You Are Not Alone
A reminder of Christ's comforting grace in every season
We live in a lonely world.
Our culture is self-focused and self-centric and this obsession with ‘me first’ can only result in a world of desperately lonely people who are never truly satisfied, fulfilled, or loved.
We are surrounded by broken people trying to find meaning in a broken world.
Even as Christians, this brokenness affects us.
For many of us, we will fight loneliness for the rest of our lives.
However, although we will need to fight loneliness, we never have to be truly lonely because we have Christ.
Without Christ, the human experience consists of trying to evade our loneliness by filling our empty souls and aching hearts with anything that would numb the reality of our fallen state.
In Christ, we have a Friend who will never leave, our souls find their source of purpose, and our hearts are made whole.
Christ Gives Us Purpose
Loneliness can be debilitating.
As humans, we are relational creatures: we long for familiarity, friendship, and fellowship with others.
We were designed to have relationships, to revolve our lives around our community, and to cultivate close fellowship with God and others.
However, we are broken people in a broken world, and we all to varying extents will be impacted by the curse of loneliness.
We cannot escape it, try as we might.
Loneliness doesn’t have to be felt only when we are alone: in fact loneliness is often felt the most in a crowd.
Even when we have a myriad of friends, when we are socially busy, and running off to events and catchups all the time, loneliness can creep in and derail our enjoyment of these friendships.
We wonder if anyone truly ‘gets us’, if we are just the loner being welcomed in simply as an act of kindness, or whether we will ever fit in because the reality is we long for things that the general crowd has no desire for.
Our uniqueness, our different tastes, and our unseen heartaches tend to make us feel isolated and to prompt us to pull back from genuine fellowship and vulnerability.
However, God is the God who creates beauty out of ashes and brings blessings from curses.
Loneliness in a fallen world is a curse, but in God’s providence He makes even loneliness to be a blessing and an edifying experience for His children.
When we are struggling with loneliness, we are learning firsthand the beauty and necessity of genuine friendship.
In our aloneness, we discover the sufficiency of Christ and the deep fellowship we can find in God’s presence.
Through our loss of friends and our seasons of being the ‘loner’ or the ‘outcast’, the Spirit is tenderising us to feel more keenly the pain of other ‘loners’ and ‘outcasts’ so that we can better love them and welcome them into communion with us and Christ.
God never wastes anything, and in our trials He is preparing us to be of service to Him and to perceive the needs and suffering we otherwise may have been oblivious to.
As 2 Corinthians 1:3-5 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too”.
When we struggle with loneliness, we learn the meaning of true friendship, and we are truly equipped to comfort others with the comfort we have received, to bear their burdens as ours have been borne by Christ, and to give the promise of hope that we have received from seeing Christ’s faithfulness worked out in our darkest seasons.
Train your mind and heart to see that although loneliness is painful, it is also a gift and opportunity for spiritual growth and a deepening of your communion with Christ.
To quote Elizabeth Elliot, “Loneliness is a wilderness, but through receiving it as a gift, accepting it from the hand of God, and offering it back to him with thanksgiving, it may become a pathway to holiness, to glory and to God himself”.
Our purpose is to glorify God in every season and to share His saving love with all those around us.
We live in a lonely world, filled with lonely people, and we would never be equipped to reach these lonely souls if we had not first experienced their suffering and isolation from others and their Creator.
Loneliness is a gift because it creates in us a longing for Christ and compassion for others who do not know the purpose and friendship that can be found only in Him.
Christ Is Our Friend
In a lonely world, Christians are the only ones who are truly never alone.
He is always with us, and He is our Friend through every high and low, every storm and every bright day, every success and every failure, and every moment of disbelief, fear, or uncertainty.
As Psalm 73 so beautifully reminds us of God’s nearness to His children, “Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:23-26)
Even when we feel alone, He is with us.
He holds our trembling hands, leads us patiently, and watches over us tenderly.
Our comfort is certain because we know that whatever we go through in this life, He has ordained to prepare us for an eternity in heaven with Him.
This life is just a foretaste of an eternity of enjoying His friendship and coming to know and love Him more and more.
Isaiah reminds us that Christ is strong in our stead, and His power and love last forever: “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” (Isaiah 41:10)
When our heart feels it cannot bear anything more, He shows time and again that His grace is sufficient for us in every circumstance, every trial, and every season of loneliness.
His friendship is ours for all eternity, and His grace and compassion will never run out: “The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant. My eyes are ever toward the LORD, for he will pluck my feet out of the net. Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. The troubles of my heart are enlarged; bring me out of my distresses. Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.” (Psalm 25:14-18)
As God says, “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9)
God is with us wherever we go, and our loneliness is quelled by His presence: so it is our duty and joy to share this hope with those around us.
What better friend can we have than the One who never leaves, the One who gave His own life to ransom ours, the One who chose to redeem us when we were in ungrateful rebellion and spiteful opposition towards Him, and the One who knows our every flaw and failure and yet loves us still.
There is no greater friend than Christ, no sweeter fellowship than the communion we have with God, no security stronger than knowing that you are chosen by unconditional grace from eternity past, and no deeper love than that experienced by God’s adopted children.
Christ Knows What We Need
We sometimes allow ourselves to wonder whether Christ truly has our best interests in mind.
We believe His plan of sanctification would be ultimately for our good, but only if we were stronger, braver, and less burdened by the brokenness around us.
We don’t think we can cope and we realise if He truly understands how weak and desperate we really are.
Yet, in all the chaos and carnage, the pain, isolation, and seemingly meaningless trials, He is present.
He knows our loneliness and fears even better than we understand them ourselves.
No one knows the pain of isolation more than Christ Himself.
As Isaiah so poignantly describes, “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” (Isaiah 53:3)
Yet the most remarkable thing about Christ’s loneliness is that He did not need to suffer it.
He lived in perfect communion with the Father and Holy Spirit.
Heaven was His home, a place of perfect peace, goodness, and everlasting love and unity.
And yet He chose to leave Heaven and enter a broken world on a mission of redemption that He knew would necessitate His suffering, rejection, grief, and eventual death.
The only reason Christ ever suffered loneliness was because He was suffering it on our behalf.
He was rejected by humans that He could have justifiably left to die in their sins.
He was mocked by those He created, shunned by those He would die to save, and persecuted by those He loved selflessly.
As He hung dying on the cross, His separation from His Father was the most agonising isolation experienced by a human being.
And the only reason He had to suffer in this way was because of His love for us.
Unless He had paid for our sins and borne the wrath of God that we rightly deserved, we would never be able to experience reconciliation with God.
His rejection paved the way for our redemption, and in Him, our wretched, broken souls found their salvation and restoration.
And yet how often do we fail to realise that the One Who gave His life for us also knows exactly what we need?
The Saviour of our souls is also the Sustainer of our lives. In Him, we find everything we need.
He is the giver of all good things, and He gives the grace to bear whatever trials and heartaches He has sovereignty ordained as necessary for our growth and sanctification.
In the loneliness, Christ draws near.
And yet, He has also made us for communion and fellowship with others.
Our desire for comradeship is God-given and a good thing to pursue.
But in all of your longing for friends, don’t forget that Christ is our closest friend, our comforter, and the One who ordains each season of our lives.
Rest in the knowledge that God fills our deepest needs and He doesn’t withhold anything good from those He loves: “For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness. For the LORD God is a sun and shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly. O LORD of hosts, blessed is the one who trusts in you!” (Psalm 84:10-12)
Sometimes, the best thing for us is to experience loss and loneliness so that in our pain we find Him to be our comforter and in our loneliness we see His gracious and everloving presence more clearly.
The trials are testaments to His faithfulness and our absolute dependence upon His grace.
His Grace Is Sufficient
No matter what we are going through, Christ is with us.
His grace is sufficient, His strength is ours to lean on, and His love is steadfast and unwavering towards us.
When we rely on Him in our weakness, He is glorified. Our sanctification is His work, and He is the God who makes the broken beautiful.
As Paul reminds us, “But He said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)
When you struggle with loneliness, remember that you are never really alone.
Christ is yours and you are His for eternity.
Lean into His character, cultivate trust in His goodness, and grow your personal relationship with and reliance upon Him in every area of your life.