“I Will Be With You”
Stuff Jesus Changed, part 4 – Loneliness
Wildwind Community Church
David K. Flowers
April 29, 2007
Psalms 38:11 (NLT)
11 My loved ones and friends stay away, fearing my disease. Even my own family stands at a distance.
Psalms 88:18 (NLT)
18 You have taken away my companions and loved ones; only darkness remains.
Psalms 102:6-7 (NLT)
6 I am like an owl in the desert, like a lonely owl in a far-off wilderness.
7 I lie awake, lonely as a solitary bird on the roof.
Psalms 142:4 (NLT)
4 I look for someone to come and help me, but no one gives me a passing thought! No one will help me; no one cares a bit what happens to me.
What do these passages have in common? They’re all about loneliness. And they’re all about suffering. Loneliness is both a cause of suffering and a form of suffering. When was the last time you felt lonely? Was it this week? Perhaps you are sitting there feeling lonely right now, even as you are surrounded by people.
Our current series is one we kicked off on Easter Sunday, it’s called Stuff Jesus Changed. Last week we talked about suffering in the wake of what has happened recently in Virginia and I posed the question, “Where was God when this was happening?” and told you I’d talk to you about this today in our discussion of loneliness. In contrast to pretty, 3-point sermons, today’s message has only one point – that God is with us. Hopefully you can leave with that one point coming alive to you this morning.
The Psalmists were experiencing pretty crushing loneliness in the passages I read to you. But do you know what the Psalms actually are? The Psalms are prayers. They are prayers of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and yes – loneliness. That’s right, prayers of loneliness. Now if you think about that for a minute, that’s ironic.
Dear God, hear my prayer. No one listens to me. No one hears me. Dear God, I have no one to talk to. God, I am completely without anyone to give me companionship – when I talk I might as well be chewing gum, because no one is listening. You might ask the question, “If no one is listening, who do these people think they are praying to? How could they believe they have no one to talk to even as they talk to God? That doesn’t make sense.
Actually, my friends, that irony captures the essence of our relationship to God. God is the friend who listens to us tell him we have no friends. God is the one who loves us beyond limit, and who is there for us when we cry out that nobody loves us. God is the one who longs to satisfy our souls while we complain to him that we will never be satisfied. I want to show you examples of this strange relationship in two places in scripture.
First, a man comes to Jesus and asks Jesus to heal his son, who appears to be possessed by an evil spirit of some kind. The man tells Jesus what’s wrong, and says, “Do something if you can!” Jesus says,
Mark 9:23-24 (NLT)
23 "What do you mean, `If I can’?" Jesus asked. "Anything is possible if a person believes."
24 The father instantly replied, "I do believe, but help me not to doubt!"
I do believe. Help me not to doubt. The King James translation records that as, “I believe. Help thou my unbelief!” In this case, Jesus (a.k.a. “God”) is the person saying, “I will heal your son if you believe.” And this man is saying, “I believe, but I realize I don’t believe completely. Part of me believes, but part of me doesn’t.” Of course what I love here is that Jesus kind of goes, “Oh, you kind of believe, but kind of don’t? Well, that’s good enough for me,” and heals the boy anyway. I think my faith is more like this man’s than practically anyone else in the Bible, and it comforts me to think that God can be moved by the prayer that says, “I believe. Sometimes. I mean, usually. I mean, help me believe. I mean, I want to believe. At least I want to believe right now, if it means you’ll answer this prayer for me.” Wow. How honest is that? It seems God doesn’t need us to be as clear and consistent in our faith as we often think we should be.
Here’s another case of this strange kind of inconsistent belief, when Jesus is on the cross.
Mark 15:33-34 (NLT)
33 At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock.
34 Then, at that time Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
If I forsake you, that means I leave you, I abandon you, I ditch you. Jesus cries out, “God, why you have you abandoned me, why have ditched me and left me here alone to die?” And yet, in spite of his conviction that God has abandoned him, it is God he cries out to. In his loneliness, Jesus cried out to the one who had left him alone.
My friends, those two examples, combined with our texts from Psalms give us what I believe are the deepest possible expressions of faith in God. The deepest faith is faith that says, “God, I am lonely. No one listens to me.” “God, I believe. But not really.” “God, I don’t think you’re even there at all.” Faith never gets more profound than that, because the prayers we pray in those moments are prayers that come not from ecstatic experiences of God’s closeness, but from desperate experiences of God’s distance. Those are clinging prayers, prayers where we realize we have nothing left, and we literally pray our nothingness. One of the most desperate prayers I ever prayed in my life was when I woke up in the middle of the night years ago, with a crushing sense that God did not exist, that everything I had ever heard and believed about him was false, that I had lived the first 22 years of my life in a fantasy world. It was one of the most lonely feelings I have ever had. And I sat there in the darkness, just feeling that weight for a while. And then I did something. I did the only thing I know how to do when I am at the end of myself, when I have lost faith and don’t believe, when I come face to face with my nothingness. I prayed. I prayed a prayer to the God I did not believe in, to the God who was not there, to the one I did not expect to answer back. It was a prayer to the silence, hoping maybe God would speak. My friends, we miss something profoundly important if we miss the fact that this is a prayer of faith. It is the prayer of Job who prayed, “Though you slay me, yet will I trust in you.” It is the prayer of some of those in Virginia right now, and people all over America at this time, saying, perhaps shouting, “God, where were you on that day?” It is prayer that comes from the deepest parts of us, prayer that seeks God’s presence when we are abandoned, that seeks God’s healing even though we cannot believe, that seeks to know God, even when God seems to hide his face from us. Prayer that clings and pleads and searches and doesn’t stop searching until it finds what it is looking for. Or dies trying.
