The Blog of Mark (SoftCoder) and Vickie Vejvoda

Most of the world’s GREAT SOULS have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness.

Enoch, walked with God and was not, for God took him; and while it is not stated in so many words, a fair inference is that Enoch walked a path quite apart from his contemporaries.

Another lonely man was Noah. Evidence points to the aloneness of his life even while surrounded by his people.

As far as we know not one word did God ever speak to Abraham in the company of men. Face down he communed with his God, and the innate dignity of the man forbade that he assume this posture in the presence of others.

Moses also was a man apart. While yet attached to the court of Pharaoh he took long walks alone. After the break with Egypt he dwelt in almost complete seclusion in the desert.

The prophets of pre-Christian times differed widely from each other, but one mark they bore in common was their enforced loneliness.

Jesus died alone in the darkness hidden from the sight of mortal man and no one saw Him when He arose triumphant and walked out of the tomb, though many saw Him after-ward and bore witness to what they saw.

This cheerful denial of loneliness proves only that the speaker has never walked with God without the support and encouragement afforded him by society. The sense of companionship which mistakenly attributes to the presence of Christ may and probably does arise from the presence of friendly people. Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society had turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross. “They all forsook him, and fled”.

The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate world.

His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences his is forced to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.

The man who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course be his as he mingles with religious persons in the regular activities of the church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find. After all, he is a stranger and a pilgrim, and the journey he takes is not on his feet but in his heart. He walks with God in the garden of his soul– and who but God can walk there with him?

The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honoured but to see his Saviour glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shop-talk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up”. His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He learns in inner solitude what he could no have learned in the crowd– that Christ is all in all, that HE is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, that in Him we have and possess life’s summum bonum.

Two things remain to be said. One, that the lonely man of whom we speak is not a haughty man, nor is he the holier-than-thou, austere saint so bitterly satirized in popular literature. He is likely to feel that he is the least of all men and is sure tp blame himself for his very loneliness. He wants to share he feelings with others and to open his heart to some like-minded soul who will understand him, but the spiritual climate around him does not encourage it, so he remains silent and tells his griefs to God alone.

The second thing is that the lonely saint is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against human suffering and spends his days contemplating the heavens. Just the opposite is true. His loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of the broken-hearted and the fallen and the sin-bruised. Because he is detached from the world he is all the more able to help it.

The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful “adjustment” to the unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them (modern Christians) and accepts them for that they are. This is the saddest thing that can be said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints.

A.W Tozer