While I'm Waiting

You are standing in the back of the sanctuary after Sunday service full of joy from hearing your pastor preach a cross centered sermon. From the corner of your eye you see a brother you have never met before, making his way toward you. You quickly look around to make sure he is not looking at the girl behind you, but when you turn back around he is standing right in front of you. “Hi my name is Todd. What’s your name?” And in that moment when he is smiling at you waiting for your reply, your heart skips a beat. Your mind is full of so many questions. “Is he really talking to me? Is he ‘The One’? Could I marry him? I wonder how many kids he wants. I hope not too many. What are his parents like?...”
As you begin to imagine your future with him, you tell him your name all the while not letting on that you have his entire future mapped out for him if he will just propose today. Now that he knows your name he proceeds to tell you that he just joined the church and his Care Group leaders have encouraged him to invite people, he doesn’t know, over to their home for lunch. After he gives you the address and time of lunch he moves on to ask a few other brothers and sisters in Christ to come too. Then it dawns on you that your assumptions that he wanted to marry you just because he introduced himself, is wrong. He does not want to marry you. Of course, he just met you. He just wants to be your brother.
So I know I exaggerated a bit with my depiction of the thoughts of a single woman but, let’s be honest ladies. How many times have you done this? Countless, I am sure. The truth is that our world is fallen and because of this our view of men, and how our relationships with men should look, is skewed. We, as women, think that the only relationship we could or should have with a single brother in Christ is one ending up in marriage. This is just not true. We are called to do much more for our brother’s in Christ.
One of the saddest things about the family of God is that it is made up of a lot of only children who don’t have any experience with siblings. In my case, my only brother is fifteen years older than me and when he was a legal adult moved far, far away. I have had little experience in forming relationships with a brother. This is where I feel single women are at a loss. We do not have the experience or the know-how to interact with our single brothers in Christ, because many of us either did not grow up with brothers or did not have siblings at all. And let’s face it, how many that did grow up with brothers actually had a biblical understanding of family to help their relationship form healthily. This lack of experience can cause great miss-communications between sisters and brothers in Christ. With a biblical world view of family and a few arrows in the right direction we can avoid many of these miss-communications.
Let’s look at what God’s family looks like. For this I will have to borrow from Pastor John Piper. This excerpt is from a sermon of Pastor Piper’s that helped me immensely with finding a biblical view of family. (Single in Christ: A Name Better Than Sons and Daughters)
"In the created order that God put in place before sin was in the world, and in the covenantal order that God put in place with the Jewish people from Abraham to the coming of Christ, “God is primarily building his covenant people through the mechanism of procreation.” (Barry Danylak, “A Biblical-Theological Perspective on Singleness) God was focusing his covenant-keeping faithfulness mainly on an ethnic people. Therefore, being married and having offspring was of paramount importance for one’s name and one’s inheritance and for the preservation of God’s covenant people.
So when we come now to the New Testament, Jesus makes clear that his people—the true people of God—will be produced not by physical procreation but by spiritual regeneration. So he says to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3)."
With this stance on family we can go on to say that our brothers in Christ truly are our brothers. I think at this point then we must ask ourselves: what do we do with our brothers in Christ? Well the answer is in the question; whatever we would do with our natural brothers. I know it is a simple answer, and if you are anything like me though you are saying to your self, “That doesn’t help me much. I have had little experience in forming relationships with a brother. What does a sister do with a brother?” Anybody have any answers?