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PROGRAM D-8242
I’m sharing about loneliness—not just missing someone you love, but that invasive sense of loneliness that controls the lives of so many people. Indeed, we find ourselves in a loneliness epidemic today with more and more people feeling alone, left out, and isolated.
It’s important to understand that activity, people, and marriage are not the cures for loneliness. If they were, then we would be doomed to a roller-coaster life because none of those things are guaranteed to us. Activities ebb and flow, people come in and out of our lives, and the most wonderful marriage in the world can be severed through death.
If you’re lonely today, are you willing to let God change your thinking about being alone? That’s where we begin, but it takes more than that. God recognized our need to know that we are not alone, our need for companionship, and our need to be loved and feel secure. He has provided for those needs completely. Hebrews 13:5 says, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” If you can learn to take this incredible promise and apply it to your life daily, it can be the beginning of knowing freedom from those awful feelings of loneliness.
Please believe what I’m telling you—it’s not a cliché, it’s truth! That lonely place inside you can be filled when you learn to live in the knowledge that Jesus is the ever-present Lord. That is his gift to you when you are born from above.
Let me share with you a poem which says this so well:
There is a mystery in human hearts;
And though we be encircled by a host
Of those who love us well, and are beloved,
To every one of us, from time to time,
There comes a sense of utter loneliness:
Our dearest friend is stranger to our joy,
And cannot realize our bitterness.
“There is not one who really understands,
Not one to enter into all I feel.”
Such is the cry of each of us in turn;
We wander in a “solitary way.”
No matter what or where our lot may be,
Each heart, mysterious even to itself,
Must live its inner life in solitude.
And would you know the reason why this is?
It is because the Lord desires our love:
In every heart he wishes to be first.
He therefore keeps the secret key himself,
To open all its chambers and to bless
With perfect sympathy and holy peace,
Each solitary soul that comes to him.
So when we feel this loneliness, it is
The voice of Jesus saying, “Come to me”;
And every time we are “not understood,”
It is a call to us to come again;
For Christ alone can satisfy the soul,
And those who walk with Him from day to day,
Can never have a “solitary way.”
With Christ, you don’t have to feel that ever-abiding despair of being lonely. He has come to abolish it, and he is totally capable of doing just that, if you will allow him to.