Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 15, 2022 | More than a Feeling - Loneliness

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May 15, 2022 | More than a Feeling - Loneliness · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everybody.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: It's great to see you.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: Glad you can make it.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Like Teresa said, we're all storm chasers this morning.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: Honorary, honorary storm chasers.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Hey, we're going through a series right now called More Than a Feeling.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: And the idea behind more than a feeling is that we have been created in the image of God, and God has entrusted us and given us emotions.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: And those emotions often reflect our creator in the way that we can properly use them or see them.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: The problem is that we often don't use them the way that God would intend for us to.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: And so then we can struggle with it and grow angry with God or grow frustrated or despondent because we don't understand how to use our emotions.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: And so more than a feeling is about taking these emotions that God has given to us, sort of getting to the root of them and seeing how through that we can draw closer to God.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: This mornings might be most famously referred to by Three Dog Night when they said, one is the loneliest number.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: We're going to be talking about loneliness this morning.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: And loneliness is it's a huge topic.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: But you might see this and you think, well, really, is loneliness something that God created us with?
1:20
SPEAKER_00: He did.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: God created us with a desire to have relationships.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: In fact, David, can you grab my Bible that's right behind Sam?
1:29
SPEAKER_00: Because I forgot to bring it up here.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: If you guys have looked at the guest services desk, you'll notice that we have these cards that are out front that you can grab and whether you're in the cab or in Mulvaine, and they say on the front, we were created for relationship.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: We made these cards because it's true.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: It's not just that we thought it was a nifty tagline, but it's coming straight out of the Bible.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: See, uh, when we look at God, and this sort of gets into the weeds for a second, but when we look at the Trinity, right?
2:08
SPEAKER_00: The three-in-one nature of our Lord, the Godhead is also one and three.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: And so for eternity, God has rested in unity and in relationship between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: They have not known loneliness because they have been in relationship with each other.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: But even if that one is a little bit far from us, when we go to Genesis 2, we see that God goes to Adam and says, You were not made to be alone.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: You must need a helper.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: And so then Eve comes along, and from then God had shown us that as creation, we are not meant to walk through it alone.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: But you probably don't need scripture for me to tell you the pain, though, that comes when we are going through life and we experience the loss of community, of family, of friends, or even just hard situations that makes us feel like we don't have anybody around us.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: I know there are some of you who have lost a spouse.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: You've lost a best friend, or maybe you're just at that stage of life where you are going to way too many funerals for people that you have grown up with.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you're new to Topeka.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always have to be because of death.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're new to Topeka or new to a job, and you've left a community that you loved and cherished, and now you've had a hard time finding a new community.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: People aren't really reaching out like you thought they were going to, and so now you're saying, What do I do here?
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Or, hey, this is the time of graduation season, and we've got some grads who are going to be going off and doing wonderful things here in the next couple years, but they're going to be heading off to colleges where they're in the freshman orientation room, saying, Man, I don't know a soul in here.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Loneliness can strike us in so many different ways.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you are somebody who, whether by God's design, as Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 7, or perhaps you would prefer something else, you're single right now.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: You're desiring a spouse, or like I said, maybe God has just called you into that space, but nevertheless you understand what it is like to feel lonely.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: So all of these things are being drawn out from us because we are made to be in a relationship and made to have a relationship, but most of all, we feel lonely when we don't have a relationship with God Himself.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna come back to that a little bit later because first I want you to see three individuals in the Bible who experienced what I think must have been the depths of loneliness.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: See how they responded to it, see how we can use their example to respond to it, and then ultimately circle back to this greatest truth, which is that honestly, we are never truly alone when we have a relationship with God.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: Now, the last thing I'll say before I dive into these individuals is if you're somebody right now who's hearing me and you're saying, I don't really feel lonely.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: I feel blessed.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: I have a family, I've got friends, I've got a community, I've got people.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: That's not really something that's a part of my life.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: Here's my encouragement to you is don't be the Titanic, okay?
