•          Introduction

Today I’m a bit nervous about the way I want to approach something here with you.

What I do with a sermon is I get hold of a text of Scripture and I open it out … a bit like unboxing a new deck chair that I’ve ordered on Amazon.

That’s what I do.

It’s safe because you are just working with ‘the Book’, you’re taking what God says in His Word and you are working that into your mind and into the minds of the people you are trying to serve.

But it’s been made pretty clear to me that I’m not to be doing that today.

This sermon is upside down.

I promise you this sermon has a text.

But I’m not telling you what it is yet … not until the end, because if I do that first of all I’ll spoil it.

We’re unpacking the problem it addresses first.

We’re looking at the way the truth which emerges in that text emerges as God unfolds what He’s doing across time for us so we appreciate it better and much more fully when we get to it.

And frankly this approach scares me a bit.

You see, people in our culture seem to think God is irrelevant to us and to our modern needs.

I’m addressing that tendency in a short online series in the next couple of summer months, and today we pick up on the second cultural problem we really are suffering with, which God and the Gospel are immensely relevant to, but which our culture really doesn’t see as a God-solved problem at all.

Loneliness … what do you make of it?

Medics and social scientists have become really motivated by it over the last decade or two, because they have started picking up on the damaging effects of it, but so far I see only ‘sticking plaster solutions’ on offer from them.

1)   The current state of the science

Professor Andrea Wigfield, director of the Centre for Loneliness Studies at the UK’s Sheffield Hallam University, points out that loneliness is different from social isolation. 

Social isolation is being cut off from people around you … lack of contact with friends, family, social contact.

It’s a matter of fact.

You can measure it objectively.

But loneliness is what someone can tell you they feel … they feel a lack of quantity or quality in relationship or in contact with other people.

Ask any large church Pastor and I’m sure they could tell you - whether they wanted to actually admit it or not - that it is perfectly possible to be lonely at the heart of a crowd!

People who study these things note that our subjective experience of loneliness usually follows a parabola as we pass through life … 

Perception of loneliness is high amongst adolescents and young adults … this was particularly the case during COVID lockdowns.

It dips in middle age, but then it rises again as we age.

It’s a serious issue for our physical health apart from anything else: the US surgeon general Vivek Murthy claims that loneliness has an impact of a person’s health equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 

{This is based on a 2010 meta-analysis of 148 separate studies covering more than 300,000 people. 

I don’t know how they did this but according to an article in the Financial Times by Anjana Ahuja (16th. May 2023) one study concluded that “people with stronger social relationships showed a 50 per cent increased likelihood of survival compared to those with weaker relationships, irrespective of age, sex, underlying health, length of follow-up period and cause of death.

The same research identified loneliness as a stronger risk factor for death than physical inactivity and obesity — one comparable to smoking and excessive drinking. The condition has also been linked to a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune disorders and cancer.”

In the UK, the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing supports this general point.

 The long-term Elsa study found that loneliness or social isolation was associated with conditions including depression, dementia, heart attacks, long-term lung disease and frailty.

Left unsatisfied, the craving for human company causes psychological stress,.

This raises levels of hormones like cortisol and triggers  the “flight or fight” response, which causes inflammation and increased white blood cell production (a response to inflammation) … and we know that is bad for your health!

{Now, Andrew Steptoe, the University College London professor who leads Elsa, highlights that it’s not only the biology but also the behaviour associated with loneliness that is bad for us. 

Socially isolated and lonely people often follow less healthy lifestyles.

If you are lonely and bored you may well, smoke, drink and just sit in the chair more rather than get up and get out away from such activity.

And if there’s no-one there urging you to go to the Doctor when perhaps you ought to that’s not great for your health either.

Now, that’s arguably social isolation rather than the feeling of loneliness, but to some extent the one feeds the other.

So the academics and the medics are telling us that loneliness epidemic really is a problem and that countering loneliness is critical to improving the nation’s health — and ideally before temporary setbacks harden into chronic isolation. 

