Archive for August, 2011
The Single Man Gets Married: Two Reflections on My Single Life
Posted by thetenthleper in Marriage and Singleness on August 21, 2011
[Here's a couple of reflections I jotted down earlier in the week about singleness. Figured I'd get this out there before I leave on my honeymoon tomorrow!]
As of this Saturday I’m going to be a married man, and a big part of me still can’t believe I get to say that. Many people have gone through long periods of singleness in their lives, but I’ve so often felt like the singlest of singles. Seriously: I went through all my college life without going on a single date, and then a couple more years after college. I had almost an entire decade between dates. The first one I went on in my twenties was right before I turned 27. Adding salt to the wound is the fact that I’m a hopeless romantic. I’m the guy who likes to buy flowers, write notes, open the car door, etc. So my many, many dateless Friday nights belonged not to a single who felt he wanted to serve the Lord as a single man for the rest of his life. No, I often spent those evenings with a heart that was aching to be with someone.
Though girlfriends in my life have been few and far between, I’d always held out an intense optimism that I’d meet my soul mate one day. I’ve been convinced so many times that I’d found “the One”, only to end up heartbroken and frustrated. Typically my love went unrequited. Still I held out hope that “the One” was still to come (or that the one who broke my heart would realize her mistake). But when I hit my mid-twenties and had no prospects at all, I began to be doubtful for the first time in my life that I’d ever marry. I felt in my heart that God had built me for marriage, but I struggled to recognize that with the fact that girls just didn’t seem to notice me in the way I wanted to be noticed.
Singleness had long felt like an unwanted part of my identity. I was sick of hearing sermons on dating. I was sick of hearing preachers talk about finding a wife as if it was as easy as going to pick up something from the store. I was very cynical when preachers (married preachers) would encourage singles to live up their singleness and embrace it as a gift from God. ”Good advice,” I thought, “from the guy who’s going to go home and sleep next to the woman he loves tonight.” It felt like a beggar-turned-millionaire telling beggars how awesome the beggar life is and then flying off in his private jet.
So it’s with utter humility and weirdness that I get to be that guy now. There’s probably a million reflections concerning singleness I could come up with given enough time, but for now here’s two…
Reflection #1: Circumstances Don’t Change Idols.
It took me a long time to realize it, but my desire for a wife had straight up become an idol. There was a long period of time that I felt like life wasn’t worth getting excited about if I was going to do it as a single guy. By way of reminder, wanting a spouse is a good desire. What’s bad is when it becomes a need.
All I wanted when I was single was someone to love and hold. And it hurt to not have it. So when Krystal came into my life, that want went away, right? Not even close. On the surface it looked like I just wanted to be married. But deep in my heart I was suffering from approval idolatry. I needed the affirmation and acceptance that I believed a wife would offer. When I didn’t get that, I lamented that I was unloveable and that no woman would ever want to marry me. Yet when I got a woman who loves me and wanted to marry me, that didn’t solve the problem. See, I still crave that affirmation like crazy. The context just looks different. In singleness, that unmet need for affirmation resulted in an inner voice telling me that I’d die alone. In dating and engagement, whenever I upset Krystal or hurt her in any way, that inner voice tells me that she’s disappointed in me and is having second thoughts about whether or not she wants to be with me. And when I upset her in marriage, I imagine that voice will tell me that she’s wondering if she feels like she made a mistake in marrying me. ”Yeah she said she wanted to be with me forever, but she didn’t have all the info on me. She didn’t know how rotten I was, and now she’s having buyer’s remorse.”
I wish I’d known earlier that having a woman in my life doesn’t magically cure my loneliness. In one sense I did know it. I’d heard it a million times before from preachers that a spouse ultimately couldn’t satisfy, only Jesus could. But deep down I always assumed the people saying that could only say it because they didn’t desire to be married as much as I did. They didn’t know how deeply my desire ran, I thought. But now I realize that I am fighting the same battle in my heart when I fail Krystal as I did on all those lonely Friday nights as a single with no prospects.
Reflection #2: Know What God Has Promised You.
This is a big one. You may have a strong prompting from the Holy Spirit that you’re supposed to be married. You may even have a strong prompting of the person you’re supposed to be married to. But it’s one thing to feel led by the Spirit and another to trust in a promise from God. When all is said and done, God has not promised you a spouse. When I first confessed that out loud it was pretty hard to accept. But as I repeated it over and over it became a great comfort to me.
We’re all like the Israelites in the wilderness after Egypt. They didn’t trust God to provide for them. So they complained. More specifically, they grumbled because they didn’t trust that God was good. My grumbling in singleness was a grumbling against God’s goodness. It was a declaration that “I am single, and I shouldn’t be. God hasn’t given me what he should.” To add sin to sin, I’d mask my frustration by trying to make it look religious. I wasn’t “grumbling”, I just “had a deep desire from God to be married.”
I wish I’d seen that there is a distinction between being burdened and grumbling. For example it’s one thing for a believer to have a burden to go minister to a certain people group overseas or go plant a church in a certain city. It’s another thing to want to go do those things because you’re grumbling about how materialistic and uncool your ministry opportunities are in your current locale. (Dallas hipster reformed Christians like me struggle with this a lot, ‘cuz I mean…Dallas.) I believe God has always put a desire for marriage into my heart. I believe he built me for it. But I wish I had owned that and then just trusted him to do something about it rather than feel like I should help him out because his timing wasn’t good. (Should’ve studied the life of Abraham more closely.)
