In this sermon, the speaker discusses the importance of singleness and the purpose God has for single women, using examples from the Bible. The speaker highlights the stories of Anna the prophetess, Mary Magdalene, and Tabitha (Dorcas) to illustrate how God used single women in different ways. Anna served in the temple, Mary Magdalene followed Jesus and supported his ministry, and Tabitha was known for her good works and charitable deeds. The speaker encourages single women to embrace their season of singleness, take initiative in serving the Lord, and learn from these heroines of the faith. Recognizing that God has individualized plans for women, the speaker also discusses the importance of being involved in the church and being proactive in serving others.

Let's start with prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the opportunity to be together this morning studying your heart for singleness and for single women. And I thank you for every one of the single women in this room and the particular story that you are writing for each of them and the purpose that you have for each of them being single right now. I thank you for the fact that nobody here who's single is single by accident or because you've forgotten them or because you don't care about them, or because you don't want good things for them, but it actually is because you're a kind father, and a generous father, and a father who loves to give good gifts to his children. So I ask that all of our hearts would be opened this morning to worship you and praise you for the special purpose that you do have in each of our lives and for the gift that singleness is in its own way.

I ask that you would give us all the grace to be undistracted, anxious about the things of the Lord and not the things of the world, and undividedly devoted to you. And I pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. So I realized the other day that I have been speaking on single Christian womanhood for almost 20 years. I started at 15 and I'm 34, I'll be 35 in a few months, And I realized I've been going around to conferences talking about being single for as long as probably a lot of you have been alive, which is kind of a mind-bending thought for me. But what makes this time of speaking different than all the other times I've spoken is that this is the last time I'll be speaking about singleness as a single woman because I'm getting married in about three weeks.

Well, thanks, y'all. It is really exciting. And he was definitely worth the wait. But I can't even tell you what a strange feeling it was to be like driving up here to this conference in the car, trying to do some wedding planning here and there, trying to research and order things for renovating our little house, and trying to write a talk on how amazing singleness is all at the same time. But there is a sense in which these things do actually go together so well, and honestly, the beauties of singleness has been, It has been a thing that's been on my mind as something that I keep thanking the Lord for, even as I'm also so excited about getting married and I keep thanking the Lord for how amazing marriage is gearing up to be.

So, Yeah, what we want to talk about today is basically just some things that the Lord has taught us about how special God's plans for the single season are and some of the ways that He has used single women in the Bible. I don't know how many of you would be able to relate to me in this, but growing up, I had no idea how many single women God used in the Bible because my radar was really only onto the married women. I would look at people like the Proverbs 31 woman or Priscilla and I'd be like, that's who I will be when I grow up. And that's the only model of womanhood that I was really paying any attention to. And I really thought I would never be a single woman for a long time.

I thought I was going to get married young, I wanted to get married young, and the life that I dreamed of from the time I was in my high chair involved a husband and children. And I, at least as a very young woman, I had no other picture in my mind about how I would do womanhood. And for me, singleness was just that sort of stepping stone that you, on the path to marriage, it's that season you have to get through, maybe sort of like the slough of despond that you have to march your way through on the way to the celestial city of marriage. And hopefully you make it all the way. And You can only keep thinking that for so long if God keeps you single for a long time.

And I found that the longer the Lord kept me single, the more I had to keep grappling with What is he doing here? Because I thought I knew how he could use me best. And for some reason he wasn't using me that way. And so I figured one of us has to be right about how he can use me best. And I know a lot of other single women have had to grapple with, or maybe are still grappling with this kind of thing too.

Like if our idea of biblical womanhood kind of hangs on there being a husband in the picture or children in the picture, then that can cause even a crisis of identity if we just don't have those things. And then we can feel like, well, how in the world can I be a godly woman? God didn't give me the pieces. Or if we are realizing, okay, I think my view of godly womanhood was too narrow, I think I do need to reevaluate, but how do I reevaluate and how do I develop a more robust view of singleness without also just becoming a flaming feminist or something and losing any idea of what actually is godly womanhood. And so that is a big part of why Anna and I want to talk about the single women that God used in the Bible.

Because I feel Like, you know, part of my problem as a young woman was I did not understand how much, for instance, God built the early church through the labors of single women or widows or single moms or childless women. Like, honestly, when you read through the New Testament and what's happening in the church there, there aren't even that many pictures of like the typical two-parent, lots of children, homeschooling family. And it's just such a shame to me that I used to skip over a lot of those women because I saw them as anomalies and that's not who I'm going to be. But I really think that the things that Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7 about what makes singleness so special, you know, so different from marriage but so special, so cool, so important to the Lord. It makes a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of how God is using these other single women.

But I would also say that if we're going to learn what we need to from these women, we have to be yielded enough to the Lord that we're willing to be inspired by women who were in circumstances that wouldn't have been our first pick. And we have to be willing to be used by the Lord in similar circumstances if that's what he had for us. Because he might have for us that some of us would be widowed or would be childless or would be single moms or would be single for a really long time. Do we believe God is so good that that could even be part of His good plan for us? So I think if our attitude toward singleness is, I'm just going to close my eyes and grit my teeth and bear it until it's over, these examples will bounce right off of us.

But if we are determined that we're going to serve the Lord with whatever pieces he gives us and in whatever state he puts us in, I think there's a lot we can learn from these women. Yes, and if we're willing to really dig deeply into the theology that he's given us. And jumping back into ancient history 20 years ago, when Elizabeth and I were kind of developing our theology of singleness as teenage girls, and we were, well, we were just trying to develop our theology of womanhood in general, but we were single at the time. And so we were reading as many books on biblical womanhood as we could find. And one thing that we kind of noticed is that all the books that we could find that were about biblical womanhood were about married women and about mothers and so we kind of picked up the idea without thinking super carefully or thoroughly that a biblical woman was a married woman.

And so when we wrote our first book, So Much More, which I don't know if you guys have read it or not or if it ever crossed your path, but we wrote that as teenagers. We kind of tried – we thought, okay, well, we're going to write the book for singles that nobody wrote, like, because all the other books were for married women, but we're going to write the book for single girls, the book that we had wanted to read. And we made a mistake in some of the ways that we applied God's word to the role of the single woman. And one of those – One of the big mistakes there is that we drew pretty much entirely from the verses on married women. And we prescribed a kind of a focus on, we were kind of trying to create a one for one.

So like for example, a married woman has a husband but a single woman has a dad. A married woman has her own children but a single woman has her mom's kids. And we tried to create some kind of one-to-one correlations that the Lord really doesn't. And we prescribed a kind of focus that was, you know, on the dad and the family and the home, which, you know, was helpful in the sense that, you know, you can learn to love the home and learn to love kids and learn to work with a man, but we went overboard with it, I believe, And in doing that, I think we missed a very important distinction that Paul makes when he says in 1 Corinthians 7, 34, there is a difference between a wife and a virgin. And we were not really talking about that.

The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit, but she who is married cares about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And I say this for your own profit, not that I would put a leash on you, but for what is proper, and that you may serve the Lord without distraction. So we were not really making the most of this difference and we were not properly explaining it. And I think we were missing the logistical freedom and the flexibility that a young woman is actually supposed to have here. And by kind of tying her to something that isn't actually her job, like the home, the care of the home, care of the children, helping the husband is the mother's job.

And so in getting that emphasis wrong, I think we missed out on really explaining something very, very special about what makes this singleness different and set apart and the kind of opportunities that women can have that a married woman cannot. And I think you even heard a little bit about that this morning. But then that kind of leads to the question of, okay, well, practically, though, like, what does this mean? So you're saying that we have more freedom, you know, more flexibility, but what exactly does that mean? Does that mean that we all get to go out and become career women?

Is that what that looks like? Like what is this actually gonna look like on a practical day-to-day level? And that's where we're going to jump into our single heroines of the faith and see how did they do it. These are women who did not have husbands or children or in some cases families or homes. What were they doing and how were they doing it?