“Some argue that the longer you experience loneliness, the more difficult it is to break out of [it],” Wigfield says. “People who are lonely can start to perceive themselves, and others’ views of themselves, more negatively and misinterpret signals from others.” 

(Credit: https://www.ft.com/content/5f712fe8-611c-405e-9098-09ccff95d6de)

Just to give an idea of the scale of the problem, The Campaign to End Loneliness estimates that the number of over-50s experiencing loneliness in the UK will reach 2mn by 2026.

So, undoubtedly our land faces an epidemic of loneliness, and a large part of the problem seems to be that the epidemic of loneliness is a denied epidemic … people feel shame at their feelings of loneliness and therefore attempt to conceal it.

In a scholarly article in Perspectives on Psychological Science 2015, Vol. 10(2) 227–237 Julianne Holt-Lunstad et al conclude that: 

“Current evidence indicates that heightened risk for mortality from a lack of social relationships is greater than that from obesity”

And yet, for some people we might be able to mention, isolation does not lead to loneliness … and results in no shame.

Have you noticed the positive impact of that on their health?

Isolation and loneliness are NOT the same thing!

The discrepancy between an individual’s loneliness and the number of connections in a social network is well documented, and Cacioppo, J. T, et al have shown that the feeling of loneliness is so dissociated from actual isolation the loneliness spreads like an infection through social networks!  (Alone in the crowd: The structure and spread of loneliness in a large social network. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(6), 977–991) https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-22579-013 

This study showed its participants were 52 percent more likely to be lonely if a person they were directly connected to (at one degree of separation) was lonely. 

The size of the effect for people at two degrees of separation (e.g., the friend of a friend) was 25 percent and for people at three degrees of separation (e.g., the friend of a friend of a friend) it was15 percent. 

At four degrees of separation, the effect disappears, in keeping with the “three degrees of influence” rule of social network contagion.}

Let’s just clarify our terms: loneliness is a perception of imperfection in social relationships, but more than that, the subjectivity of it means that it can spread not simply on the basis of the number or quality of social interactions (that’s BEING alone) but on the perception and perceptions can spread like a virus regardless of actual ‘data’.

It seems likely, therefore, that addressing loneliness WITHIN ANY PART of a social group (say, a Church for example) is pretty much in the interests of the whole group!

Now, Genesis 2 addresses the issue of being alone in a measurable sense … you can count very few incidences of human contact for Adam!

There is no indication there … before the Fall messed EVERYTHIUNG up … that Adam was dissatisfied with his social relationships.

It was God Who was dissatisfied with Adam’s social relationships and stepped in to make Eve.

Well, today we’re looking at how relevant Christ and Christian faith are to this issue of FEELING lonely, starting in Genesis exposing its nature and origins and ending up in the more mature revelation of the New Testament looking at God’s provision in the matter.

What is it?

How does it become a problem?

What has God done about it?

         •        2) What IS loneliness in the Bible?

a)    Adam’s ‘aloneness’

I think we’ve probably established already that loneliness is not the same as being alone.

Adam lives in a world that is still uniformly ‘good’ as God described each part of His Creation before the Fall … which only happens AFTER God says Adam needs a buddy.

So Adam shows no sign of distress over his relative isolation with no companion but God … and the creation of a companion for him arises out of GOD’s concern about the situation - NOT Adam’s concern about it but God’s.

Isolation, then, in itself it doesn’t mean there’s bound to be a problem.

Isolation existed on God’s good world before the Fall.

But the response we make to that situation is what we’re going to recognise as feeling lonely … and we’ve already seen that loneliness can actually be QUITE a problem.

And we find several people in the bible who seem to be having a problem with loneliness.

Let’s look quickly at a few …

            b) Biblical loneliness

            •           i) Elijah, 1 Kings 19

Elijah is afflicted in spirit by the sense that he is the only prophet in Israel left that has not compromised the faith and gone over to Baal.

God corrects Elijah’s misunderstanding … it’s actually Paul who puts it very well in a way pertinent to people who feel the church is such a mess they want to give up on it:

(Romans 11:2-5) “Do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he appeals to God against Israel? 3 “Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.” 4 But what is God's reply to him? “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” 5 So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace.”

