On behalf of Pastor Mark and Grace Driscoll, we want to thank you for listening to this series based on the book of First Corinthians titled Good News for Bad Christians.

In this series from 2007, Pastor Mark is taking us on a 33-week journey through First Corinthians verse by verse.

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Thank you again and enjoy this message from First Corinthians.

Now nationally, when we move from our church to our city to our nation, nationally about half of American adults are unmarried singles.

So this is a growing number because people are waiting longer to marry. In 1960, the average man was 23, the average woman was 20 upon marriage.

Today, the average man is 27, the average woman is 23. And so people are waiting longer to marry, but is that because they love Jesus and are maintaining their purity

and using all of their time to memorize verses? No. We dealt with that last week. And what singles tend to do is wait longer to get married but have sex until they get married to the degree that 41% of all women will have cohabitated,

shacked up, lived with a boyfriend before marriage at some point in their life, four out of ten women. So nine out of ten people will marry, four out of ten women will cohabitate before they marry.

Some of you may be shocked to hear that that is a problem with God. Now last couple weeks ago, when I talked about it, some of you said, well what? I got to email, what killed you? I was fornication. What counts? What is that?

So you're not supposed to have any sex until you get married and sex is for marriage. So we're going to talk to you about sex and marriage and singleness and all of this. And there's two things I want to establish up front. There is a theological issue to consider, that being marriage. And there is a practical issue to consider, that being if and when you should marry for practical reasons.

So theological will stay in Genesis chapter 2, that it is not good for a man to be alone, right? Why? Because men are weird. You dudes wear black pants and white socks and you have what color leather couch? Black with what? A large television? That's all your furniture, right? You wear sports jerseys all the time, no product in your air. There's a lot of reasons why it's not good for a man to be alone.

It's not good for a man to be alone, Genesis 2 says, so singleness is not ideal. God made a woman to come along and fix the man. And then we also see in Hebrews 13, that marriage is to be honored by all, single and married. We see in 1 Timothy chapter 4, that anyone who discourages marriage or tells you marriage is bad and you shouldn't get married, that's an evil thing. That is a demonic lie. So theologically the Bible elevates marriage. It embraces marriage and marriage is to be honored.

And to be preferred, but that is just the theological issue. Practically, there are seasons, reasons why you may not want to get married right now or may want to wait for a while to be married. We will all be single at some point. Some of us are single until we're married. Some of us will be divorced or widowed, then be single again. Singleness is an issue for everyone.

And singleness is to be preferred under certain conditions for certain seasons, for certain purposes. And so we must, in addition to being theological, we must be practical.

So we pick it up. In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 8, Paul has this hip, cool, trendy young church just like you guys. And they were all sleeping together, living together, dating, making out friends with benefits, booty calls.

So we were doing that in Corinth. And here's what Pastor Paul has to say. Now to the unmarried and the widows, meaning chapter 7, verse 8, those who have never married, those were were married, but their spouse died, unfortunately, it is good for them to stay unmarried as I am.

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