Before Krystal and I started dating, God began to flood me with comfort when I began to simply accept that he wasn’t out to screw me over. It did wonders for me to simply focus on what he had promised me. For instance, he had promised to be good to me. (Romans 8:28) God is in the process of spiraling everything in your life toward your good and his glory, and if that doesn’t comfort you, the problem isn’t in the truth but in your definition of “good.” I started trusting his promise rather than my feelings, and the result was comfort. Additionally (and especially with regard to singleness), I banked on his promise in Psalm 84:11- “For the LORD is a sun and shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.” God’s not a withholding God. He wasn’t holding out on me in the blessings department because I was single. I realized that I was no less blessed than my married friends. He doesn’t always bless in the same way, but he’s in the business of lavishing blessing upon every single one of his children. This is a very clear Biblical truth (see Ephesians 1:3 and 2 Peter 1:3-4) that I could either choose to trust or not.
Introduction to Ezekiel: The Ministry of Ezekiel the Prophet
Posted by thetenthleper in Ezekiel on August 10, 2011
My next entry in this whole Ezekiel series will be cover the first chapter of the book. But before we get there, I wanted to note a few things about Ezekiel’s ministry, particularly the climate he was called to minister in and the roles God called him to take on as a prophet.
The Climate of His Ministry
I’ve already covered some of this a couple entries back, but it’s worth revisiting. Ezekiel had been carried off to Babylon in 597 BC as part of the first deportation (second if you count the smaller deportation in 605 which included the prophet Daniel). There was another deportation in 587 when Babylon finally crushed the southern kingdom of Judah and destroyed the temple of the Lord. The first part of Ezekiel’s ministry was from about 593-587 and was directed to the exiles who had been taken in 597. These people had naturally suffered much trauma. They had been relocated far away from their homes and from loved ones who had been left behind. Yet amidst such harsh realities, there was still a glimmer of hope in some. No matter how bad things were for them, Jerusalem could never fully be destroyed. Or so they thought. When the city was destroyed with many more exiles to show for it, that glimmer of hope was shattered.
The fall of Jerusalem resulted in spiritual and psychological trauma for the exiles. They simply couldn’t believe it. The temple and city of their God had been destroyed. Were the Babylonian gods more powerful than the God of Israel? Had he been shamed as they had by a superior force? Was there any future left for them as a people? Where was God? Does he even have the ability to rescue them from the apparently superior Babylonian deities? How should they make sense of this catastrophe? ”Ezekiel, then, was called to serve God in the midst of a shattered and shell-shocked people, a context not far removed from many contexts of mission today.” (Christopher Wright) Psalm 137 remembers Jewish life in exile:
By the water of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
Ezekiel’s call was to preach to people who felt abandoned by their God.
The Roles of His Ministry
Ezekiel was called to be a pastor to his people. The trauma of exile and of Jerusalem’s fall took many forms for the displaced people of God. Some rejected their faith outright. Others maintained baseless optimism. There were those who protested that God’s judgment was unfair. And some sank into despair. As pastor, Ezekiel labored to bring his people to a right understanding of their situation. They needed to understand that they were going to be in exile for a while, that their judgment was just, yet also that God’s judgment would one day end. A restoration would come. ”The emphasis on newness is overwhelming: a new shepherd, new hearts, a new spirit, new breath, new unity. Ultimately only the language of resurrection (37:1-14) can really do justice to the river of hope being poured out over the languishing dead bones of the exiles.” (Christopher Wright)
Ezekiel was also called to be an evangelist. As a watchmen meant to warn the people, his warnings were to prompt them into repentant action. Aspects of this included:
-Conviction of sin. Ezekiel was ministering a very entitled people who felt proud of their heritage and who felt that they had “an absolute and eternal right to the privileges of land, city and temple.” (Wright) Some of the people adamantly refused to acknowledge that they were sinners and thus had brought judgment upon themselves. Because of this, Ezekiel gives perhaps the most graphic depictions of sin found in Scripture (chapters 16, 20, 23) in order to shock them out of their false innocence.
-Apologetics. Particularly, Ezekiel engaged in what’s called theodicy, or the field of apologetics that addresses the seemingly unjust actions of God. (A classic example of theodicy is answering why a good God would allow evil in the world.) Many of the exiles were grumbling and complaining that God was not fair to inflict such judgment upon them. Ezekiel needed to correct these false assumptions.
-Divine Grace. Ezekiel complements his horrific depictions of sin with some absolutely beautiful depictions of grace. Israel had continually sought to be like the nations around them (20:32), but God would have none of it. Through his judgment, he would redeem them. For his own sake he be merciful to his people. Christopher Wright beautifully sums this up: “Yahweh will gather and cleanse his people, do some radical heart surgery, and grant his own Spirit to enable full obedience. The great gospel language of the New Testament is hardly more inspiring, and indeed owes some of its most precious imagery to Ezekiel’s eloquence.”
-Appeal for Repentance. When conviction of sin has settled in the heart, the next step is to repent. Ezekiel reminds the exiles that repentance will result in salvation. (18:21-23) Confessed sins are sins that will not be remembered.
-Assurance of Life. God’s grace is freely and abundantly offered for all who turn to him and repent. For those who did, God promised to bring them back to life. (37:12-14)
The darkness was great for the exiles, but the God who spoke brought light into the darkness at creation wouldn’t let the story end there for the people he loved. This kind of darkness needs a greater light than stars can give, and he was prepared to give it. When God speaks, darkness scatters. That brings us to the first chapter of Ezekiel’s prophecy.