5:29
SPEAKER_00: Do not go unprepared because you are overconfident into something that you cannot plan for.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: Don't be somebody who hears the message of the Word of God and says, you know what, that's actually not really for me because I'm not experiencing that right now.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Loneliness because we live in a fallen and sad world is something that afflicts all of us at some point or the other.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: But there are three individuals I want to show you who I believe we can look at and we can identify with and see how they responded to their loneliness as they drew closer to God.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: The first one is Moses.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Wait, no, not Heston.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: Um we've got Moses.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: Moses, who enters really the biblical narrative as a baby having been sent off by his mother down the river because the Pharaoh at the time is trying to kill all of the Hebrew children.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: And so Moses grows up in Pharaoh's household, and Moses' life is split into really three segments of 40 years.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: The first 40 years, he grew up in Egypt, under Pharaoh's house, in an adopted family, but he was living with a family who was persecuting and killing his countrymen and his people every single day.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: And so we get these glimpses of Moses' life throughout this time, where we see that he developed a desire to rescue his people from under the bondage of his relatives.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: And so not only did he grow up in a household where he was seeing himself in the eyes and the faces of those who were being persecuted by his family, but then when he's about 40 years old, he goes out and he's sort of traveling and he sees a Hebrew, an Israelite, being attacked and scourged by a slave owner.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: And he strikes the slave owner and kills him.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: And unlike what you might expect if we were watching a movie about this sort of thing, where everybody rejoices and says, Oh, thank you for liberating us, they start spreading rumors.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: They say he's a murderer.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: His own people, they say he's a murderer.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: He's killed somebody.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to be around him.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: In fact, the next day, Moses goes out again and he sees two Hebrews who are fighting.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: And he walks up to them apparently to try and sort of quell the conflict, and they say, What, are you going to kill us too?
7:49
SPEAKER_00: So, rejected by his own people, the rumor then spreads to his adopted family, and Pharaoh says that he's going to now kill Moses.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: So his plan and his purpose that he had sort of been contriving in his head has been rejected.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: His own family is now trying to kill him and sends him away.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: And in one of the greatest summary lines in the Bible, it says that Moses fled from Egypt.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: He went to Midian and sat down by a well.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you were to walk to Midian as Moses did, if you started into Pika, you would walk east and you would go about 40 miles past St.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: Louis.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: That's roughly how far Moses was walking to get away from these problems.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: Do you think he probably experienced loneliness during that journey?
8:37
SPEAKER_00: You think he probably was wondering, man, I just left 40 years of life behind and I'm starting over.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: I know nobody and I know nothing.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: And if I go back, they're gonna kill me.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: The next 40 years, he's wandering as a nomadic shepherd, thinking probably that his life's purpose is done with.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: Well, and then he's 80.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: He's 80 years old, we might forget when the burning bush happens.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: Moses is 80 when he sees the burning bush, and God calls him back to Egypt.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: And we sort of know the story where Moses goes back and rescues his people and then takes them out in the Exodus.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: But then it's another 40 years where he's in the desert and everybody is grumbling with him.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: He is their leader appointed by God, somebody that he gets to communicate with God.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: But not only do the people reject his leadership and say that he's making terrible decisions, even his own sister Miriam, tries to overthrow his leadership.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: But then every single adult that he left Egypt with, when they fled out of that nation, every single adult died along the way in the desert.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: It was the next generation that was to inherit the promised land.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: So his brother dies, and everybody that he was friends with along the way during those 40 years.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: Lonely.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: And then you get to the very end of Moses' story where God says, Moses, you disobeyed me.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: And so now you are not going to enter into the promised land, but you're going to go high up on that hill.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to show it to you, and then you're going to be joined with your ancestors.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: You're going to die.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Moses, nobody's going to be with you.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: It is going to be a solitary journey, as Moses must have imagined, like all of those journeys up Mount Sinai that he would take to go and be with God.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: Moses, you are going to be alone.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: But Deuteronomy tells us when he goes up to the top of that mountain, that God is with him.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: And Moses, understanding the truth, that God had never really left him before he ascends the mountain to go and truly face his maker, if there was ever a proper use for that term, he gives these final parting words to Joshua.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: And I want you to sort of take in all of the knowledge of Moses, what he must have experienced, for him to be able to truthfully say to the man that was going to take his spot, going to be the next leader, and take the people into the promised land.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: He says, Be strong and courageous, for you will go with this people into the land the Lord swore to give to their ancestors.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: You will enable them to take possession of it.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: The Lord is the one who will go before you.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: Joshua, who had been with Moses for decades, understanding the leadership here, Moses is saying, Joshua, God is going to be with you like he was with me.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: God is going to lead you like he led me.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: God is going to protect you like he protected me.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: And Joshua, when you feel like because you are in leadership and people are rejecting you and you feel like nobody can relate.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: Joshua, when you feel the armies, the gigantic armies of the nations that are far larger than us, when you feel them bearing down on you, God is never going to leave you.