Dear Single Woman, God Sees You

Dannah Gresh: The beloved missionary and author, Elizabeth Elliot, wrote this: "Singleness may be only a stage of a life's journey, but even a stage is a gift. God may replace it with another gift, but the receiver accepts his gifts with thanksgiving. This gift for this day. The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived, not always looked forward to as though the real living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow." So good. So we have this responsibility to accept with thanksgiving whatever circumstance God has chosen to give us today, and yet at the same time, God gives us freedom to acknowledge this is hard. He tells us he sees us when we feel hidden and overlooked. He invites us to bring him our pain. So today, we hold these two realities together, acknowledging that singleness can be both a source of real sorrow and a gift. I'm your host, Dannah Gresh. You're listening to *Revive Our Hearts Weekend*. As many of you know, my dear friend Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth was single until age 57. That's when she married the man she affectionately calls her "DH," or "Dear Husband," Robert. Sadly, Robert went home to be with the Lord in early January, so Nancy has entered into another single season, leaning on the lessons she learned during those earlier years and learning new lessons, too. Back in 2001, she shared about some choices that led to trust and contentment in singleness, even on the hard days.
Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The first choice: I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God. That's a choice I make, to receive my singleness as a gift from God, to thank him for that gift and not to demand that he give me the gift of marriage. I love that response that the Virgin Mary had in Luke chapter one, when the angel came to her and said to this young teenage girl who was engaged to be married, "You're going to have a baby, and Joseph is not the father. God is the father." Just imagine how Mary's world just went into a whirlwind at that point. But I love her response. Luke 1:38, she said, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be unto me as you have said." That is a great answer for every circumstance that God brings into our lives. "I am the Lord's servant. May it be unto me as you have said." Lord, I receive your decision for my life. I receive this gift for my life. I'm not going to resent it. I'm not going to demand that you give me a different gift. Now, singleness as a gift may or may not be for a lifetime. I don't know if I will be single for all of my life. God hasn't revealed that to me. He probably hasn't revealed it to you. But the neat thing is I don't have to know. What I do need to know is he's made me single today, and my focus is on pleasing him today. Now, that doesn't mean if I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God, that I won't have unfulfilled longings. Can I say that it's okay to have unfulfilled longings? Can I also say that everyone has them? Every married woman has unfulfilled longings. Every single woman, every man, old, young—every person has deep inner longings that cannot be filled here on this earth, that cannot be filled by any created thing. There are times when as singles those unfulfilled longings particularly surface. I can remember not too long ago going to the wedding of the 20-year-old son of some of my peers. Some of my friends' children are now starting to have their own children. I went to this wedding. It was a sweet young couple, really precious wedding. But I sat there in that service, so thrilled for them, but it was just one of those moments when it hits you: I'm probably never going to be married. Or I may never be married, depending what age you are, how you think about that. There was a moment of sadness for me. I was thrilled for them, but there were tears in my eyes and a sense of unfulfilled longings. I can remember the Mother's Day Sunday when the worship leader in our church said, "Everyone who's not a mother, I want you to stand and read Proverbs 31 together." Well, I stood with all the men in the church. That was kind of what it felt like. Most of the women are sitting listening to this, and there's just that hard moment where it hits you: all these other women are mothers. Here I have the physical capacity to bear children, but God hasn't given me that privilege, to have children of my own, and to realize that likely I probably never will. There were tears. It was a moment of experiencing unfulfilled longings. But in the midst of that, I can still through my tears thank God and surrender to him afresh, realizing that this unfulfilled longing is material for sacrifice. It gives me something to offer God that costs me something. With that moment of teariness, that moment of longing, comes an opportunity for a fresh surrender, a fresh chance to say, "God, I trust you." Just last night, I bowed my heart before the Lord, and through my tears, I gave to the Lord a request. It's an unfulfilled longing in my heart. I was sad about something that's not been fulfilled, and I asked the Lord if it would please him to fulfill that longing, to fulfill that request. Then I just laid it up to him and in a fresh surrender said, "But Lord, I trust you to do what is best. I receive whatever your answer is. Whatever your will is in this matter, I receive." There's a freedom that comes from that. Amen.
