Living Out God's Purpose, Married or Single
Breakpoint
Colson Center
4.8 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2022
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whether married or single, the call of Christ for His people is to reject a life focused on individual self-fulfillment and instead embrace a life focused on Christ and His Kingdom.
That's why we are making available an amazing new book featuring G.K. Chesterton's best writing about the family. The Story of the Family is compiled by the Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist. Receive a copy—and access to exclusive videos Ahlquist created for the Colson Center—with a gift of any amount this month. Go to colsoncenter.org/October.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. |
| 0:06.2 | For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. |
| 0:09.5 | The family, argued G.K. Chesterton, is a non-negotiable aspect of reality. |
| 0:14.8 | In his own words, quote, the triangle of truisms, father, mother, and child cannot be destroyed. |
| 0:23.0 | It can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it. Well, today, that triangle of truisms is not only disregarded, it's attacked, |
| 0:29.2 | dismissed. We even attempt to replace it. Christians face the challenge of embracing and at times |
| 0:34.6 | defending God's created order as essential to both the well-being of the next |
| 0:39.0 | generation and the future of our civilization. And it's important to remember that for a vast majority |
| 0:44.6 | of skeptics of God's very good idea, marriage and family is not merely a matter of theoretical |
| 0:49.9 | disagreement. It's been a source of existential confusion, disappointment, even pain. Because of this |
| 0:55.9 | bad track record of personal experience, along with other cultural factors and personal choices, |
| 1:01.8 | more people today find themselves single than ever before. For the first time since 1976, |
| 1:08.3 | according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more Americans are single than are |
| 1:12.9 | married, 50.2%. In 1950, that number was just 22%. And such a cultural moment like ours, is it even |
| 1:21.4 | possible to reconcile God's design for marriage with the experience of singleness? Does God also have a plan and a design for |
| 1:28.8 | those who never marry? Historically, Christianity has elevated singleness as a calling. I wish that all |
| 1:35.5 | were as I am, wrote the Apostle Paul. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon |
| 1:41.0 | you, but to promote good order and secure your undivided devotion to the Lord. |
| 1:45.7 | And Jesus, answering a question about marriage, also mentions that there are those who are |
| 1:49.9 | eunuchs from birth because of war and violence or by choice in service of the kingdom of God. |
| 1:55.7 | Now, of course, Jesus also taught us by example. Fully God, and it can be rightly said, the most |
| 2:00.7 | fully human person ever, |
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