Is Celibacy a Spiritual Gift?

Question 4125

Whether there is a gift of celibacy is a question the apostle Paul answers directly, and his answer is yes, though with a care that guards it from the abuses that have grown up around it. Writing to the Corinthians about marriage and singleness, he says, I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another (1 Corinthians 7:7). Paul was unmarried, and he describes his own single state as a gift from God, using the same word, charisma, that he uses for the other grace-gifts of the Spirit. So the single life lived for the Lord is not a lesser or a default condition. For those to whom it is given, it is a genuine endowment of grace.

We should be careful, though, about how we name it. The popular phrase the gift of celibacy can give the impression of a switch that is either on or off, as though some people feel no desire for marriage at all and the rest are simply waiting their turn. Paul is more realistic than that, and so we must be too. The gift he speaks of is the God-given capacity to live a single life that is fruitful, contented and undistracted in its devotion to the Lord, and that is a rather different thing from the bare absence of opportunity to marry.

What Paul actually says about the gift of celibacy

The seventh chapter of 1 Corinthians is the great New Testament passage on this subject, and it rewards slow reading. You can follow the whole argument at 1 Corinthians 7. Paul is writing to a church that had received some unhelpful teaching, with some saying it was more spiritual to abstain from marriage altogether. He corrects them in both directions. Marriage is good, honourable and the right course for most, and he plainly says that because of the temptation to sexual immorality each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. Yet he also holds up the single life as a real and good option for those whom God has equipped for it, and he does not pretend that everyone is so equipped.

The heart of his argument comes later in the chapter, where he explains why singleness can be such an advantage. The unmarried person is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord, while the married person is necessarily anxious about worldly things, how to please his spouse (1 Corinthians 7:32 to 34). Paul is not running marriage down. He is simply observing that the single believer has an undivided availability that the married believer, with all its joys, cannot have. The gift of celibacy is the grace to take that availability and pour it out in undistracted service to the Lord, with a settled contentment rather than a constant ache.

The Lord Jesus on the single life

The Lord Jesus himself spoke of this when his disciples reacted to his strict teaching on divorce by suggesting it might be better not to marry at all. He replied that not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given, and he went on to speak of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, ending with the words, let the one who is able to receive this receive it (Matthew 19:11 to 12). Two things stand out. The single life for the kingdom is a gift that is given, not a discipline that anyone can simply take up by willpower, and it is not for everyone. Only those who are able to receive it are to receive it, and the Lord lays no burden of compulsory singleness on anyone.

The Lord himself was unmarried, and so was Paul, and the kingdom has been served across the centuries by believers who remained single in order to give themselves wholly to its work. This is a dignity, not a deprivation. The single Christian is following in the footsteps of the Saviour and the apostle, and the church should honour the single life rather than treating its unmarried members as somehow incomplete or still waiting for real life to begin.

It is worth adding that the able to receive language sets this calling apart from a simple lack of opportunity. A believer who would dearly love to marry but has not yet found a spouse is not thereby exercising the gift of celibacy. The gift, where it is truly given, carries with it a contentment and an undistracted freedom that make the single state a settled vocation rather than a season of waiting, and that contentment is itself one of the marks by which the gift may be recognised. The absence of it is no shame, and its presence is no badge of higher holiness, for like every grace it is given by God as he chooses.

Why the gift of celibacy is not mandatory

Because some have taken these passages and built compulsory celibacy upon them, requiring it of all clergy or treating marriage as a lower spiritual state, it is worth saying plainly that the New Testament does nothing of the kind. Paul calls the forbidding of marriage a teaching of demons (1 Timothy 4:1 to 3), grouping it with other ascetic falsehoods that reject the good gifts of God. Marriage was instituted by God in Eden, blessed by the Lord Jesus at Cana, and used by Paul as the living picture of Christ and his church. To make singleness compulsory for any class of believer is to impose a yoke that Scripture never lays down, and it has produced bitter fruit wherever it has been tried.

The gift, then, is exactly that, a gift, freely given by God to some and not to others, never a law to be enforced. Paul is emphatic that the believer who does not have this gift should marry, and that there is no sin whatever in doing so. It is better to marry than to burn with passion, he writes, and he counsels the younger widows to marry and bear children. The gift of celibacy is honoured precisely by being left free. Where it is given, it is to be embraced with joy, and where it is not given, marriage is to be embraced with equal thankfulness as another of the good provisions of God.

Living the gift well

For the believer who has been given this grace, the single life is not to be endured but invested. The whole point of the apostle argument is that the freedom from the proper cares of marriage is a freedom for something, namely an undivided devotion to the Lord. The single Christian can serve at hours and in places that a parent cannot, can take risks for the kingdom that a person with dependents could not responsibly take, and can give a quality of attention to the things of the Lord that the married believer, rightly occupied with a spouse and children, cannot match. The grace is given so that this availability might be used, and the single believer who fills the freedom with self-indulgence has missed the purpose of the gift.

This is also where the gift needs the support of the wider body. The single believer is not meant to live in isolation, and the church is meant to be the family in which unmarried members find belonging, affection and a place. The same Spirit who gives this grace also produces the love and self-control that make a chaste single life possible, and our study of the fruit of the Spirit describes the character that sustains it. The single life lived in the strength of the Spirit, within the family of the church, can be among the most fruitful of all Christian callings, as the lives of countless single missionaries, pastors and servants have shown.

So, now what?

If you are single and sense that the Lord has given you a settled contentment in it and an undivided heart for his work, then receive your singleness as the grace Paul says it is, and invest it. Do not live as though you were waiting for your life to begin when a spouse arrives. Pour the freedom you have been given into the service of your King, and let the church be your family.

If you are single and long to be married, that longing is not a sign of unbelief or of a failure to be spiritual. Paul plainly says that those who do not have the gift should marry, and the desire for marriage is good and God-given. Bring it honestly to the Lord, pursue marriage in his ways and his timing, and trust him with the outcome. You can read more about how every believer comes to recognise the particular grace God has given them in our study of discovering and using your gift.

Whether married or single, the call on every believer is the same, to please the Lord with whatever measure of freedom and circumstance he has given. The gift of celibacy is one of the ways he equips some of his people for undistracted service, and the church is the richer for those who have received it and live it well.

“I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.” 1 Corinthians 7:7