Dannah Gresh: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth on offering unfulfilled longings to the Lord. Notice Nancy doesn't say singleness is a breeze. There were real tears during her single years. But by God's grace, she learned to say, "Yes, Lord," and she found freedom in those words. What might it look like for you to step into that freedom? Would you take a moment right now to ask the Lord that? To say, "This is hard, Father, but I want to offer my singleness to you, to receive this truth that your way is best, that you are always working for my good." I want you to hear from another dear friend of mine, Sharmaine Porter. She's learned to confess that throughout her own single years. Once upon a time, Sharmaine toured with me as a lead True Girl teacher, and today she's the Learning Community Coordinator at a ministry called Impact 360 Fellowship. It's kind of a gap year, and she's the female leader. She does a weekend retreat on biblical womanhood and coordinates a lot of other biblical worldview learning that these students undergo for nine months. Now, she has this real passion for the church to approach the topic of singleness more biblically, and her wisdom on this topic has impassioned my heart to approach singleness differently. Here's Sharmaine.
Sharmaine Porter: I think it's 1 Corinthians 7:17, says in the Message version, "Let God, not your relationship status, define your life." I started to not only believe that and let that shape how I was living my life, but I started to become a fan of God defining my life. So the conversations started with, "Lord, help me in this area of singleness to trust you there," but eventually it went into, "You're a holistic God. You're not just concerned about my relationship status. You're concerned about my relationships with my family. You're concerned about my relationships with the people that are around me. You're concerned about what I eat. You're concerned about how I spend my days." So I started to invite him into my life, my relationship status included, but I didn't just let that, the relationship status, define me because God doesn't define me just by that.
Dannah Gresh: Let's stop there in 1 Corinthians 7 because as this part of your story was unfolding, you're touring with True Girl, I'm listening to that honest declaration to God, sometimes in our prayer circle, as you would just say, "God, I trust you with this desire." I think for me, that was the beginning of my rethinking of singleness, and I thought, I think we're getting this wrong as the church. I think maybe not everyone in church, but I was guilty of it and others around me were. We weren't satisfied to just pray for Sharmaine to glorify God; we were praying for Sharmaine to find a husband. My husband confronted me and said, "You need to stop praying for Sharmaine's husband and you need to start praying for Sharmaine's worth in Christ." So between your honesty and his confrontation—my husband has a great passion to approach the topic of singleness with biblical honesty and integrity.
Sharmaine Porter: Yeah, I've experienced that.
Dannah Gresh: So I began studying this passage, 1 Corinthians 7. 1 Corinthians 6 and 7 is a lot about how the Corinthian church, the Greek and Roman culture, had a lot of lies they were believing about sex, marriage, and singleness. Now, I didn't realize there were things in here about singleness. I was hyper-focused, as is the problem, on the sex and the marriage stuff. But in 1 Corinthians 7:8, it says, "To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am." What Paul was addressing there in part was the fact that beginning at about 31 BC, Augustus Caesar had widows fined if they weren't married within two years of their husband's death. The value of singleness—well, there was no value for it in the culture. Even the rule of the land was, "Don't be single." So Paul's addressing that in here. He's saying, "Wait a minute, wait a minute." Of course, we know that Paul also said, "Hey, if somebody is single or they are a widow, you pay their way." Because that was a very practical need in the day; women couldn't have a job. He says, as Christians, we value singleness so much that we're going to pay their way. This confronted me in terms of, oh, we are so guilty as the church of Corinth was of not valuing singleness and responding to it differently. The passage you just quoted, 1 Corinthians 7:17, in the ESV version, says, "Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches." You just quoted it in the Message version, which I think a lot of times we're like, oh, change of topic now, but it wasn't. So say that again in the Message version.
Sharmaine Porter: In the Message version, it says, "Let God, not your marital status, define your life." He's saying, hey, listen, this verse is still attached to the topic of singleness. So let each person lead the life the Lord has assigned to them, which is what you were saying you were discovering in a hard way on the hot pavement of life. You know what's funny, Dannah, is one thing that over the years I started to realize that there was a disconnect between what the Bible was saying and what the church was telling me. God has never made me feel belittled or less than or unqualified because of my singleness. I have, unfortunately, felt like that in the church, though. So that to me was, well then I need to start redefining how I'm thinking about my singleness. I need to start redefining when people say, "Do you think you have the gift of singleness?" At first, I honestly would be like, I don't want you to say that about me because I'm not trying to be labeled by that, and I assumed that people were saying because you have the gift now, then you're going to have the gift forever. But as I started to do some research on this and getting back to what the Bible, what Paul was actually saying, getting into the Greek and things like that, I started to realize that Paul's saying, if you're single, you have the gift. If you're single, you have the gift of singleness. But also, if you're married, you have the gift of marriage. Think about receiving a birthday present. You wouldn't just have that gift and sit it on your table and just leave it there, or you wouldn't just put it in the back of your closet. You would take that gift, you would open it up and see what was inside. How do I work this? What can I understand about it? How can I use it in my everyday life? If it's a good gift, I think that's what the Lord is waiting for a lot of us to do, is realize that whether you have the gift of singleness or the gift of marriage, open that baby up and see what it is. It's a tool for us to use for however long the Lord has us have it to bring him glory.