You are not on your own at ALL Elijah, says the Lord … and then God immediately gives Elijah fresh, meaningful work to do for Him.

We’ll return to that theme.

            •           ii) David, Psalms 25:16 & 142:4

In Psalm 25, by way of example, David turns in the affliction of loneliness to the Lord

“Turn to me and be gracious to me,
    for I am lonely and afflicted.
17 The troubles of my heart are enlarged;
    bring me out of my distresses.
18 Consider my affliction and my trouble,
    and forgive all my sins.”

Loneliness doesn’t always arise because we have sinned and turned away from God.

It’s a thought worth having and checking out though … as David does … because it can do.

            •           iii) Paul, 2 Timothy 1:15, 4:10 & 4:16

There is in Paul’s latest imprisonment a litany of loneliness to pay attention to.

The GREAT Apostle at the upward end of the parabola of loneliness that is common to humanity speaks of his mature experience like this:

“You know that everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me, including Phygelus and Hermogenes.

16 May the Lord show mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, because he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains.”

2 Timothy 1:15

Towards the end of the letter Paul expands on the theme of his loneliness and gets more explicit:

“Do your best to come to me quickly, 10 for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. 11 Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry.”

2 Timothy 4:10

“At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held against them. 17 But the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion’s mouth.”

2 Timothy 4:16

Well, it’s worth following through on what the Lord did about these experiences for these heroes of the faith, but for our immediate purposes let’s look briefly in more general terms at what God has done about loneliness for His covenant people.

         •        3) What has God done about it?

We’re looking at this from the viewpoint that there are unhealthy as well as healthy ‘coping mechanisms’ in the face of loneliness.

            a) Exposed unhealthy ‘coping mechanisms’

It is absolutely no accident that David fell into sin with the wife of Uriah the Hittite when David himself was under-occupied, deprived of the manly company of the leaders of his armies, stuck at home in Jerusalem when as Israel’s king he should have been out in the field at the head of his men fighting the Ammonites at Rabbah.

He hadn’t even gone down to sit with the old guys down on the allotments (or whatever the contemporary cultural equivalent was) because read that he was dozing about napping in the afternoon …

So 1 Samuel 11:1-3 reads:

“In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem.

2 One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. 

The woman was very beautiful, 3 and David sent someone to find out about her …”

He was idling around where he shouldn’t have been.

His men were off at the war … no company there.

Where was David?

Bored at home.

His wife was … where was she?

Nobody knows, but she wasn’t with him.

No company there either.

So dawdling about when he woke up from the nap he very arguably shouldn’t have been having and wandered idly out onto his roof … he found a coping mechanism for his loneliness that proved wildly unhealthy.

Famously the prophet Nathan to David in 2 Samuel 12 and blew David’s secret about how he had wronged Uriah the Hittite, engineered Uriah’s death and took his wife Bathsheba.

It’s obviously the case that the devil really does find work for idle hands, but he certainly finds unhealthy coping mechanisms for loneliness too.

And that’s just one example of the way loneliness gets unhealthily tackled when people go after their own ways to address it in Scripture.

And it’s all so unnecessary because what God has done about loneliness is that He’s

            b) Created Gospel-based solutions for loneliness

            i) Restored fallen people to fellowship with Himself

Fundamentally when mankind was created to be God’s image, His own image or likeness (that is His own semblance or resemblance) way back in Genesis 1:27, God made mankind for life in relationship, just as the triune God was and is himself … a relationship that functioned with God very adequately until sin arose in human experience, when (as Isaiah put it much later in Isaiah 59:1-2) “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,
    nor his ear too dull to hear.
2 But your iniquities have separated
    you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
    so that he will not hear.”

It is your INIQUITIES, you see, that have separated you from your God … leaving you alienated and alone in his world … so Colossians 1:21-22 says:

“once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 

22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.”

What’s God done?

He has reconciled us to our once alienated God and that leaves us very much less ‘alone’.

