"One Is The Loneliest Number" Series

LIFELINES

“One is the Loneliest Number”

Psalm 142:1-4

One of the primary figures in the OT is David. All of us know who David was. According to the Bible this is a man who basically had it all. The Bible tells us that David was

• Handsome. Even Goliath said so and he despised David.

• Strong. When a lion turned on him he seized the lion by its hair and killed it. When a bear carried off one of the lambs from his flock, David chased the bear down, punched the bear and took the sheep back.

• We also know that he was a hero. When Goliath threatened Israel, for 40 days Goliath would come out every morning and every evening; just to intimidate the people and it was working! But you remember the story. David stepped up and with one rock he killed Goliath.

Handsome, strong, a hero…everyone loved him…and he was chosen to be King. What more could you want? But we also find another word that described him. Lonely. How could someone who seemingly had it all ever feel lonely? Listen to some of his words. Psalm 142: 1-4. In Psalm 22 he writes and says, “my God why have you forsaken me…why are you so far from me?” There is perhaps no feeling we face in life that is more difficult than when we are completely alone.

Maybe you have felt this emotion before, perhaps you feel it today. A recent Gallup poll said that 4 out of every 10 people in America admit to frequent feelings of intense loneliness. One ad in a local newspaper in Kansas read this way: Call me. I will listen to you talk for 30 minutes without making any comments for just 5.00. Sounds like a joke. But they were serious. Did anybody call? Get this. It wasn’t long before this individual was receiving 10-20 calls a day.

Loneliness is a common emotion that at one time or another, all of us experience. And there is a good reason why we feel this emotion. It’s not because we’re weak…it’s not because we have a character flaw. The reason is simple…..God created us for community. Genesis 1:26 Then God said “Le us make man in our image, in our likeness.” So who is “us” and “our?” We understand this to be the trinity. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. All3 were involved---all came together and created man. That’s how important we are to Him. His plan for us was so big and so important that it required the fullness of God to complete.

We see then that God created the world, the sun, moon, stars---animals and of course man and once He did He looked at all of it and said this is good. But then the Bible tells us that He noticed one thing that was not good. Again in Genesis the Lord God said, it is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.

Every one of us has a built-in need for a deep satisfying relationship with another person. This can be in one of two relationships….(1) a marriage or (2) a friendship. The best situation would be to marry a friend.

I believe that one of the biggest mistakes we have made is in forgetting what God says in this verse…it is not good for man to be alone. God created us for community and too many people lives their lives trying to deny that fact. And the result is that we have a nation of strangers who are very unhappy and live in isolation. This is the conclusion of a major study done by Harvard University. The study interviewed almost 30,000 adults in over 40 different communities in the United States. Listen. The study indicated that the “degree to which we socialize with one another, trust one another and join with one another in community life predicts a city’s quality of life far better than levels of education or income.” So it is not about how smart we are or how wealthy we are that will give us quality of life; it is about how we interact with other people.

There are at least 4 things this study pointed to that have nearly destroyed our ability to have relationships resulting in loneliness. Here they are: (4) the rise of two earner families. Husbands and wives often work two different shifts. One works 7-3 and the other works 3-11. Then they sleep and start over. (3) Longer work hours. Most people I know work more than 8 hours a day. (2) Television. The average person watches 4-5 hours of television a day. (1) Computers and cell phones. Electronic devices we cannot seem to live without. And they become our only way of communication with other people. No wonder we are lonely.