The Satisfied Life

Introduction

Well last weekend I was away guest preaching for the youth retreat of another church up in Pennsylvania. The theme of the retreat was focused on how these youth, as young Christians, can thinking about holding firm to their faith in the midst of a constantly changing and sometimes turbulent culture. So we talked about a lot of topics such as marriage, sex and sexuality, pornography, and technology use. And as we were talking about all of these cultural issues and what the Bible has to say about them, I found myself continually coming back to this idea: that before we can understand what the Bible says about these issues, we really need to understand how the culture has influenced us to think, and how we may be captive to the culture in ways that are less than biblical.

In our text this morning the Apostle Paul is continuing to apply Christian teaching to the subject of marriage and sex by becoming especially targeted toward those who are widowed, divorced, or not yet married.

How our culture views these subjects is going to have a significant impact on how we understand this text. Consider the fact that for a large period of church history, for almost a thousand years during the monastic period, being single and celibate in service to the church was the highest “calling” a Christian could have for their lives. While the Roman Catholic church doesn’t quite emphasize this sacred/secular divide to the same degree as it used to, by mandating that its priests and nuns remain single and celibate they certainly still send a similar message: marriage is good; but if you really want to serve God, you’ll remain single and commit yourself in service to the church.

Later in history, thanks to several movements of thought such as the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the value and dignity of marriage was reclaimed, but the pendulum quickly swung to the other side. For much of modern, western history - especially in the 20th century - marriage became idolized by both the church and the surrounding culture, such that it was very, very difficult - and even odd - to live your life as a single, unmarried and celibate person.

In the last decade or so, we have entered into a time where once again the culture and the church view marriage and a life of singleness differently. Except unlike the monastic period, when the church idolized singleness and the surrounding culture valued marriage; it is now our culture which idolizes the single life and the church which, most of the time unintentionally, creates an idol out of marriage.

As recently as 2000, married 25- to 34-year-olds outnumbered their never-married peers by a margin of 55% to 34%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, those estimates had almost reversed, with never-marrieds outnumbering marrieds by 53% to 40%. Young Americans have quickly become wary of marriage.

There are several reasons that people have attributed to this decline in marriage: some say its because wages are too low, and if wages were higher there would be more confidence to get married. Other