And moreover, He has …

            ii) Sent His indwelling Comforter to be with us

In John 14 Jesus seeks to reassure His disciples in the face of His coming departure that He, upon Whom they have come to depend, will not leave them as orphans.

Orphans?

A powerful image of those left discomfortingly alone and vulnerable in a world that isn’t very friendly … no-one to protect and to succour you.

FEELING alone.

And He says to those disciples, soon to be left alone by Him because He’s very much on the way to the Cross at this point:

““If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— 17 the Spirit of truth. 

The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. 

But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. 

18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”

So He has reconciled His faithful people to himself.

He has urged loving Him and keeping his commandments on his post-passion people, and with it comes the promise of the One Who will stand up for you … that is, the “advocate to help you and be with you forever” … the Spirit of what?

The Spirit of prayer? Worship? Fellowship?

Well, he plays a big role in inspiring and developing all those important things, but Jesus picks up immediately, as His priority, (v. 17) “the Spirit of truth”.

HE will be with you and in you to drive back the orphan feeling created by His physical departure … in the person of the indwelling Holy Spirit of God.

Lean in to that, lean in to Him.

·       Reconciled believers to Himself.

·       Sent His indwelling Spirit to be in us and with us.

Thirdly …

            iii) Created Gospel-shaped community around us

In the TGC blog NOVEMBER 21, 2020  |  JOE CARTER sums this up neatly for us:

“Psalms 68:6 tells us, “God sets the lonely in families” (NIV). If you’re a follower of Christ, God has set you “with God’s people and also members of his household” (Eph. 2:19). Because of your union with Christ, you are spiritually connected to a family of brothers and sisters who will love you and be with you for all eternity. Find your family by embedding yourself in a community of believers.”

But it doesn’t always work out so neatly because we have to deal with our own sin and the sins of others as we rub up against one another in church in this way … there’s a whole series of sermons in that but Scripture gives us a very important pattern for how to handle the relationships the Lord calls us into in His Church … but for now please notice that it is into those relationships He calls His people as their response to the individual salvation they/ we have received.

But what are we supposed to be doing IN the church to counter loneliness … our loneliness?

You see, Scripture doesn’t teach us that church is designed around MY needs.

Scripture teaches me the church is a place for something else … 

You’ve come across people being lonely IN families?

I have.

And the causes of that often find an echo in the loneliness we can find INSIDE His Church.

You see, what God has done about loneliness for us is given us the Church where He has …

            iv) Given us meaningful service to perform in fellowship

This is pastor Steve Dewitt again saying this:

“we will be a lonely family as long as we come expecting everybody else to meet our needs. We overcome loneliness when we forget ourselves and become concerned with other people and their needs, especially people we don’t perceive as able to meet our needs.”

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/lonely-me-a-pastoral-perspective/

The Lord hasn’t given us Church to sit and feel cosy in.

And using it to serve yourself that way will leave you feeling pretty lonely in it, pretty isolated and lonely indeed.

Sorry to be so blunt.

         •        Conclusion

They tell us that the NHS is moving into an era of prevention rather than treatment, bringing with it more ‘social prescribing’ … including making you feel better with much less use of tablets … and given what we’ve been looking at today, there’s got to be a role for the church to play there, surely?

“God didn’t intend man to be alone. This is why he created Eve and marriage. This is why he instituted the family. This is why the church is called a body. God doesn’t want anyone to be alone. Solitary confinement is for prisons, not the church.”

Well, thanks for hanging on for this but … cue great excitement … here comes today’s text, so you can see how dealing with loneliness, whether we’re alone (meaning isolated) or not, lies Biblically at the heart of God’s Gospel’s purpose:

In Ephesians 1 Paul sets out exactly what God intended to achieve by means of the Gospel.

In vv. 3-6 there Paul BASKS in the greatness and Glory of the way the Lord has brought about the salvation of human beings … it is an effusive outpouring of the greatest and most glorious of truth, that we might struggle to understand but do well to bathe our souls in …

But Paul’s point gets made in v. 10 where Paul shows us that the purpose of God in this whole hot-bath for the soul is to show that God is actively now - through this phenomenal Good News about Jesus – bringing all things together in unity again under the headship of our Saviour.