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: And so it is with this knowledge that Moses goes up on top of the mountain.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: What's interesting, though, is that the one who was able to truthfully say this understood it because it was a reality.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a pep talk that he was giving Joshua.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: It was experiential.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: Moses understood that through all of these years that God had never ever left his side.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: In fact, when he does go up on top of that mountain to meet his ancestors, as God says, Moses dies, and God himself buries Moses.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: Just take that in for a second.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: God himself is Moses' pallbearer, basically.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: Talk about a way to leave this world.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: Jude verse 9 in the New Testament then tells us that God sends his angels to fight over the body of Moses because he so cherishes him, and Satan wants to fight with him for the possession of it.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: That's a whole nother sermon.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: But this is the kind of person who understands that even in the depths of loneliness, that God never leaves us.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: God never leaves us.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: And so if you are feeling a little bit like Moses, somebody who maybe feels like your purpose is no longer here.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: You have had your family, maybe they are no longer a part of your story or they have rejected you.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you are in leadership and feel the loneliness that comes with nobody being able to understand what you're going through.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe like Moses, every single person around you has now passed away, and it seems like you are the only one left.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: In these deepest and darkest of moments, God has never left you.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: But that's not the only thing to learn about loneliness.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about King David for a moment, and actually before he becomes King David.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about little shepherd boy David, the youngest of all of his brothers, who was often sent to tend the flocks, and those, like Moses' lonely nights out in the field as a shepherd.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: David, who understood what it was like to live a solitary life, was in no way ready for what God ultimately had for him, or could at least never have predicted it.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Because when it was time for a new king to be chosen, the youngest of all of Jesse's boys, who had been left out in the pastures by himself, because they thought it was going to be at least one of the other brothers, gets brought in.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: And so, like Joseph, who experienced the ridicule of his brothers as one of the youngest was chosen over all of them, David, the son of Jesse, ultimately a great, great, great, great, great ancestor of Christ and future king of Israel, gets anointed as the king, and you can imagine the thought that is going through his head.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: I am an adolescent.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm not even ready for my grad party yet.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to be the next king of Israel.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: I bet that was a pretty lonely experience, perhaps.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: Not many people can relate to that.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: There had only been one king at that point.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: And as we find out later in the story, Saul had a real hard time with David.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: See, after David defeated Goliath, we read in the text that David is brought back into Saul's tent, and Saul says, David, you're not going home.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: You're staying here with me.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: You're going to be my pseudo-commander and bard as you play the harp in my presence.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: David, you're not going back to your family.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: You're going to be in my service.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: And so David stays with him, and things look okay for a while.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: David is almost adopted into Saul's family.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: His best friend, Jonathan, is David, is Saul's son.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: His first love, uh, Michael, is David, is Saul's daughter.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: And so between all of these things, it's like Saul is almost his adoptive father as well.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: But then Saul starts throwing spears at David and wants to kill David and is jealous of David, and so David has to go on the run.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: And it's easy to look back at that and to sort of build it up into this wonderful thing because we know what's coming.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: It was a servant that left without a posse because his best friend told him that somebody was trying to kill him.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: And so David goes on the run for the better part of a decade.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: Better part of a decade.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: And as he is running, as he is drinking from streams, and he is scavenging for food, and he is going from city to city because the king of God's people is chasing after him and has his armies going after him.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: David is hiding in these caves.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: And it's in these caves that not yet King David says something like this Look to the right and see.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: No one stands up for me.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: There's no refuge for me.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: No one cares about me.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm not looking for a show of hands, but I don't know if you have ever felt something like that before.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: No one cares for me.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: He's talking to the Lord here.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: God, you know.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm alone right now.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: There's not a single person who cares for me.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows my needs.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's calling me.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's reaching out to me.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: My own family does not care for me.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: But notice how David keeps going.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: On the run from Saul, carried by his soldiers, scavenging for food, stuck in a cold dark cave, not yet the king of Israel.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: This is the next three verses.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: I cry to you, Lord.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: I say, You are my shelter, my portion in the land of the living.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: Listen to my cry, for I am very weak.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: Rescue me from those who pursue me, for they are too strong for me.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: Free me from prison so that I can praise your name.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: The righteous will gather around me because you deal generous generously with me.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: What does it take?