Were they feminists? Were they career women? What were they? So Elizabeth, we'll start. Yeah, OK.

So the first one we're going to talk about is Anna the prophetess, Luke 2.36. Now There was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Fanuel of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age and had lived with a husband seven years from her virginity. This woman was a widow of about 84 years who did not depart from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. And coming in that instant, she gave thanks to the Lord and spoke of him to all those who looked for redemption in Jerusalem." So the first thing I notice about Anna the prophetess is that she's a prophetess.

So the Lord had given her a very special calling and anointing to be a prophetess and to speak of Christ's coming. And that to me has been a very helpful corrective to an idea that I don't even really know where I got it from. I think it was more of a vibe that I kind of picked up, which is that God gives men lots of diverse, varied passions and burdens and callings and everything, but women all have the same calling, just get married, have children. And that is not exactly how God actually talks about how he gifts Christians, and that's not actually how he uses, the way he uses women in the Bible is not actually that simplistic. And throughout Scripture we see the Lord giving very special directions, sometimes to a specific woman, sometimes a single woman, sometimes a married woman, or sometimes he's giving her a special assignment or something.

And in Romans 12 we read about the differing various gifts given to the members of the body, men and women. And the gifts being given, It's not like men, there's like a dozen different gifts you get to have. Women, you all have the gift of mercy. It actually, that's not actually just how it works. And I think it's really important for us to realize that God has just as individualized a plan for a woman as he does for a man.

That doesn't mean that there aren't differences between men and women, but it does mean that you can't think that God cares less about your giftings or your passions than he does a man. He's the one who gave those to you. He wants you to use those for his glory and he wants you to use those in whatever state that you're in, whether you're a single woman or a married woman. And it will look different when you're a single woman versus a married woman. But I do think it's very interesting that we see Huldah and Deborah and Isaiah's wife also all being prophetesses, but they happen to be married.

So you can imagine that it probably looked a bit different for them than it looked like Anna in the temple, because she's literally in the temple all the time. So I just I find it helpful to remember that even as our state may change, our context may change, our responsibilities may change, the special stamp that God has put on you and the good works that He's prepared for you to walk in, these things are constant. They transcend your season. And My season is about to change, my responsibilities and my context are about to change and I'm about to be taking the gifts and the burdens and the passions that the Lord has given me and I'm going to use them in helping Reese versus the ways I've been doing it before but I'm still going to use them. And, yeah, so anyway, yeah, God cares just as much about gifting and using women as he does men in, I would say, as diverse ways.

And then another thing that is interesting about Anna is that even though we know from scripture that the home is really important and that a ton of really crucial ministry happens in the home, Anna's not actually doing her ministry in the home. And I think a huge part of that is because she is a single woman and she, like Anna was saying, she does not have the same responsibilities to a husband and children and to manage a household. She did not sign up for those responsibilities. Well, she did, but then she was widowed. And it's interesting, yeah, she was only married for seven years.

And The Greek is a little bit confusing about is she 84 here or did it say she's been a widow for 84 years. Scholars think it actually means she's been a widow for 84 years. So she clearly believed that the way she could serve the Lord best is full time, night and day, in the temple praying and worshiping. So yeah, so yeah, recognize that as a single woman, you do have a different kind of freedom that the Lord wants you to steward and pray really carefully about how you're going to use it. Okay, so another single woman in the New Testament who is a really good example of how she took advantage of this freedom was Mary Magdalene.

So let's just talk a little bit about who she was. She was a woman from the prosperous city of Magdala. We hear that she had seven demons cast out of her. And then we don't know much about her background. Like we don't know was she widowed, was she divorced, was she never married, we don't know.