What’s that got to do with this?

Together again.

Under Christ’s headship.

The whole job of bringing all things together again is obliterating the isolation from God and from one another brought about by the Fall … the Fall happens in Genesis 3 and Cain slew Abel in Genesis chapter 4, see?

The whole eternal plan of God in the Gospel blows the mind but it turns back the alienation from God and one another which DRIVES loneliness (and does a lot of other damage besides, of course) … and brings ALL back together again through the Gospel.

And God is doing that NOW, by means of Gospel reconciliation to Himself and to one another in the proclamation of the Gospel and through the fellowship that creates by His Word and His Spirit in His new community … the actual church.

Not the institutions of men, which we sometimes mistakenly call ‘the Church’, but the company of imperfect but growing people living by His Word in fellowship with his Spirit in this broken world until we see our loving Saviour face to face in Heavenly Glory.

And THAT is the essential work that the Gospel does.

However, there’s a kink in this tale!

But, you say, I am lonely IN the church!

This is where the rubber really hits the road, because we weren’t called to Christ so much to be IN the Church, but to BE the Church.

Let me put it like this.

Are you lonely IN the Church or lonely AS the Church?

Let’s hear these words from a Pastor (his name is Steve Dewitt) who often feels lonely IN the church, because he thinks that if we are feeling lonely IN church it may be because we are accurately understanding the function OF the church but misunderstanding our function IN the Church.

He puts it better than me:

“The church is designed by God to be a place of belonging (Rom. 12:5). We are the family of God. But we will be a lonely family as long as we come expecting everybody else to meet our needs. We overcome loneliness when we forget ourselves and become concerned with other people and their needs, especially people we don’t perceive as able to meet our needs.”

Now he may be onto something there.

The point of being IN the church is that we are to work together in a mutual and reciprocal sort of way … the way Romans 12 describes it happening … to BE the Church together.

Steve Dewitt goes on:

“The power of Christian community is this: when we invert our natural desire to be loved and choose to love and serve others, the love of God through us mitigates the loneliness in us. 

As Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Love has a by product of blessing to it. Self-giving love doesn’t merely bless others—it is the life of God through the Spirit experienced within me. 

Try it and see what happens with your loneliness.’

Steve Dewitt, TGC, August 4th., 2011 https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/lonely-me-a-pastoral-perspective/

Someone I don’t know personally who rejoices in the name Ashley Chesnut … I think that’s a lady’s name and I think she is single … wrote some wise words in an article for The Gospel Coalition in July 2018:

“Our emotions are tainted by sin, so just because we feel something doesn’t mean it’s true. Emotions are a good gift that should be tested, not automatically trusted. So when you feel lonely, remind yourself of what is true. For example:

• Although you feel alone, you’re not. God is with you. He will never leave or forsake you (Deut. 31:6).
• God knows exactly how you feel, and he has felt the pain of loneliness too. Nowhere is that exemplified more than when Jesus hung on the cross (Matt. 27:46; cf. Isa. 53:3).
• You know the God of all comfort (2 Cor. 1:3–4). If you turn to him with your pain, he will comfort you. He is near to the brokenhearted, to the crushed in spirit (Ps. 34:18).
• God has a mighty and marvelous purpose for your situation and pain (Rom. 8:28). It won’t be wasted.”

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/3-unhealthy-responses-loneliness/

And you might want to say to me ‘that’s alright for you, you’ve got a wife and a family and you don’t know what it is to be lonely.

Do you think so?

Go back over what I’ve found to say to you today.

Do I sound like a stranger to loneliness?

(And by the way, please take note, that is a criticism I make of myself and of nobody else).

Our good and gracious God gives us all manner of experiences to hone our character, turn our faith into faithfulness, even help us to be a little bit more like Jesus.

Alright for me, is it?

Don’t you believe it!