18:23
SPEAKER_00: What is the attitude of somebody who is in the depths of loneliness for them to be able to look at the Lord and say, Lord, you deal generously with me.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Father, you are good to me.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: Yes, there are people that don't so you know, they don't surround me.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: I am very weak.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: People are running after me, and I can no longer fight against them, but God, you are my shelter.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: See, this is different than Moses.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: Moses understood, I'm sure he understood the same kind of lesson, but Moses over 120 years saw that God never left his side through all of the trials that he experienced.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: David, what is so interesting about him is that he was able to see that God can always be found.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: No matter the situation, it was not just that God was present, but that in the deepest moments of depression or loneliness, God was there and he could be found, and he could relate to him and speak to him and find comfort from the king who had anointed him some dozen years earlier.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: These two things, Moses understanding that God had never left his side, and David realizing that in when everybody was going against him, when he says, No one cares about me, he was still able to reach out to God and say, But you do.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: Lord, nobody else, but you care about me.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm going through.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: You understand my plight.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: You, Lord, are my shelter.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't sound like me to somebody who has succumbed to the pain and grief of loneliness.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: It sounds like somebody who is able to use it and see that, hey, maybe God was using that to prepare him for his life ahead and so that he might draw closer to the king, the true king, that he would need to rely on while he was king.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you can relate to David too.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: But there's a third figure that I want us to focus on this morning, and that's Jesus Christ.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: As we look to Jesus, there are many things that can be said about our Savior, God incarnate, Emmanuel, as we sang this morning, God with us.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, God Himself, who came to live a perfect life, die on the cross for our sins, a death he did not deserve, so that we might be saved, if we would accept him, repent of our sins, and turn to him.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: This Jesus Christ, you might think lived a life of loneliness, but you probably don't understand the deaths that he experienced.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: See, when we read in the Gospels about Jesus, we get about three years in his life.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: His earthly ministry lasted about three years before he was killed, before he allowed himself to be killed.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: There's about 30 years before that.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: And we don't get much glimpse into it.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: We get when he was born, right, which is what we normally talk about around Christmas time.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: We get a little bit when he's, you know, 12-ish and he's at the temple, and he says, you know, this is my father's house.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: But by and large, we have no idea.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: The Bible is at least silent on what his life was like.
21:37
SPEAKER_00: Except for when we go to Isaiah 53 and we hear about the suffering servant, which is talking about Jesus and what his life was like.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: He didn't have an impressive form or majesty that we should look at him, no appearance that we should desire him.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: He was Like someone people turned away from.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: He was despised, and we didn't value him.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: It's antithetical to pretty much the way that we develop celebrities today.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: That they are attractive, they are popular, they're winsome, and so we follow them on Instagram and let them influence what we think and say.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: No, here it's saying Jesus, I mean, I'm reading in the text, I'm understanding that he was not very attractive, that there was nothing about him as far as his outward appearance that made it so that people in the world living by their flesh valued him.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: He was despised and rejected, and apparently he was sick quite often as a child.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: Even though he was God himself, he did not have an impressive form or majesty.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: And so you might be able to sort of imagine, as we have been with Moses and David, for a moment, what that was like for God Himself, as we read in Philippians, that he was humbled when he came to earth and took on human nature, maybe a greater understanding of that humility as God himself chose to not be outwardly impressive and experienced rejection.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: He was not the cool kid in Hebrew school by any stretch of the imagination.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: And this Jesus is the one who goes on as we read about in the Gospels and is very well able to relate to those who also feel lonely, who also feel rejected, who say, I am the least of these, and he says, Well, you will be first in heaven.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: Jesus understands that.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: But there is one moment that I want to point out to you about Christ and what we have in Scripture that I think best encapsulates this moment.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: And that is on the cross in Matthew 27, when he is being crucified from noon until three in the afternoon, darkness came over the whole land.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: About three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, Lama Sabactini, that is, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
24:06
SPEAKER_00: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me is the beginning of Psalm 22 that David wrote.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: And so as we're sort of skipping stones here throughout the Bible, we're picking up on some threads of loneliness of David and sort of the anguish that he felt during the time that we just talked about.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, that's kind of what I feel.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: And more than that, what it is like for, if you remember at the very beginning, we said in our understanding of the beauty and divine mystery of the Trinity, that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have always been one, yet have felt fellowship with one another, what it is like for a member of the Trinity on the cross to for a moment say that he feels distant from the Father.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: The reason he feels that way is because he is taking the weight of the entire world's sin, placing it upon his shoulders, and he is being killed and punished as a substitute for us.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: Now, there's a deeper truth here too, even beyond his loneliness, which is that the reason that he is feeling lonely is because he is experiencing the worldwide effects, the culminating effects of what sin does to us in our relationship with God when it's a part of our life.
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SPEAKER_00: When we sin against God and when we rebel against God, we are pushing away the one who has always been with us and can always be found.
25:29
SPEAKER_00: Now it is not that God ever truly leaves us, as Moses saw, or that he cannot ever be found as David saw, but we draw far away from God.
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SPEAKER_00: It's a popular verse to be taken out of context.
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SPEAKER_00: Revelation 3.20, where Jesus says, I stand at the door and knock, and if anyone answers, I will eat with him, and he with me, I will go in and be with them.
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SPEAKER_00: That verse is not about salvation.
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SPEAKER_00: It is about those who have shut the door on their relationship with Christ.
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SPEAKER_00: It's in Revelation 3, it's in a part of a letter to the church.
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SPEAKER_00: And so we see here a couple things that I would love for you to pick up.
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SPEAKER_00: And the first is that Jesus is our Savior.
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SPEAKER_00: He is our sacrifice, and he's experiencing these things out of his love for us.
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SPEAKER_00: He is going to the cross, and he is experiencing loneliness willingly because he does not want you to be alienated from God.
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SPEAKER_00: That was the first.
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SPEAKER_00: The second thing I want you to see is that God knows our pain.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: This is the third lesson of sort of these vignettes.
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SPEAKER_00: It is that God knows our pain.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: This is one of the most beautiful parts about the incarnation of Christ, is that God himself is not some faraway God.
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SPEAKER_00: He is omnipresent, yes, but at the same time, he chose to come in human flesh and experience the pains of this world so that he could relate to us.
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SPEAKER_00: He created us, yes, but he wanted us to be able to go to him and say, Lord, you have experienced the same pain that I have felt.
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SPEAKER_00: This is why in the book of Hebrews it so helpfully goes on and says, Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
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SPEAKER_00: Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
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SPEAKER_00: Do you understand that the writer of Hebrews here, though the core of this passage is saying we do not have a high priest, Jesus, who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.
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SPEAKER_00: When we go to God and say, Lord, I've been rejected.
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SPEAKER_00: I've lost people.
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SPEAKER_00: I feel pain and I feel lonely, Jesus is able to genuinely say, I have been there too.
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SPEAKER_00: I've experienced that.
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SPEAKER_00: I know what it feels like to go through what you're going through.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: And so in him, we do not have a distant God, but a close God.
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SPEAKER_00: We have a relationship with him that is more important than anything else.
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SPEAKER_00: And so because we know that he never leaves us, because we know that he can always be found, we're able to go to him, and he is able to relate to us and us to him to a degree as we see the sufferings of Christ in those things, our own sufferings.
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SPEAKER_00: And this is the part that gets kind of uncomfortable, the further sufferings that we are supposed to experience as Christians in this world when we pick up our cross daily and follow him.
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SPEAKER_00: Don't you know that Jesus says that when we follow after him and live our lives in such a way that we are honoring the Lord, we are going to encounter loneliness because the world is going to reject us.
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SPEAKER_00: Hey, that's what we signed up for.
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SPEAKER_00: We signed up to be rejected by the world and to experience loneliness from the world because we have a Savior who is trying to save the world and yet they do not want him.
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SPEAKER_00: And so those things, when we experience them, we can go to Christ and say, Hey, God, I tried to tell this person about Jesus, and now they said that they're not my friend, and Jesus says, Yep, been there.
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SPEAKER_00: I know what that one's like too.
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SPEAKER_00: So in all of these things, we see that because of the truth of God in our loneliness, in the loneliness we have encountered, where we can now look back and see that He's never left us, and the loneliness we're in now, where we can see that Jesus, God, can be found in this space, and also as we look to the future, when we encounter further pain, we can go to God and say, Lord, please, I need help.
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SPEAKER_00: In all of these things, the command that we are given here in Hebrews is that we are to draw near to the throne of grace.
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SPEAKER_00: We draw near to God's throne because through that throne, that majesty, that holiness, right, if you were with us for Leviticus, this should have an even greater weight.