But the point is she's operating as kind of like an individual without these other things tied to her. So after her conversion, what it sounds like is that she is with Christ and his disciples pretty much full time. And Luke 8 says about Christ, you know, he's going through cities and villages proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God and the 12 were with him and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. Mary called Magdalene, whom had seven demons gone out of her and then there were some other women as well but yes, she's, It also says that she followed him from Galilee to the cross. It says that she ministered to him along the way and was part of a very small group of people who actually gathered around the cross, which was a pretty gutsy thing to do because it was very dangerous to be associated with Christ at that time.

And a lot of people defected or just ran away because they were afraid, but she was gutsy and she was there with Jesus's mother. And then according to John, she was the first to arrive at his tomb when it was still dark. So apparently she was traveling on the road. This would have been on foot at night. Not very safe.

And One thing that she demonstrates specifically is the freedom that single women have to be light on their feet and to be very mobile. And like Anna, the home was not the main sphere that she was working in, but also she was everywhere. She was also not in the temple all the time. Like, she was all over the place. And she's really able to serve Christ and his disciples with that freedom and her ability to go places on foot.

She's a fit, amazing woman. And the principle here that I think we should take away is not that we need to be running around exactly like this all the time. Some of us might be called to that, some of us may not. But what I think we do need to do is make sure that we're not so comfortably planted in a home environment or just in a comfortable spot that we're not taking opportunities to go out there and advance the gospel where we really could be. And this is something that I've had to grapple with because I'm an introvert and I am a home buddy and I like being in my home.

And for years and years that worked out well because we had a pretty thriving hospitality ministry and there were people in the home all the time. So this was not really something I had to rethink. But then in the last few years, my dad has had some health difficulties and we've not been able to have people in the home. So our hospitality ministry kind of dried up a little bit. And so, yeah, so Elizabeth and I have been trying to figure out, well, how can we get out?

How can we find people that need to be helped and ministered to in other places? And hospitality does not have to happen in the home. I think we're probably going to hear more about that later. But basically, you girls who have cars and the freedom to go places, there could be places that the Lord would really like you to be besides the home or in addition to the home where there is really important ministry work that needs to be done. So another point about Mary Magdalene and also some of the other women who were traveling with Jesus that I want to draw out is that even though she was a single woman without family, without husband and children, She was not operating solo.

The church and other believers were a huge part of her ministry, and she's with people all the time, or acting on behalf of people all the time. And This is a principle that I think that we all need to take to heart and we need to be drawing very close to the Lord's people and not just our family but the church and the people around us. And I want to just make a few points about the church and Mr. Brown talked about this too last night and I think we even got a question, maybe a couple questions about like what can it look like for a girl to be involved in her church. And so going back to Mary Magdalene, It looks like more than just showing up on Sunday and sitting in a pew and hearing the sermon.

I think we're all doing that, I hope. But what she's doing is she's taking a very, very active role in kind of helping find and put together a ministry team that she is with on a regular basis, that she's praying with, that she's being discipled by, that she's ministering with, that she's supporting. And this is the sort of thing that takes dedication and personal initiative. You don't just show up for this. You have to be very deliberate about trying to make this happen and find this.

And in Mary's case, it was also, she was spending her own money on it, and she was walking the miles for it. And I think that We need, if we really want that kind of partnership in the Gospel with the body of Christ, it's going to take more than showing up on Sunday. We're going to need to figure out who do I really want to be working with in this church and how can I set up a prayer meeting with them, or maybe there's some older ladies in the church that you would really like to minister to with, and you could be pairing up with them, or helping put together a reading group or something? Or, I don't know, it does take initiative and it takes dedication. And I think another principle, this is a little bit controversial, but I'm just gonna say this.

I don't think that we can make a case from scripture that these believers that we should be working with have to be in the same church as our family or that we have to be going to the same church as our family. It's really great when we can. That's really special and good. But I think we can also see from the examples of so many of the men and women in the New Testament that they were not going to the same church as their family. They were having to break away and do something different and just be with the people who were being faithful to Jesus and faithful to the Lord and that's something that we're going to need to do as well.