Dannah Gresh: Wow, what a powerful flip of the singleness script. Thank you, Sharmaine Porter, for turning our eyes towards God's glory. Single or married, that's what it's all about. Sharmaine has told me she likes to pray, "Lord, squeeze all the glory possible out of my single years," and I love that. May it be so, Lord, for sweet Sharmaine and for every single sister listening today. Last but not least, we're hearing from Portia Collins and Kristine Hoover. Many of you know Portia from our days together on the video cast, *Grounded*. She's a dear friend of mine, as well as a wife, mom, author, and speaker. On *Grounded*, she sat down with pastor's wife Kristine Hoover to talk about her book, *You Are Not Forgotten*.
Portia Collins: That's how we want to close today, meditating on the God who always sees, always remembers, always cares. This isn't a message for single women explicitly, but for every woman who worries she's overlooked and unseen. If that's where you're at in your singleness today, I hope this conversation will be a rich encouragement. So let's start with the obvious. Have you ever felt forgotten?
Kristine Hoover: I have. I have felt forgotten in several ways: in my marriage, in ministry, I've felt forgotten. I think if we were honest, I think everyone at some point has felt forgotten, unseen, disregarded, overlooked. A lot of my questions that were coming up in that time, I was directing toward God because I felt unseen by people, but really I started to question: Does God see me? Has he forgotten me? Why do I feel like I'm languishing in the desert, in the wilderness? Does he see? Is he going to act on my behalf? So I started asking those questions of Scripture and finding that there were people in Scripture asking the same questions that I was asking. Thankfully, God showed me some truths about who he is that helped me come out of that season. But yes, to answer your question, I have felt unseen and forgotten.
Portia Collins: Me too. So you work with a lot of women. What are some of the unhealthy or maybe even unholy ways that we try to get attention, the attention that we crave when we feel overlooked?
Kristine Hoover: That's a great question because I did as I was going through this processing with Scripture, with the Lord. I didn't want to see at first that some of this was my own—I was involved in the process of being unseen and I was hiding myself in certain ways. I think the way that we can determine how we are doing that is to think about how we clamor sometimes. Who am I looking to for a sense of being seen, a sense of value, a sense of validation, that I am worthy of attention? We see this all over our culture. You look around on the news and you see that there is clamoring to be seen for maybe a certain issue that people think is important. We do the same as Christians sometimes, clamoring for others to affirm our gifts, that we're waiting for somebody to give us permission to do what God has called us to do. For me, it was clamoring. It was, I'm going to hide myself a little bit, my real self, but I'm going to perform and I'm going to do well externally so that people will pat me on the back. It really became an idolatry, an idol for me, of performance. But I was looking for that sense of validation from people rather than knowing God sees me and I'm doing what I do for him. That's where I'm going to have a sense of peace rather than a sense of, I have to clamor for what I want and what I desire.
Portia Collins: You sound like me. Everything you're saying are things that I could very well say myself. So I love where we're headed here. Okay, I want you to take us to the story of Hagar. Who is she and what can she specifically teach us the next time we feel overlooked?
Kristine Hoover: Well, that's where the Lord took me. When I started realizing I was in a pit, is what it felt like, the Lord spoke to me: "I see." I knew immediately that he was taking me to Hagar. So I went and I opened my Bible to Genesis 16. I'm looking at her story and how did God meet her to where she said, "God, I name you the God who sees." She had an experience with him. What I found was interesting about Hagar is that she was an Egyptian slave. She was a part of Abraham's household. Sarah, before she became pregnant, sent Hagar away because Hagar had become pregnant. So it was a whole mess. Everybody was involved in the mess. Hagar goes out and she says, "I'm leaving. I'm going home." So she's in the desert. She sits down and she's in a hopeless place, knowing that she's not going to make it, her child, her unborn child's not going to make it unless somebody intervenes. So she sits down and that's when God meets her. I love what God says to her: "Hagar, where have you come from and where are you going?" That question is the question that the Lord asked me through Hagar. Where have you come from? Name the unseenness that you feel. What is the pain that you feel in that? But also, where are you going? Are you going to walk down a path of bitterness, hopelessness, despair? Or God says to her, "I want you to go back. I want you to go back to your life and live your life." The reason why he says that is not that she's to go back to an abusive situation or whatever; he's saying go back under my protection, under my blessing, this covenant that I've made with Abraham and this child that he will have through Sarah. So I think that for me, that's Hagar's story. We're going back, we're doing hard things to kind of come out of that idolatry of clamoring and to truly walk in seenness. What Hagar takes us back to is really Abraham's son with Sarah, Isaac. Through Isaac's line comes Jesus. So really he's bringing us back to Jesus to show us that through Christ, God sees us. He's acted for us, and he acts for us in specific ways when he sees us in our wilderness.
