married.

And in this case, he says, what are the present conditions in the world? What are the distresses? What are the necessities? we don't really know what they are, because he doesn't delineate them. But I got to thinking about if I was contemplating marriage today, as a young person, with all that's going on in our world, would it be a good idea to get married?

May or may not. What if I was a young person that, you know, just out of high school, don't have a very good job, apartments cost a ton of money, You can't live as a single person by yourself. You gotta have roommates because you can't afford it. And the circumstances with COVID, with the economy the way it is, and in Denver, how expensive real estate is, you start taking into consideration those factors. You should think about those.

Like in Acts 18, we find that there was some persecution going on in Corinth. We don't know about persecution. It's common, but we don't know about it. But Paul is saying simple to realize that the circumstances, whatever they may be, are a consideration in deciding whether you're gonna get married or stay single.

I think that's a real good advice. Until the day of the Lord, the earth is the scene of wickedness, confusion, and misery. We can attest to that, especially as believers. This world, there's nothing there for us, nothing at all. There's nothing that is gonna support us. So it is a general question of entering into marriage relationship by believers.

And this too, the apostle, he actually solves this, not on the Lord's authority as commanding, but by giving a judgment of his own ground, grounded in his own authority. opposition to the world, to Christianity. In other words, think about the present distress. What's going on? Are you going to be able to do what you want to accomplish by being married in a world that doesn't like you? And because you belong to the Lord, it hates you. You have to consider that.

However, the time then and the time now is not the time of great tribulation or great apostasy. Although, I don't know, this apostasy thing is growing and growing. And the Lord's judgment about what is coming isn't here. In other words, a great tribulation is not in front of us right now.

But the gospel necessarily encounters enmity where in its purity the world discovers its own doom as unbelieving and already judged. You start laying that message out to the world that doom is coming for you because you will not accept the gospel and you have already been judged.

You're not going to be the most popular guy in the room. You just won't be. And what's interesting about men in the world is they deny Christianity. None of that's true. Or they say, man, I'm gonna forget about that. That's too stressful for me to think about.

But what you find with the Apostle Paul is he always had that in front of him. Always had that information in front of him. So, The gospel necessarily encounters enmity no matter where you go. No matter where you go. And in contemporary Christianity, the gospel has been watered down so much that it really isn't offensive. It doesn't say what Paul the Apostle would have it say.

So, In verse 27, he says, are you bound to a wife? In other words, are you married? Don't seek to be released. He doesn't qualify whether they're married or whether they're believers or not. Are you released from a wife? Did your wife die or did she, as a non-believer, leave? Don't seek to get one. Again, the New Living Translation says, if you have a wife, don't seek to end the marriage. If you do not have a wife, don't seek to get married.

So what's he saying here? This doesn't mean that if a man is bound to a wife, he's to seek to be free, that it's better for him to do so. In other words, this is not an excuse to initiate a divorce because you don't believe that your wife is a believer.

If you take a look at 1 Corinthians 7, 10, and 11, in the New Living Translation, it says, but for those who are married, I have commanded you, I have a command that comes not from me, but from the Lord. A wife must not leave her husband. But if she does leave him, let her remain single, or else be reconciled to him, and the husband must not leave his wife. A very interesting verse here, because part of this verse is a command to be obeyed, and part of it is a suggestion. The first part is, I have a command that comes not from me, but from the Lord. A wife must not leave her husband. But if she does leave her husband, she needs to remain single or be reconciled back to him, and the husband must not leave the wife. So the first part of this verse is a command. The second part of this verse is really advice. And the last part of this verse, or what he's about to tell them is that what I'm really doing this for is to spare you as much trouble as I can.

So he guards against the misuse of commending a single life to a Christian ordinarily. And a lot of times what we're talking about, when Paul starts talking about the single life, we think, oh, that's the superior life. I'm not gonna be really spiritual unless I stay single. That's not what he's saying at all. He's saying if you're married, stay married. If you're single, it might be a good idea to stay single.

I'll tell you a story about this. I remember, again, growing up in Catholicism. Our family had a really close friend who was a Jesuit missionary in Jamaica. His name was Charles Judah. He was the neatest man. At that point, I'm about 14. He was really a neat guy.

And if you were a missionary in Jamaica at that time, you not only had a church, but you had a business enterprise, and you had a bank, and you had a savings, or you had a lending company, and all of this stuff to help people in your congregation. So you could work for them, you could put money in the bank, you could borrow money for whatever you needed, and the priest was in charge of this whole thing. And he was a busy guy, a really busy guy. So I'm fast forward about 10 years. I think I'm just out of school in Denver. And he is traveling through the United States. And he stopped to see my mom. And my mom called and said, they referred to him as Father Judah. I called him Charlie. Well, he wasn't my father.

