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Japanese Sexual desire is not a sin for a single Christian: God made it, and he called all he made very good. What the Bible asks of single people is chastity. Sex is kept for marriage, and desire is kept from turning into lust. Scripture also honours singleness as a gift, and Jesus himself lived it.
When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about sex, he began with the body. “Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body” (1 Corinthians 6:13). The second half is easy to read past. The Lord is for the body. He is for yours, as it is today, single and full of longing. A single Christian’s body is not waiting for a wedding before it can matter to God. It is already “the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you,” Paul goes on, “therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
Is it a sin to have sexual desire when you’re single?
No. Desire is part of the way God made us, man and woman, before anything went wrong: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Paul does not pretend single people feel nothing. He writes of the unmarried, “if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9). The burning is real, and the apostle names it without shame.
Jesus was never married, and Hebrews says he “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). To feel the pull is not to fall. The Catholic Catechism describes chastity in the same hopeful way, as “the successful integration of sexuality within the person” (paragraph 2337). Chastity asks us to be whole men and women.
What does the Bible ask of single Christians?
It asks the same of every unmarried believer: to keep sex for marriage. “Flee fornication,” Paul writes. “Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18). And to the Thessalonians: “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication: That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour” (1 Thessalonians 4:3–4).
Single people carry this call alongside everyone else. “All the baptized are called to chastity,” the Catechism teaches. Married people live it within marriage, and “others practice chastity in continence” (paragraphs 2348–2349). It sets the single life beside the married one, and quotes St Ambrose on the three ways of living chastely, as a spouse, as a widow and as a virgin: “We do not praise any one of them to the exclusion of the others.” Every one of us, married or not, is learning the same faithfulness in a different house.
Protestant and Orthodox churches say the same in their own words. The Baptist Faith and Message, the confession of the Southern Baptist Convention, calls marriage “the channel of sexual expression according to biblical standards.” The Orthodox Church in America teaches that sexual intercourse belongs to “heterosexual monogamous marriage in which alone it can be that for which God has given it,” and it asks that “Celibacy and virginity are also to be defended and protected from vilification and ridicule.”
Christians who are attracted to people of the same sex hear the same call in historic Christian teaching. “Homosexual persons are called to chastity,” the Catechism says, and it asks the Church to accept them “with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” (paragraphs 2358–2359). The Orthodox Church in America teaches that homosexual acts are sin, and that “Persons struggling with homosexuality who accept the Orthodox faith and strive to fulfill the Orthodox way of life may be communicants of the Church with everyone else who believes and struggles.” Many Protestant churches hold the historic teaching too. Some churches teach differently: the Episcopal Church since 2015 and the United Methodist Church since 2024 recognise the marriage of two people of the same sex.
Is lust a sin if you’re single?
Lust is a sin for anyone, single or married, but a passing thought is not lust. Jesus says, “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). The words “to lust after her” matter. He is speaking of a look that wants and keeps wanting, a desire welcomed and fed.
James traces how it happens. “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin” (James 1:14–15). The temptation comes; the sin begins when we take it in and let it grow. So we turn the eyes and the mind elsewhere, as often as we need to, and we fill them with better things: “whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely … think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). Jesus’ own words on lust, and steps that help, are set out in how to overcome lust as a Christian.
No one fights this alone, or beyond their strength. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
Is masturbation a sin for a single Christian?
The Bible never names it, and churches answer differently. The Catholic Church teaches that it is “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action,” while adding that “affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety” and other factors can “lessen or even extenuate moral culpability” (Catechism, paragraph 2352). Evangelical teachers are divided. The question has its own page: is masturbation a sin?
Is singleness a gift from God?
Paul says so. “For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that” (1 Corinthians 7:7). He saw a freedom in it: “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord,” so that we “may attend upon the Lord without distraction” (1 Corinthians 7:32, 35). Jesus spoke of those who give up marriage “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and added, “He that is able to receive it, let him receive it” (Matthew 19:12).
Not everyone who is single has chosen it or feels it as a gift. Some are waiting for a husband or wife who has not come; some are widowed or divorced. In every season of it, a single life is a whole life before God. More on Paul’s teaching is in is singleness a gift from God?
Who in the Bible was single?
Jesus first of all, who had friends and followers and no wife. Paul was unmarried when he wrote to Corinth, and told the unmarried and widows, “it is good for them if they abide even as I” (1 Corinthians 7:8). God told the prophet Jeremiah, “Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place” (Jeremiah 16:2), and his single life became part of his warning to a land where, God said, sons and daughters “shall die of grievous deaths” (Jeremiah 16:4).
Luke remembers single women too. Anna had been married only seven years, and she was “a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day” (Luke 2:36–37). When the infant Jesus was brought in, she “spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem” (Luke 2:38). And Philip the evangelist “had four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy” (Acts 21:9). None of their lives was small.
How can single Christians live with loneliness?
Loneliness is not a failure of faith. Before there was any sin in the world, God himself said of Adam, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). The longing for someone to come home to is part of how we are made.
God’s answer to it is wider than marriage. “God setteth the solitary in families” (Psalm 68:6). Jesus promised those who had left home and family for his sake that they would receive “an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children” (Mark 10:30). That hundredfold is meant to be the Church: people who share our table on a Sunday and at Christmas, who know our names and notice when we are missing. The Catechism says that chastity “blossoms in friendship,” and calls friendship “a great good for all” (paragraph 2347). “Two are better than one,” the Preacher says, “For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–10). For those of us who are married, this is a call too: to open our homes to our single brothers and sisters, and to be the family the psalm promises.
Isaiah heard God speak to people who could not hope for children of their own. “Neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree,” the LORD says, and then he makes them a promise: “Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off” (Isaiah 56:3, 5).
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