Following Jesus, serving God, means that no matter how lonely you may get, someone is there to listen to you talk about your loneliness. Do you realize how huge this is? The Jews in the Old Testament had no concept of a God who dwells inside of people. For the Jews, the living presence of God was not in the individual believer, but in the temple, behind the curtain, in the Holy of Holies, also called the Most Holy Place. If you wanted to actually be in God’s presence, you had to go to the temple. If you weren’t in the temple when you prayed, God could hear you, but he was far off. He was not within you, not beside you, but located physically in the temple.
And then Jesus came. The whole idea of Jesus is that God chose to stop being far away, and to get close to us; to come in human form, to be one of us, to share not only our physical space on planet earth, but our very experience of humanness. John 1 records this mystery by saying that Jesus – the living Word of God – became flesh, and made his dwelling among us.
John 1:14 (NIV)
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us…
Peterson translates this in The Message as “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.”
John 1:14 (MSG)
14 The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood…
I mean, dang. Just think on that for a minute. The eternal word of God – the creator, the one who was from the beginning – the word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us. That is perhaps the highest and sweetest expression of human thought in history – those words written by John.
The prophecies about the coming of Jesus focused on this aspect of his being among us.
Isaiah 7:14 (NIV)
14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
Immanuel is Hebrew for “God With Us.” We say that so flippantly sometimes. “God with us.” Via con Dios. Go with God. But if this happened, it is the most remarkable thing that has ever happened – that God has chosen to be with us. Do you realize this is unique to Christianity? Only Christianity has this concept that God has made himself available to actually live in us and among us, that he is no longer distant, but is as close as the air around you.
Over and over and over again in scripture, God promises his personal presence to people. He says, “I will be with you.” “I will be with you.” “I will be with you.” He says it to Moses. He says it to Gideon. He says it to Abraham. He says it to all people that he calls to lives of faithful obedience. And then Jesus says it during his earthly ministry. Like Father, like Son. The last words Jesus is recorded as saying to his disciples before he ascended back into heaven are:
Matthew 28:20 (NIV)
20 …surely I am with you always…
I’ll be with you – ALWAYS! Always. When you feel it and when you don’t. When you care and when you don’t. When you’re grateful for it, and when you’d rather I just get lost. Because of Jesus, God is always with us. Jesus promised us that after he went back into heaven, he would send his Holy Spirit – the spirit of God – to be with us forever, to take up residence in our lives, to guide us, direct us, and be a constant companion to us. Here’s how the Apostle Paul writes of this in the New Testament:
2 Corinthians 4:6-7 (NIV)
6 For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.
What treasure does he speak of? (The treasure of God’s light) The treasure of God’s light that shines where? In our hearts. In other words, the treasure of God’s presence that is with us all the time – in tragedy and triumph, darkness and light, victory and defeat, in good and evil. Look how Paul prays for the people in his church at Ephesus:
Ephesians 3:16-17 (NIV)
16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,
17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…
His Spirit where? In your inner being. Christ dwelling where? In your hearts. That’s up close and personal. God is with you.
Isaiah records God making an incredible promise about his presence with us.
Isaiah 43:2 (NLT)
2 When you go through deep waters and great trouble, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown! When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you.
The message, my friends, is that God’s presence might not “fix” everything, but it makes a difference in how we go through things in life. God was in the anguished prayer of Jesus on the cross. God was at hand, ready to heal a spirit-possessed boy, in spite of his father’s lack of belief.
When I personalize this in my life and ask the question, “How has God been with me in my loneliness” I have tons of answers. On one dark night, when I thought I had lost all faith, and all hope in God, the presence of God in me moved me to pray. I prayed the prayer of faith, despite my unbelief. See, I believe it is God’s spirit in us that prompts us and leads us to pray. When we pray, God reaches out to God. The Spirit connects with the Father. This is how Jesus changes the face of loneliness.
Remember, it is because of Jesus that when you are lonely you have someone to talk to about it; when you don’t believe anymore, you can tell God you no longer believe. When you lack faith, you can muster up just enough to pray and let God know it’s missing. Because why? Because God is with you. God is with you when you are grieving, with you when you are angry, with you when you no longer believe, with you when you are wrestling with temptation, with you, with you, with you. With you when you pass through the waters, like the Hebrew people passing through the Red Sea. With you when you go through the fires of doubt, of suffering, of loneliness, of temptation. With you always, always, always. You are never alone.