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SPEAKER_00: In fact, all of Hebrews should have a greater weight because of the themes that are drawn forth.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: But the idea of coming close to the throne of grace after everything we've talked about with holiness and how separate God is and how he hates sin and can't stand it and is all good and only good and is filled with justice, and that we can draw near to that throne and experience his mercy and experience his grace in time of need.
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SPEAKER_00: These are things that we have to do, but it requires us drawing near.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: So my final, my final sort of encouragement to you is that you would draw near to God, that you would experience his grace, and you would fully commit to your relationship with Christ.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: There are two final avenues I want to travel down this morning.
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SPEAKER_00: The first is that I want to tread so carefully as to not bruise anyone who is experiencing that depth of loneliness that we've talked about.
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SPEAKER_00: I don't want you to, if you are lonely right now, for whatever the reasons are that are present, I want you to hear that God is near to you, that he can be found, and Jesus knows your pain.
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SPEAKER_00: I want you to know that he loves you, that he died for you, and that he is always going to be there for you.
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SPEAKER_00: I also want you to know that your loneliness is temporary.
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SPEAKER_00: It might last until we Jesus calls us home, but your loneliness is temporary.
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SPEAKER_00: And how sweet it will be when the relationship that you have cultivated in sort of the fallow ground of despair is a beautiful plant that when we get to heaven and get to be with God and experience Him in eternity, it will be like seeing an old friend.
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SPEAKER_00: That is what I desire for you.
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SPEAKER_00: And so I want you to feel that and know that.
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SPEAKER_00: But there's also a separate sort of area that I want to travel in, which is I want to lovingly prod those who, maybe because they don't feel lonely right now, or because they don't understand the depth of their sin as they have transgressed against God, or maybe it's because they are just wanting to give lip service to this idea that they are a Christian instead of truly committing.
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SPEAKER_00: I want you to know that God is not satisfied with those things.
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SPEAKER_00: And I use that language very carefully, that God is not satisfied with us giving lip service to our relationship with him, to telling the world that we are Christians, yet in our lives we go to him once a week, maybe less, that he is some sort of distant figure that we relate to in our prayers and is not the God of, well, as Moses would say, the God of his fathers, the God of His ancestors, as David would say, his true king, and as we look to the actions of Jesus Christ, we would say our Savior.
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SPEAKER_00: We don't know those things unless we are fully committed to our relationship with Christ.
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SPEAKER_00: And as a final thought, as you fully commit to your relationship with Christ, you will experience more loneliness from this world and a greater and deeper fellowship with Jesus.
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SPEAKER_00: Those are the things that we exchange.
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SPEAKER_00: When we draw nearer to Jesus, we are rejected by the world.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: That's what he means when he says that we take up our cross every single day and we follow him.
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SPEAKER_00: And for some people, that cost was too much.
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SPEAKER_00: And so I don't desire that for you.
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SPEAKER_00: I want you to know that the cost is worth it, both eternally and temporally, in the world that we live in and our earth today.
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SPEAKER_00: That cost that you pay is worth it because of who God is.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: So as a final note, um, I want to read to you.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have a little bit of church liturgy here.
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SPEAKER_00: Um I want to read to you Psalm 22, which is what Jesus quoted on the cross, which is what David wrote when he was on the run from Saul.
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SPEAKER_00: And um, when we're done, I'm gonna read Psalm 22 for you, and then when we're done, um, I'm going to say, this is the word of God for the people of God, and I would like for you to say, thanks be to God.
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SPEAKER_00: Okay?
34:27
SPEAKER_00: So uh if you'd like to follow along, I'm going to read from Psalm 22 here.
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SPEAKER_00: And uh, if you have your Bibles, I think that's fantastic.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: Please follow along with me.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have your Bibles, consider the um the progression that is made throughout this Psalm as David moves from verse 1 to this last verse.
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SPEAKER_00: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
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SPEAKER_00: Why are you so far from my deliverance and from my words of groaning?
35:00
SPEAKER_00: My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer.
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SPEAKER_00: By night yet I have no rest, but you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.
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SPEAKER_00: Our fathers trusted in you, they trusted and you rescued them.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: They cried to you and were set free.
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SPEAKER_00: They trusted in you and were not disgraced.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by people.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: Everyone who sees me mocks me.
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SPEAKER_00: They sneer and shake their heads, they say he relies on the Lord.
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SPEAKER_00: Let him save him, let the Lord rescue him, since he takes pleasure in him.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: But it was you who brought me out of the womb, making me secure at my mother's breast.
