The sermon discusses the importance of single young women giving their lives to the local church, and provides practical advice on how to do so. It emphasizes the importance of not waiting for the perfect plan, but to jump in and serve where needs are seen or ask for help in identifying them. The speaker encourages serving in both areas of gifting and weakness, as well as engaging in fellowship with the whole body of Christ, including married couples and families. Single women can also play a role in identifying needs in the community outside of the church and help coordinate events, support ministries, and facilitate connections between people. The sermon ends with a caution on being careful when ministering to Christian brothers.

This is a long one, so bear with me. What does giving my life to the local church practically look like for a single young woman? I'm going to skip that part. We've heard over the course of this conference, use our single years to the glory of God. What are practical thoughts on how that is to be displayed through our daily life?

So what does it look like to give your life to the local church? How can you not? So what are the practical ways to do it? I loved when you were talking about Tabitha, aka Dorcas. She was looking for what God put in front of her and jumping in.

She was not waiting for the best idea or the greatest idea. Don't wait for the perfect plan. Jump in and serve what you see around you. If you don't see anything, ask a woman in your church to help you see and you'll get a list a mile long. Especially if you have somebody that weaves, you know we always have people that weave people together.

If you have somebody like that around you, ask them, I think I'm not seeing things right. What are some ways that I can be helpful? We talk about using our giftings. Sometimes God uses us in our weakness and He chooses that quite for our benefit and then for the benefit of the body. I have found in our local church I have giftings that I use and I like doing that And I have weaknesses that I'm pushed into and I don't like doing that.

Because we all like to do what we're good at, but that's not really what God calls us to. He calls us to serve Him and obey in all things. So don't be scared to serve in things you're weak at. You will, it won't be as easy, it won't be as slick, you won't look as good. Well, it's not about us, right?

So serve in whatever way it calls you to, even if it's in weaknesses, and then you grow in those things. You guys expand, I just wanted to get us rolling. Expand on ways that especially singles can serve in the local church. We could just talk through some of the things that we have done in our church. I mean, so every church is going to be different, but I would also say that every church is probably going to have some similar things.

Every church is going to have events that need coordination. I've already talked about that. And just, you know, practical hands and feet to help meet practical needs. Always going to need that. But, you know, another thing that we've discovered is that sometimes the married, the young married women need friends.

And actually one principle that I didn't mention but I should have is that when it comes to the people, the believers that we're wanting to hang out with, we should not just pick other singles. Like we need to be fellowshipping with the whole body of Christ, children, moms, older women, dads, you know everybody. And in doing so we will find the needs But if we're just hanging out with our friends or other singles, we probably won't. No, we're like, well, what do people need? But when you start spending time with the moms, you'll think of things.

And one thing that we've had moms tell us is sometimes they like to just talk to someone who's not in the same phase as they are, you know, changing diapers and being moms. But you know, someone who does have time to maybe read or go out in the community and do things, who can then come and talk to them and say, here's what I'm reading or I just learned this. And they really appreciate that. So we don't need to feel like, oh, they wouldn't want to be friends with me because I'm single. They might actually really want to be friends with a single person.

And then one of the ways that I'm trying to help the church is by getting out into the community and finding opportunities for service because everyone in our church is super busy. The moms are super busy, the dads are working full-time jobs, young men are working full-time jobs, but I have more flexibility to go to commissioners meetings, to go to community events, to meet people. I just got my real estate license. There's things that we can be getting out there and just kind of seeing what's going on beyond the church, and we can come back into church and say, okay, there's this event that's going on. We think we should have some people there for that.

We think that this need, we're seeing this need in the community. Maybe we could organize some sort of church picnic and try to meet that need. We just met this widow and we want to go and help her paint her house. Or when you get out there you'll see things and then you can kind of like be the scout for your church and you can come back and say we found this need and this need and this need. And that's something that we need more people doing that and sometimes the singles men and women are the people who have the most time and the most flexibility so that's a huge huge need right there.

Yeah well I think also a great place to look for practical examples of being involved in the churches. You know, some of these women we were just looking at today, what were they doing? They were being students of the Word. That's one very practical thing that we can and should be doing is study the Word, which doesn't just mean have a 15 minute quiet time every morning, It means really get in there, be a scholar and a student of what God is trying to tell us in the Word. Engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs.

Learn marketable skills that you can use to meet needs. Be willing to jump up, take initiative, get out of your comfort zone to run around helping make things happen for people. Spend a ton of time in prayer for the ministries or the people who are involved in ministry, or just the spiritual needs that you see surrounding your church or your community. Give if you have things that you can give to support ministries. You know, when it comes to the idea too of what even is a need, when it comes to meeting a need.

A need is basically a problem that has not been fixed. So do you see any problems in your church? The kind of problems that might make you feel like, oh, my church doesn't have any this, or my church isn't very organized in this, or my church doesn't have any ministries for me to plug into. Maybe this is a problem that somebody like you could actually help address. Maybe this is a need that you could help meet.

Maybe you could go to your elders and be like, I realized we don't have anybody coordinating such-and-such in the church. Would it be helpful if I tried to do that or would it be helpful if I teamed up with these three older women to do this or yeah things like even getting out into the local community our church really was trying to get into the local community and figure out how to help but we needed Scouts you know to figure out what's even going on in our local community and who are the widows who have needs and you know all these kinds of things and because Anna and I just had a lot of flexibility to be light on our feet we're able to be going to you know different council meetings and talking to people who go to all, you know, a lot of different churches and just keeping our ear to the ground and developing connections and then, you know, another thing that you see women doing a lot, we didn't even, there's a lot of unnamed women in the New Testament who just says they were helping the disciples. They were supporting the disciples.

They were giving to their needs. Are there people in your church or your community who are doing good things that you can help with, even if it's just as simple as you over here that's doing this, you need to meet this person over here who's doing this so that you guys can work together, but you don't know that each other exists, but I could help make that happen by doing hospitality maybe at a coffee shop or something, because that would be another thing I'd throw out there is do hospitality however you can, wherever you can. That's the thing that we've done that I think has actually been pretty important, is just facilitating meetings between people who needed to know each other. We've done those in all kinds of places. When you talk about young or singles ministering in the church, I'm going to add a caution.

Be really careful how you minister to and love your Christian brothers. If your Christian brother has the flu, you probably shouldn't make some chicken soup and take it over there. Probably not a great idea. So just be careful when you're thinking through how to love your Christian brother. Ask your mom.

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