So I think I'm going to just move on now and… Okay, so then another woman we were going to talk about is Tabitha, who's also called Dorcas. And something you'll notice about her, that I think we notice about basically all of these women, that's very challenging, is that there's a common thread here that they are being so proactive and they are working so hard to serve the Lord and actually be part of Christ's bride. And They're not just taking the path of least resistance or doing what's easy or doing what other people basically have given them as here's your package of things to do, just do that. They're taking so much independent initiative to seek the Lord and follow the Lord And it's a lot of work and exertion. And one thing that I think stay-at-home daughters have to be careful about is that if we adopt a lifestyle package that would actually facilitate a very easy life that doesn't actually require very much from us in the way of service or evangelism or study or active ministry, but then we feel very comfortable in that because, well, this package has been rubber-stamped by all the Christians I respect.

That doesn't mean that the Lord is actually happy with us if we're actually just being lazy about serving him. So what I want to point out about Tabitha is it says in Acts 9, 36, at Joppa, there was a certain disciple named Tabitha, which is translated Dorcas. This woman was full of good works and charitable deeds, which she did. And then it describes how she died and the disciples called for Peter. And so Peter arose and went with them.

And when he had come, they brought him to the upper room. And all the widows stood by him weeping, showing him the tunics and the garments which Dorcas had made while she was with him. So Dorcas was a hard worker. She was actively looking for needs that she could meet for other people. And so I think a principle we can draw from her is we should be full of good works and charitable deeds towards others.

We should be learning marketable skills like she had. Making garments is – that was a marketable skill. We don't know what it would have involved for her specifically, but do We have skills to meet needs that others have, to engage in good deeds, to meet pressing needs. The point about Tabitha is not that she liked to sew. Lots of us like to sew.

The point about Tabitha is she's looking around to meet needs. Here's another interesting principle about Tabitha. It says there is a certain disciple named Tabitha. And so the first thing we see about her is that she is called a disciple. And I'm going to quote something from Dr.

Phil Kaiser, who preached a really good sermon on Tabitha. And you'll notice on all of your seats are these little cards that have a QR code for downloading a sermon series called Women of Faith, and it's by Dr. Phil Kaiser. And he preaches sermons on, I think, Each of the women we're talking about today and a whole bunch of others, I think there's like 30 something women, and all of these sermons are incredible. So here's what he says about this word disciple.

He says she's the only lady in the New Testament to be called a disciple, and This is the only occurrence of the feminine form of that Greek word for disciple in the Bible. So this is a deliberate deviation from convention. By using that word, Luke is highlighting the fact that her labors were done as a follower of Christ, but there is more in that word disciple than simply being a follower of Jesus. The word, methatria, also means a pupil, a learner, or a student, and is an antonym of the word, hamathas, which means ignorant or unlearned. So, Luke is saying that she was learned in the Scriptures.

Tabitha was a woman who, like the carpenter boy Jesus, made it her goal to learn all she could about the Scriptures that her Lord had given to her. It is not only pastors who should be immersed in the Scriptures. And I find that so inspiring. Do you want to comment on Martha or should I? Yeah, okay.

So Martha is so interesting. Martha was a single woman who lived with her brother, Lazarus, and her sister, Mary, in a house that Scripture actually refers to as Martha's house, which is very interesting. Phil Kaiser actually thinks that's very significant, that the house is only ever referred to her as Martha's house. Martha is likely a wealthy woman. She's doing a lot of hospitality.

She's doing hospitality that might have cost a lot of money. We don't know where she got her money, but I think a principle that we see in her life and how significant a role she played in Christ's ministry is that single women can have their own houses and their own finances. There's a lot we don't know about her family situation, but the very fact that she owned this property was completely fine and great, and the fact that she is using it so powerfully for ministry is fantastic. And you know, I think this can sometimes challenge another idea that I don't even know where some of us might have gotten it, but the idea that sometimes it's better to do all of your labors for free than to do things for money and then have money that you can actually use and put towards ministry. There are women in the New Testament, like a lot of women who were referred to as giving to the cause, you know, helping support the disciples.