He's coming through Denver on his way to Salt Lake City, and he's gonna spend a day or two, and I said, well, God, he can stay with us. Well, I had a great day with this guy, and I got to the point where I could ask him some really interesting questions, and I'm probably 24 years old, something like that. I'm not married, I'm single. And he and I got in a conversation.

I said, what is it with the celibacy of the priesthood? And he said, well, he said, you know, it's just the rules of the church that you, you know, he said, if I had a wife, I'd have to think about her first. I said, yeah. He said, what if the phone rang at three in the morning and it's somebody that I'm ministering to and they need me right then, but my wife is sick and she needs me right then, how do I choose? I said, I don't know. He said, wife comes first.

He said, so not having one is really a blessing if you do what I do. Well, if I had to make a judgment about Charlie Judah, I would say he was a believer, because he had a heart for his people. But he's a black man, and he was afraid to go to Salt Lake City, because that was the next stop. And I said, why? He said, there are prejudices over there. I said, are they really? I said, their president's here too. He said, yeah, I know. And he was a Jamaican, which meant that he probably was 75% African American, 25%, whatever.

And I never thought of him as a, he was just a friend of the family. The idea, that was the first time anybody, offered an idea to me that if you were gonna serve the Lord, if you could do it unencumbered, that would be a good thing. You wouldn't have distractions. That's the advice that Paul's giving here. He's not commanding it.

He's just saying, okay, if you really are involved in serving the Lord, not being married is a good thing because it leaves you free. But he says in verse 28, but if you should marry, you haven't sinned. And if a young lady or a virgin should marry, she hasn't sinned, yet you're gonna have trouble in this life and I'm trying to spare you. So he says, look, neither man or woman that gets married, they don't sin by getting married.

It's just left up to your own judgment. Gee, that makes a lot of sense that I as a believer can make judgments about my own life before the Lord. Christians who enter on marriage state they don't do any wrong and they will have, but they are gonna have trouble, I like this, in the flesh to add to their cares. Well, those of you and most of you, most of you are married. you do have to think about issues with your spouse that you wouldn't otherwise have. When he uses this term, trouble in this life, is he referring back to the present distress that he talked about in a previous verse? But it could be. Or he could say, well, what if you're married And the other, your spouse is suffering physically. She's got some real problems.

You have to pay attention to that. Or what if you are being persecuted? What if you are in an environment where your whole family is being threatened because of your faith? That's something that you have to focus on. You can't say, well, I'm gonna push that aside because I got a ministry. No, you have to think about that.

Other troubles that I thought about myself about that come up in a marriage that, how do I say this, may distract you from the Lord is, let's say your husband isn't one of those guys that's a spiritual leader. And he doesn't even know that that's what he's supposed to do. Or let's say your wife is someone who won't submit to you because she doesn't think that that's proper. I know in my experience of premarital counseling, a lot of times when we get to that point in Ephesians 5, wives, submit yourself to your husband. A contemporary woman will look at you like you're crazy. I'm not doing that.

What do you mean, we're a partner in this thing? No, the husband is the head of the wife and you go through that and you explain it on a grace basis and how God has set up marriage from Genesis to be a certain way. It doesn't mean that the man is in any way, especially a Christian man, superior to the woman or the woman doesn't mean that at all. It means how God has set up the functioning of a family and how it should go. Or, Maybe one of the members in a marriage, one of the partners has substance abuse, or don't understand the roles that they play as a husband or a wife, or they have in-laws that impinge upon their freedom and their marriage.

They're always trying to tell them how to do it. You know, if I marry you, one of the things that I always say to the in-laws, let them go. Leave them, don't get in their business. Let them go and cleave to each other. And I usually say it by name. Like I would say, hey Jim, let him go. And you, let her go. And let them cling to one another.

Hard to do as a parent sometimes. But there's a lot of things that can impinge on a marriage and impinge on someone who's a believer who wants to serve the Lord but also wants to be married. So when he talks about trouble in the flesh, it's probably inevitable at some place there will be issues that have to be taken care of. So Paul desires that if possible, they should be spared all this. Well, his answer is if you want to be spared all this, don't get married.

However, I got to thinking about how many single people have you ever met in your life that were really spiritual? All the people that have influenced me spiritually were all married. Every single one of them was. And they were, in my mind, spiritual giants. Hal Malloy was a spiritual giant. He was married, a bunch of kids. Even Miles Stanford was married. Every person that ever really influenced me was married.