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SPEAKER_00: I was given over to you at birth.
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SPEAKER_00: You have been my God from my mother's womb.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Do not be far from me, because distress is near and there's no one to help.
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SPEAKER_00: Many bulls surround me, strong ones of Bashan encircle me.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: They open their mouths against me, lions mauling and roaring.
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SPEAKER_00: I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed, my heart is like wax melting within me.
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SPEAKER_00: My strength is dried up like baked clay, my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
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SPEAKER_00: You put me in the dust of death, for dogs have surrounded me, a gang of evildoers has closed in on me, they pierced my hands and my feet.
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SPEAKER_00: I count all my bones, people look and stare at me, they divided my garments among themselves, and they cast lots for my clothing.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: But you, Lord, don't be far away.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: My strength come quickly to help me.
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SPEAKER_00: Rescue my life from the sword, my only life from the power of these dogs.
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SPEAKER_00: Save me from the lion's mouth, from the horns of wild oxen.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: Lord, you answered me.
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SPEAKER_00: I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters.
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SPEAKER_00: I will praise you in the assembly.
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SPEAKER_00: You who fear the Lord, praise him.
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SPEAKER_00: All you descendants of Jacob, honor him.
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SPEAKER_00: All you descendants of Israel, revere him, for he has not despised or abhorred the torment of the oppressed.
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SPEAKER_00: He did not hide his face from him, but listened when he cried to him for help.
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SPEAKER_00: I will give praise in the great assembly because of you.
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SPEAKER_00: I will fulfill my vows before those who fear you.
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SPEAKER_00: The humble will eat and be satisfied.
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SPEAKER_00: Those who seek the Lord will praise him.
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SPEAKER_00: May your hearts live forever.
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SPEAKER_00: All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord.
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SPEAKER_00: All the families of the nations will bow down before you, for kingship belongs to the Lord.
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SPEAKER_00: He rules the nations.
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SPEAKER_00: All who prosper on earth will eat and bow down.
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SPEAKER_00: All those who go down to the dust will kneel before him, even the one who cannot preserve his life.
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SPEAKER_00: Their descendants will serve him.
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SPEAKER_00: The next generation will be told about the Lord.
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SPEAKER_00: They will come and declare his righteousness to a people yet to be born, they will declare what he has done.
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SPEAKER_00: This is the word of God for the people of God.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, Father, we thank you for today.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: Lord, you are gracious to us.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: We draw near to your throne, Father, where we may find grace and help in our time of need.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: Father, you have done this for us by the power of your Son Jesus Christ, who willingly chose death and for a moment experienced, Lord, separation from you.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: What that must have been like.
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SPEAKER_00: The loneliness of an eternity, a relationship feeling so distant, but God, you did it out of your love for us.
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SPEAKER_00: And so, Father, I pray for, first of all, anyone who is lonely, whether because of death or rejection or new circumstances, Father, that you would help them, help us all to seek you out, knowing that you have never left us even during those darkest moments.
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SPEAKER_00: Lord, you can always be found and have always been able to be found.
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SPEAKER_00: And Lord, we'll always continue to be found.
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SPEAKER_00: As we understand that you can relate to us a decision you made, Lord, out of your love for us, so that you could sympathize with our needs as we live in a fallen world.
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SPEAKER_00: Father, please help us by the power of your spirit to understand that and bring comfort, Lord, grace and help to those who are lonely right now.
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SPEAKER_00: God, I also pray for anyone who does not yet fully understand the grace of Jesus Christ and what it means to draw near to that throne.
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SPEAKER_00: And Father, I pray that you would work in their hearts as they see that a relationship with you is more important than any other relationship that they might desire.
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SPEAKER_00: And Father, that we, none of us, will truly be satisfied until we have that relationship with you.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: Father, I pray for them.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: I pray that you would stir their hearts towards your affections, God, and they would see your glory, and they would be convicted of their sin.
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SPEAKER_00: And Father, they would repent and turn to you.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: And finally, Lord, I pray that as we all experience loneliness in the future, God, that it might be as sweet of an experience as Moses faced.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we will you will gather us together so that we can be with those who have gone before us, Lord, that we dearly miss.
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SPEAKER_00: And God, you will be with us in those final moments.
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SPEAKER_00: Father, for we love you and we thank you.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: And it's in Jesus' name that we pray.
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SPEAKER_00: Amen.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for coming today.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: Have a great week.