The fact that they had money was something the Lord was able to use. Lydia is a really interesting example of an extremely wealthy businesswoman whose wealth was able to be an asset for the kingdom. So money, houses, assets, these are actually good things for a woman to be able to have if she's willing to use them for the Lord. And then another interesting thing about Martha is she clearly has a thriving hospitality ministry. And I remember feeling like, won't it be great when I'm married and then I can do more hospitality and things like that.

And I think it's a very common thing to feel like you need to wait to be married until you can really do this. Martha wasn't waiting until she was married to do this. I think the hospitality of singles should be normalized and I think there's a lot of ways to practice hospitality even if you don't have your own house. Basically what Martha's doing is she's hosting get-togethers for people and she's feeding people. You can do that in so many places.

I would even say that's one of the one of the ways that women single women can very practically help the church because most churches probably do have events that they try to have on a regular basis, they need someone to do the logistics and to figure out who's doing what and to put it on a calendar and make it happen. And in our church, single young women have been kind of like the main task force behind that. And it's a great way to practice hospitality even if you're not doing it in your own home. Yeah. And then a point that I would make kind of about all of these women that we just talked about is No two of them are doing the same thing.

And it's so interesting to see the different, A, the different pieces God gave each of them, but B, just the different decisions that they made that were also good decisions, like Anna's decision to spend day and night praying and worshiping in the temple is so different than what Dorcas was doing, basically doing humanitarian work, or what Mary Magdalene was doing, running all around, helping Jesus and the disciples. Who made the best decision? They all made the right decision for who they were, for what God enabled them to do and equipped them to do. And so it can be a real snare to feel like we only have permission to do things the way that we're seeing the other girls around us doing it. Because like I was saying earlier, God's plan for women I do believe is as individualized as his plan for men.

And it doesn't mean that it looks the same for women and men, but I would even say there's a million different ways of being a wife and a mom. No two women are going to be the same wife and mom, and your different gifts and abilities and callings that the Lord has given you, they should come out in how you be a wife and how you be a mom. So yeah, these women are not following a formula. They clearly have a fairly robust system for how they make these individual decisions about what is the right thing to do in this situation. And you have to really understand Scripture well to be able to do that.

I think it also really helps to have a really robust system of counselors and advisors and accountability people in your life to do that. Because some of these decisions are just very hard. There are also a decision that might be a good thing for you in this context but a bad thing in this context and it's not as simple as, in most areas, it's not as simple as, well girls can do this and they can't do this. There's a few where it is but and yeah trying to think if we should want to talk about that more right now or so So we just heard about Martha and I will just throw out this real quick. Martha often gets a bad rap because when people think about Martha they just think about the story of how she's nagging her sister and yet we can see, we need to look past that one story that we've probably all heard a billion times and think about the broader role that she's playing in the New Testament and she's clearly, you know, a very important woman who was very loved by the Lord.

So now we are going to move on to that story that you've heard a billion times and we're going to talk a little bit about her sister Mary who is also very special. And This is from Luke 10. So Jesus entered a village and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house, as Elizabeth said earlier, and she had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and she said Lord do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone tell her then to help me but the Lord answered her Martha Martha you were anxious and troubled about many things but one thing is necessary Mary has chosen the good portion which will not be taken away from her.

And one principle that I want to draw here from Mary, and this is not specific to single women but I think it's important, is that we need to make sure that we are taking the time to sit at Christ's feet. And this is not the sort of thing that our circumstances will kind of push us into or our family will kind of push us into or maybe our parents will make us do it. This is something that either we will do or we won't do it. And we have a responsibility to tend to our own souls. And this might seem kind of obvious, but I actually think this is a principle that's not super intuitive for a lot of young women.

I think there can sometimes be the idea that when we're children, it's sort of going to be our parents' job to be helping us grow and putting restrictions and rules on us and watching out for us and correcting us. And then when we're married, our husbands are going to be the ones leading us and maybe telling us what to read and washing us in the water of the word and all of that is going to be great. But the fact is we all do individually have responsibilities to tend to our own souls. And there's ways that a mom and a dad and a husband and even a pastor cannot do that for us. And they are not responsible.