Portia Collins: Absolutely. So let's dig in a little bit more here. How does knowing this, how does knowing that God sees us—share with our *Grounded* sisters, how can we find comfort and strength in knowing that God sees us?
Kristine Hoover: That's a great question. I think that when we are sure that God sees everything we do in his name, and including the things that we're doing in our heart to forgive maybe, to obey when it's hard, to reject bitterness—when we know that, there is a peace and a security that we can live in that can come from no other person seeing us. I talk in the book about there are different categories of unseenness that we may experience, like disregard, or being misunderstood, or lack of appreciation, and several more. But I think that when we know that God sees us, he kind of meets us in each of those categories. We're not disregarded. We've been regarded. We were regarded at the cross and through the resurrection. We continue to be. One of the things that I love that I discovered about Jesus was thinking about—I thought so much in my Christian life about what God had done for me in the past through the cross and resurrection, but to think about and to meditate on Jesus as my intercessor presently. That he sees and is praying for me, interceding for me, and the Holy Spirit is interceding for me. So to know that is such security. It gives for me, it's changed me in the sense it's given me courage. It's given me courage to live the life God has asked me to live faithfully, to use the gifts that he's given me faithfully for him, and not doing that to be seen, not for visibility's sake, but to do it for the Lord. I think about Matthew 6 and how Jesus says, "Don't do these things so that people will see you. Do these things for me privately and I will reward you." It makes me smile to think about it, just the joy of having a relationship with God where we know he sees us and values us, and what we do for him is for him and for his eyes alone. Really all of that need for approval or validation or permission just kind of slides right off when we know those things.
Portia Collins: I love that. I love that. So you're a pastor's wife. I get it. I get it. Talk to the woman who particularly feels unseen in ministry. I know that as a woman in ministry, I think there is a misconception that we don't struggle with this, that because we are primarily seen, that we don't struggle with this. So yeah, talk to the woman in ministry. Perhaps she feels like her efforts go unnoticed and that maybe she's not really making much of a difference. What hope and perspective can you offer her?
Kristine Hoover: I will give her my favorite verse, which is Hebrews 6:10, and it says this: "For God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you demonstrated for his name by serving the saints and by continuing to serve them." I go to that verse a lot to remember. God is—because he is just, he sees everything that we do and that others do, sometimes to wound us or us to wound others. But what we do to serve his saints in his name, he remembers. He sees and remembers and rewards, as I said earlier in Matthew 6. So I go to that a lot. People may not see, but it kind of doesn't matter. It matters to me that God sees and will reward and not that I get a sense of appreciation for that. Now, that has come over many years of wrestling with my selfishness. I want the glory sometimes. I think when we want the glory, we want the appreciation. But if we see God's glory, we can live in just the truth that he sees and he rewards.
Dannah Gresh: Dear single woman, God sees you. He really sees you as you offer your singleness to him, embrace the good work he's set before you today, and choose to spend yourself for his glory. Let me repeat Kristine's favorite verse as a benediction over you: "For God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you demonstrated for his name by serving the saints and by continuing to serve them." Again, that's Hebrews chapter six, verse 10. You may feel hidden during these single years, but God never forgets the woman who pours herself out for his glory. Instead, he honors her, always working for her good. If you're desiring to say, "Yes, Lord" in this season, to pray like Sharmaine, "God, squeeze all the glory possible out of my single years," would you let us join with you? You can submit a prayer request at ReviveOurHearts.com/prayer. We'd love to hear from you and pray alongside you. One of our prayers for you is that you'd discover God's goodness right where you are. That is why our team created a brand-new book, *Finding Beauty in Every Season*. You'll enjoy 30 days of stunning nature imagery paired with encouragement drawn from Nancy's teaching. It's a gentle daily reminder that in every chapter of your story, God is writing something beautiful. Request yours when you make a donation of any amount to support *Revive Our Hearts*. You can do that at ReviveOurHearts.com. Calling all young moms: next weekend we're focusing on your season of life. If you're feeling weary and in need of some gospel-saturated wisdom for the little years, you'll find that right here. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy sweet fellowship with your local church this week. Thanks for listening today. I'm Dannah Gresh. We'll see you next time for *Revive Our Hearts Weekend*. This program is a listener-supported production of *Revive Our Hearts* in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.