So I'm thinking, do I know anybody who's single who has this fervency for Christ to such a point that they really decide, I want to serve the Lord and I just can't get married if I want to do that? I don't know anybody like that, do you? I probably, some of the lady missionaries we support, those New Tribes ladies that are now elderly, had that. My friend Charlie Judah probably had it. But most everybody that is of, a go-to person that I would call or sit down with and say, hey, I have this spiritual issue, can we talk this through?

They're married. And they've learned how to deal with the circumstances because when Paul says, when you come to Christ, stay where you are, he means that. You're where you are because God puts you there before you got saved. And you're to stay where he puts you. In times of severe persecution, marriage wouldn't be advisable. The pain of that, if you had to lose your husband or your wife or one of your children because of persecution would be too much.

I'm gonna read something now that I got out of Constable. I thought it was really relevant to us. He says, one of the unfortunate things that has happened to this text in the church is that the very pastoral concerns of Paul that caused him to express himself in this way has been the source of anxiety rather than comfort. Part of the reason is this, that in Western cultures, we do not generally live in a time of present distress. That's true, we don't. Thus, we fail to sense the kind of care that this text represents.

Beyond that, what is often heard is that Paul prefers singleness to marriage, which he does. But quite in contrast to Paul's own position over against the Corinthians, we often read into the preference of singleness, it is somehow a superior status. That causes some who do not wish to remain single to become anxious about God's will in their life. Such people need to hear it again. Marriage or singleness per se lies totally outside the category of commandments. To be obeyed or sin if one indulges. And Paul's preference here is not predicated on spiritual grounds, but on pastoral concerns. It is perfectly all right to marry.

The apostle would as far as possible have us without care so that we might undistractedly serve the Lord. How wonderful that would be if as a single person that you had such a heart for the Lord that that's all you focused on. Naturally, and so far rightly, the married seek to please each other, and they should, whereas the unmarried are more free to serve the Lord, undistractedly, in spirit and in body, assuming that they have matured enough that serving the Lord takes priority in their life. That would be my question. Is the Lord the center of your life? If he's not, and you're trying to decide, well, if I don't get married, maybe someday I can serve the Lord like I think I probably ought to. That's not good enough reason. You better have that heart for it before you make the decision.

Oops, gotta push the right button. So he says, This I say, brethren, the time has been shortened so that from now on, both those who have wives should be as though they had none. Oh, how does that work? Let's deal with the time factor first. So what amount of time is he referring to? It's the time the person has left to serve Christ, and it grows shorter every day. Every day that you and he or she lives. Is he talking about the Lord's return? Maybe. However, it's not the amount of time that we have left that concern Paul, but the fact that we know our time is limited. Paul's caution at this point means that we should make maximum use of every moment that we have. What struck me about this was the fact that Every one of us has a gift, a spiritual gift. And I've often thought that being a husband or a wife is a spiritual gift. Has to be. Being a dad or a mom is a spiritual gift.

Talked to somebody last night on the phone with the three kids and trying to deal with school in California. And she's just, you can tell she's at her wits end because like her one son just in the middle of class gets up and goes in the living room. Well, you need to get back there and listen. Oh, I'm tired of that, Mom. I don't want to do that anymore. You know, I really have a heart for these moms and dads who are trying to get their kids educated on Zoom. Give me a break with that, you know?

I think I probably would have done harm to my son by now. He wasn't God's greatest student anyway. You know, it's so difficult. But the point being this, all of us grow in marriage or single. We grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus, especially if you're in an exegetical church that teaches the word of God line by line. And you find that your ministry is the same block you live in, the neighbors that you have. Roger and I can attest to the fact that we never thought we'd be doing what we're doing now. Never. And we never went to seminary. And we don't have credentials, but here we are. And so, okay, Lord, we're going with it, and it's fine with us.

And if there are two guys in this congregation that know the time is short, it's him and me. The time remains very short, and I've had this thought in my life over the last few years. We as believers, only have this, if you live 30 years, 60 years, 90 years, 105 years, in light of eternity, you only have that time to serve the Lord under the present circumstances. And think about that. When we leave, when we get to go home, whether we're raptured or we die, This environment is over for eternity.

We will serve the Lord, but not with the hindrances that we have now. We won't have to walk by faith. We won't have these things going on with us that are going on right now. That time is really short. And there is this understanding that We only have a short amount of time here, a short amount of time to serve, whatever it is. You don't need to run down and get on a plane and go see Hassan.

You don't need to do that. It's right where you live, right where he puts you. He puts you there not only for your advancement and to bless you, but also for your spiritual involvement. You're right where you are. Paul says in 29, 30, and 31. Now this is really interesting. This I say, brethren, the time is shortened.