But we are, and we're responsible for – I'm just going to read through some of the things that kind of make up what this job of tending to our soul should look like. And it would come down to like how we read the word and meditate on it and how often we do it. How we pray and how we spend time with the Lord and how much of a priority we choose to make that. For how we deal with sin in our own hearts and our lives because again that's not just someone else's job to fix. This is something that we need to take responsibility for.

For how we spend our time, for what we look at and what we listen to. And we do during these years need to pay very close attention to what we're sewing and what we're reaping in our lives. And I really appreciated the point that Jeff Johnson made last night, that singles are, they do have some temptations and distractions and vulnerabilities that married people do not have. And part of that is we just, we have solitary moments. We have empty time.

Even very busy singles will have this. And we are, we're going to give an account for how we spent that time. But we're also going to reap what we sowed during that time. And we need to just be paying very close attention to that and to the music that we're listening to, or the books that we're reading, or the movies that we're watching, and the kind of effect that's having on us and our ability to focus. This is not just a young man's problem.

And I have had to be willing to totally cut out certain genres of music in my life and just not touch it. Just because I could tell it wasn't bad, but it was just not having a good effect on me and you know there might be a season where we need to just totally clear our playlist of all the music we like to listen to and put sermons there instead. Like we need, this is work that we need to be doing for ourselves and we can definitely enlist the help of parents and wise women in our church or godly friends but ultimately this comes down to what we do in our own hearts and nobody else can see it. So then the final principle that I want to take from all of this is taken from this verse in John 11, which says that, now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. This may sound like an odd point, but I actually think it deserves some special emphasis.

I'm going to read it again. Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. He loved single people. And it's something that I think deserves some thought and some meditation on because I've actually heard many single girls confide in me, and maybe you haven't thought this consciously, but maybe it might be kind of lingering in your mind that the Lord somehow does not love you as much as he loves the girls who get married. I've had a lot of girls say that to me.

They know it's not true, but they know it's a lie, but it's a lie they believe. And with that lie comes the temptation to develop what I would call an outcast spirit because we're single and we need to fight against any tendency to feel like God has forgotten us, He has rejected us, He's punishing us, and that we probably are not welcome among His people. And these are all lies that, I have never heard anyone say these things. These are the kind of lies that are gonna come from the adversary and they're going to be there in our hearts and we're going to have to really watch out for them. And not only is this poison to our souls, but it will also hamstring any ministry that we try to do.

I mean one thing that we've seen today in all the women that we've talked about from Anna to Mary Magdalene to Martha to Mary is that they were all incredibly giving women. They're pouring out in so many different ways with their time, with their money, with their prayers. They're just giving, giving, giving all the time. How were they able to do that? Like what was their secret?

And one thing we need to realize is that they were giving out from the abundance of what they knew that they had received. And this is all we have to give. It's not, you know, special gifting, well I mean giftings yes are important but it's not like some people are just really, really good at this or just have a ton more to offer than this other person, it all comes down to what we have received. That's all we have. And the principle that we love because He first loved us and we comfort out of the comfort that we ourselves have received is really important here.

And I've even recognized there were seasons in my life where I was trying to minister and there was just nothing. Or I was trying to pour out and there was nothing coming out. Or I just did not feel like being a very loving person. And when that happens, what it is an indicator to us of is that we're not living in Christ's love for us. And if we do not do that we will not have love to give and we can become very hard women and very bitter women and women that do not have grace if we are not making sure that we are abiding in Christ's love for us and we need to fully and this is exciting we need to fully live out an identity as women who are loved and redeemed and forgiven and who do have a seat at Christ's table with His people, and that there is nothing that He has commanded that we cannot fully embrace.

And we can get out there and serve like the women that we just mentioned, but first of all, let's make sure that we are digging deeply into the deep reservoirs of Christ's love for us so that we actually have something to give. So that's the end of our notes here.