My favorite writer, Philip Yancey, writes about how there are times he is alone in his house when his wife is away for several days at this or that engagement. And he misses her. He misses her deeply. The house is quiet. He cannot hear her voice. He cannot speak directly to her. He cannot see her. But he notices something interesting in those times. He can still FEEL her. The sense of her absence is so strong that he feels it as a kind of presence, and if you have ever lost a loved one, you know exactly what I’m talking about – that you can feel their absence as a kind of presence. It’s palpable. You just know it – they are there in the midst of their absence. My friends, I suggest to you that God is present even in the midst of his absence – that if you get quiet, if you are still, if you focus, you can sense God’s absence as a kind of presence. Over and over again in scripture God says, “I am with you.” And 366 times in scripture, God says, “Do not fear.” Do you think that courage to take all the hits life will deal out to us might come from knowing that even in our loneliness, God is with us? That no matter how we might feel, we are never, ever alone?
I want to read to you part of an entry from my blog. For those who aren’t Internet people, blog is a nickname for web log, basically an online journal that others can subscribe to and read at any time and leave comments if they wish. I was working through some of my own spiritual struggles with suffering and loneliness this past week, and here are some thoughts:
The greatest challenge for me in the last MS flare-up I had was a profound fear that this was not in fact MS, but perhaps cancer or, even worse, ALS – Lou Gerhig’s disease. Many of the symptoms were the same, and ALS really is just a fatal version of MS in terms of how it works in the brain. I had terrible anxiety about it. For days I feared and worried. And then finally something occurred to me. I thought, "Dave, many people would be horrified to experience what you are experiencing now, and yet you have found God in this place. Do you think that if it were ALS you had instead of MS, God would not be in that place too?" And the most profound comfort came from that. I was able to get through the rest of that flareup not with confidence in myself, but with genuine confidence that as long as God was with me, I could walk through any valley. And not with some expectation of physical healing. God’s presence would be enough. How true it is that this presence is the most healing thing we can ever experience - it heals the soul of the things that really ail it. Bitterness, depression, resentment, frustration, anger, anxiety - with the experience of God’s presence, and the corresponding knowledge that we are never really alone - there is soul healing. When that comes, bodily healing appears as a convenience rather than a necessity -- even though it may be a deeply-desired convenience.
All of this is what I have lost sight of in the last few weeks as bad things have happened in my life and in the lives of others and in our country. That is what has allowed my anger to flare and my doubts to overtake me at times, and put up a wall between God and me. I intend to tear down that wall this week.
So where was God in Virginia last week? I believe God was right there beside each victim. And I don’t say that lightly, as if to imply that this removed all fear, or removes all questions about why these things happen. All I’m saying is that the Christian message is that there is no place we can go to in this life that God will not go with us.
Psalms 23:4 (NASB)
4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
Psalms 139:5-10 (NCV)
5 You are all around me--in front and in back-- and have put your hand on me.
6 Your knowledge is amazing to me; it is more than I can understand.
7 Where can I go to get away from your Spirit? Where can I run from you?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I lie down in the grave, you are there.
9 If I rise with the sun in the east and settle in the west beyond the sea,
10 even there you would guide me. With your right hand you would hold me.
Remember when you were a child and had to go in and get your shots? For a child, that is a traumatic experience. You maybe begged your parents to keep this from happening. You didn’t understand it. But barring them telling the nurse to keep her filthy paws off of you, what did you most desire? There was really only one other thing you wanted. You wanted your parents to be there. You wanted to know that when your moment of suffering came, somebody was there who loved you, who wanted good things for you, who would hold you afterward while you cried and comfort you. As terrible as it was to face what you had to face, knowing mom or dad was there made it somehow bearable – made the fear less fearful.
I believe the message of scripture is not that God will fix everything wrong in our world – at least not now – but that we will not be alone. John the Baptist, Jesus’ own cousin, was beheaded. Nearly all the disciples were martyred. Jesus himself had to face the cross, against his wishes. Believers throughout the ages have suffered and been killed, and that continues to happen today all over the world. And yet the church around the world is thriving. God is with them, and God is with us. We are never alone.
Earlier I mentioned walls I had put up against God in my life because of various kinds of suffering and the spiritual loneliness that can come from them, and said I wanted to tear those barriers down in my life this week. Some of you might have walls that need to be torn down right now, and are ready to take steps in that direction. Let’s take a moment to quiet our hearts and maybe get that process in motion, for those who are longing to do that.
God, you have asked us to believe, in faith, that there is nowhere we can go where you cannot be with us. Remind us today that we are never alone and may that reality bring us a new peace as we face our own loneliness and the suffering of a lonely world. Amen.