So from now on, both those who have wives should be as though they had none. And those who weep, as though they did not weep. And those that rejoice, as though they did not rejoice. And those who buy, as though they didn't possess. And those who use the world as though they did not make full use of it, for the form of this world is passing away. Boy, I looked at these verses and I said, what in the heck is he talking about?

Because, wait a minute. I'm supposed to rejoice all the time. Am I supposed to act like I don't rejoice? So here it is. Here's what this phrase means. Those who have wives should be as though they had none. What does that mean? Be careful of excess. You know married couples that one dotes over the other or not. This doesn't mean that you should say, well, honey, I'm becoming spiritual. I won't be able to, no. If you're smart, you bring her along. Those who weep as though they did not weep. Those who rejoice as though they did not rejoice.

Well, in Philippians 4.4 it says I'm to rejoice always. But I, another quick story.

Hasidic Jews live in my neighborhood and on Friday nights, you know the Jewish day goes from sundown to sundown. So the Sabbath starts on Friday night when the sun goes down and it goes till Saturday night. What did a rabbi tell me? It's sundown, stars out. So they will not turn their lights off on Friday night. They leave them on all night long because that's work.

So the guy behind me, he's got a room he leaves the lights on all night and every once in a while I look out there and he's got this thing on and a shawl and he's praying and he's doing this you know and I look at him and I think Boy, would I love to go tell him the gospel. But he wouldn't hear it because I knew the rabbi across the street on the other side and he and I talked about the gospel and boy, you talk about a door going down fast when I start talking about Christ. But there's no rejoicing in them because it's all performance. I'm doing this so God will notice and I can be righteous enough to be accepted in the kingdom.

Those who buy as though they did not possess and those who use the world. Again, those who buy to excess. You know Christians that buy to excess? I do, I do. You know my favorite trick at Home Depot? I impulse see this thing and I put it in my cart. I walk around for 20 minutes and I put it back, because now I've owned it for 20 minutes, it isn't that big a deal anymore.

And those who use the world as though they did not make full use of it. What's interesting about that is all of these things are things that we do. but we're to pay attention about do we overdo them? Do we focus on them so hard that we do not actually have control of them? They control us, and we're not free. When we see an example of this, it must be understood that it is forbidding excess.

The interpretation is only one that would harmonize with Philippians 4.4.

Now, Paul uses excess in mind as also seen in the word use or make full use. What that word means is the word make full use is a translation of a word which is a compound verb, use, and a preposition, kata, which means full use or overuse. In English, we would say, don't drive it into the ground. I'm overdoing it. This means don't overdo it, don't do it to excess.

The Lord can be crowded out of one's life by a thousand legitimate and wholesome activities. We should never let that happen. Golf, exercise, making money, running. running for office, whatever it is. Whatever gets in the way of the Lord is the point here. When we make purchases, we need to consider that we're only stewards of God's money. It's not mine, it's his, and I'm a steward. And that everything really belongs to him. The Christian should use the world and everything in it to serve the Lord. But we must not get completely wrapped up in the things of this world.

Now how many of you guys are thinking about going out and buying that 90 inch television for Christmas? No. Even the Lord Jesus, Phil raised his hand. Even the Lord Jesus spoke. on how the cares and woes of the world choke out the word of God. So what's important? It's the Lord Jesus and him alone.

And those who use the world as though they did not make full use of it, for the form of this world is passing away. This is where the rubber meets the road. Paul wanted us to live as people concerned with final events in history of the world or of humankind, not immediate. How long are we gonna be here and what's gonna happen soon? Our new existence in Christ should determine our lives. How do we live? Not the world in its present form.

Oh my goodness, I'm so fearful because of the virus. Do you think, I've said this before, do you think God doesn't know where every molecule of this virus is and which one of you is gonna get some and which aren't? Sure he does. And he's gonna use it for his glory.

Not the world in its present form. Buying and marrying should not be determined, should not determine our existence. A clear view of the future should do that. How much of a conversation have you had in the last 10 months about, oh, I think the rapture is coming soon? How much conversation have you had, gee, I see the things of the Lord, I see the world coming together, and hey, maybe we get to get out of here soon.

We get to go home to be with the Lord. And our viewpoint isn't, I want to get away from the problems. The viewpoint is, I want to get to Him. I want to be with Him, because He's my very life. I think it's close. Most believers, I'm having this conversation all the time with believers about, do you think Christ is coming soon? Yeah, I do. I really do. So let's close.

Dear Father, we all know that the world will pass away soon. We all know that you're coming to get us in the clouds. and we look forward to that so much. In the meantime, thank you for teaching us how we should behave in the world that you bless us way more than we deserve, and that we might, through the work of your spirit, keep our focus on the Lord Jesus Christ and walk with him and serve him. We thank you, Father, we pray in your Son's precious name, amen.