Sam Allberry > Quotes

“If marriage shows us the shape of the gospel, singleness shows us its sufficiency.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“It is the same for us all - 'whoever'. I am to deny myself, take up my cross and follow him. Every Christian is called to costly sacrifice. Denying yourself does not mean tweaking your behaviour here and there. It is saying 'no' to your deepest sense of who you are, for the sake of Christ. To take up a cross is to declare your life (as you have known it) forfeit. It is laying down your life for the very reason that your life, it turns out, is not yours at all. It belongs to Jesus. He made it. And through his death he has bought it.

Ever since I have been open about my own experiences with homosexuality, a number of Christians have said something like this: 'the gospel must be harder for you than it is for me', as though I have more to give up than they do. But the fact is that the gospel demands everything out of all of us. If someone thinks the gospel has somehow slotted into their life quite easily, without causing any major adjustments to their lifestyle or aspirations, it is likely that they have not really started following Jesus at all.”
― Sam Allberry, Is God Anti-gay?: And Other Questions About Homosexuality, the Bible, and Same-Sex Attraction

“Desires for things God has forbidden are a reflection of how sin has distorted me, not how God has made me.”
― Sam Allberry

“I don’t need to look good so Jesus can look good; I need to be honest about my colossal spiritual need so he can look all-sufficient.”
― Sam Allberry

“The issue is not whether this path or that path is better, whether singleness or marriage would bring me more good. The issue is God and whether I will plunge myself into him, trusting him every day.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“As we reject God, we find ourselves craving what we are not naturally designed to do.”
― Sam Allberry, Is God Anti-gay?: And Other Questions About Homosexuality, the Bible, and Same-Sex Attraction

“Jesus has been exalted. Through his resurrection and ascension the King has been enthroned. All authority has been given to him. The universe is his. His authority is absolute and exhaustive. You will never breathe air that doesn't belong to him and you will suffocate if you try.”
― Sam Allberry

“But the fact is that the gospel demands everything of all of us. If someone thinks the gospel has slotted into their life quite easily, without causing any major adjustments to their lifestyle or aspirations, it is likely that they have not really started following Jesus at all.”
― Sam Allberry, Is God Anti-gay?: And Other Questions About Homosexuality, the Bible, and Same-Sex Attraction

“This is why the church needs single people. Not as a supposedly endless source of free babysitting, but to remind us that the joy and fulfillment of marriage in this life is partial and can only be temporal. The presence of singles who find their fullest meaning and satisfaction in Christ is a visible, physical testimony to the fact that the end of all of our longing comes in Jesus.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“God knows me more than I know myself. God loves me more than I love myself. God is more committed to my ultimate joy than I am. So I can trust him.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“It is no surprise that weddings can be a little bittersweet for single people. We’re genuinely happy for our friends as they marry. But there can also be a sense of loss. It is the start of a new era for the couple. But the end of an era for our friendship. A single friend of mine in his late forties, recently said that the marriage of one of his closest friends felt like a bereavement. It feels as though you’ve been demoted. One writer, Carrie English, describes feelings of rejection that come when attending the wedding of friends. Two people announcing publicly that they love each other more than they love you. There is not denying that weddings change friendships forever. Priorities have been declared in public. She’ll be there for him in sickness and in health, till death do they part. She’ll be there for you on your birthday or when he has to work late. Being platonically dumped wouldn’t be so bad if people would acknowledge that you have the right to be platonically heartbroken. But it’s just not part of our vocabulary. However much our society might pay lip service to friendship, the fact remains that the only love it considers important, important enough to make a huge public celebration, is romantic love.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Getting married is no guarantee of companionship and care for life. Neither is having kids. Life in this tragic and fallen world is fraught for all of us. No one situation provides any ultimate security. No matter our station in life, we live with uncertainty.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“If someone thinks the gospel has somehow slotted into their life quite easily, without causing any major adjustments to their lifestyle or aspirations, it is likely that they have not really started following Jesus at all.”
― Sam Allberry, Is God Anti-gay?: And Other Questions About Homosexuality, the Bible, and Same-Sex Attraction

“We need to remind ourselves, daily, that our singleness is not for us but for the Lord.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“In 2014, 54 percent of women described themselves as “unhappy with their body,” and 80 percent said that looking in the mirror “made them feel bad.” These numbers are significantly higher than in previous years. I am sure there are many contributing factors, but one is surely that, more and more, we are being presented with unrealistic standards of beauty. Models and actors are subjected to training and dietary regimens that are often unsustainable, hugely expensive, and extreme. And even then, images are cropped, airbrushed, and recolored so that the final image we end up seeing on a giant poster may not actually be anyone’s actual body but a weird hybrid of one or more people and a whole lot of digital editing.”
― Sam Allberry, What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves

“In much of our thinking, singleness, if not downright bad, is certainly not seen as good. One writer has noticed the difference between Christian books on marriage and those on singleness. In the books on marriage, marriage is assumed to be a great thing and all that remains is to understand it better, and perhaps be aware of one or two potential pitfalls that might arise. But books on singleness typically have a different starting point. Singleness is assumed to be pretty much awful. The point of the books is, therefore, to see if we might to eke out something just about tolerable from it. Even the way we describe singleness reflects this. It is almost always defined in the negative, as the absence of something. It is the state of not being married. It is the absence of significant other. This defining by negation reinforces the idea that there is nothing intrinsically good about singleness. It is merely the situation of lacking what is intrinsically good in marriage.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I heard some-
one describe long-term celibates like me as being like unicorns:
you’ve heard of them, but you never think you’re going to actu-
ally meet one.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“And singleness isn't actually a bad thing. In the Bible it's good. It's even described as a blessing. In and of itself it's a wonderful gift from God that should be affirmed and celebrated.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Whatever relational cost our discipleship may incur, however much family we may lose in the course of following Christ, Jesus is saying that even in this life it will be worth it. Following him means an abundance of spiritual family. Nature may have given us only one mother and one father; the gospel gives us far more.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Then [my friend] started dating, quickly got married, then just disappeared. I never saw him. He was like Frodo from Lord of the Rings. The moment he put a ring on, he vanished. I’ve seen this happen a few times. Once a serious relationship is established and a couple gets married, friendship with others becomes a low priority.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“This shows us why it is not true for those with SSA to say: “But God made me this way!” Paul’s point in Romans 1 is that our “nature” (as we experience it) is not natural (as God intended it). All of us have desires that are warped as a result of our fallen nature. Desires for things God has forbidden are a reflection of how sin has distorted me, not of how God has made me.”
― Sam Allberry, Is God anti-gay?

“However ingrained it may be in someone’s behavior, homosexual conduct is not inescapable. It is possible for someone living a practicing gay lifestyle to be made new by God. Temptations and feelings may well linger. That Paul is warning his readers not to revert to their former way of life suggests there is still some desire to. But in Christ we are no longer who we were. Those who have come out of an active gay lifestyle need to understand how to see themselves. What defined us then no longer defines us now.”
― Sam Allberry, Is God anti-gay?

“Without an understanding of what it means to be in Christ, our view of the Christian life becomes blurry. The ideas will still be there, of course—we’ll know that we’re justified through the death of Christ alone, that we will one day join him in resurrection life, that in the meantime we’re to commit ourselves to walking in holiness, and that all this is to be understood and worked through in the context of a local church. The pieces will be in place, but they won’t fully cohere—they’ll seem like separate elements, each of which we admire in its own way but which, like Lego bricks poured out onto the table, are meant to fit together and make a whole. Union with Christ is the lens through which all these parts of the Christian life can be seen most sharply and beautifully.”
― Sam Allberry, One with My Lord: The Life-Changing Reality of Being in Christ

“We must treat each word we type as if it was being offered to someone sitting across the table from us. Presence matters. In its absence we need to be all the more careful not to dehumanize.”
― Sam Allberry, What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves

“And having people with whom to do nothing is not necessarily a need [married people are] conscious of.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“The relationship which is thus depicted is something much more than a formal attachment or nodding acquaintance, something more even than a personal friendship; it is nothing less than a vital, organic, intimate union with Jesus Christ, involving a shared life and love.”
― Sam Allberry, One with My Lord: The Life-Changing Reality of Being in Christ

“A friend moving away is often hard because of what it often represents. People move for all sorts of reasons…but whatever the reason, it is another way of reminding us that however close our friendship is, it’s not close enough to make someone think twice about upping sticks and moving off…The family goes. You stay. That’s the deal…People will move for family or economics, but no one moves for friends. All this underlines the fact that there is a commitment that comes with family that is lacking in the way most people think about friendship.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Glynn Harrison puts it this way: Whether we are married or single in this life, sexual desire is our inbuilt homing instinct for the Divine, a kind of navigation aid showing us the way home. You could think of it as a form of body language: our bodies talk to us about a greater reality of fulfillment and eternal blessing, and urge us to go there.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I can’t get by with seeing such close friends once every three months. It made me realize that while my close friends feel essential to me, I might not necessarily feel essential to them. That can really hurt. What they are to me, their families are to them. I exist much lower down on their list of needs.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I am grateful to my friend, Kathy Keller, for reminding me that God doesn’t give us hypothetical grace but only actual grace. The point is that when we imagine all the worst case scenarios, we are imagining them without factoring in the presence and grace of God that would be there if they actually happened. As Kathy wrote in an email once, “God doesn’t play that game. He doesn’t inject hypothetical grace into your hypothetical nightmare situation, so that you would know what it would actually feel like if you ever did end up in that situation.” He only gives grace for our actual situation. Replaying these scenarios over and over in our mind is therefore not at all helpful, and actually factors out what God would be doing were it to actually happen. What we’re imaging is actually life in that situation without God’s presence. Better to find something else to fill our minds with. C.S. Lewis makes a similar point when he says, “Remember one is given the strength to bear what happens, but not the 101 different things that might happen.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness