Tough No.11 Loneliness - Elijah

I'm going to turn to God's Word to a number of readings. They're dotted all over the place. These are all verses from scripture which relate to tonight's subject.

The first verse relates to an incident which took place with Elijah after the account on Mount Carmel. And the verse says, he replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars and put your prophets to death with the sword.

I am the only one left and now they are trying to kill me too. Two verses in Psalm 68. His name is the Lord and rejoice before him.

A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing, but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. Over to the book of Luke, chapter 5, verses 15 and 16.

The accounts of Jesus and the leper. Yet the news about him spread all the more so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

The account in Matthew 26 of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to them, sit here while I go over there and pray.

He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him. And he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

Stay here and keep watch with me. Going a little further, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, my father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will. Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping.

Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour? He asked Peter. Then the following chapter, Matthew 27, from the sixth hour until the ninth hour, darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which means my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? When some of those standing there heard this, they said, he's calling Elijah.

And finally, in 2 Timothy chapter four, this is Paul speaking, the apostle Paul. At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held against them, 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. May God add his blessings to those readings from his word. Bob, could you come to the microphone? Let's turn the clock back a number of years to the Second World War.

When the war broke out, what were you doing, Bob? Well, when war broke out, as far as England was concerned in 1939, I was then a missionary in Tunisia, but the war didn't really come to North Africa until 42. So all that time I was a missionary. Right.

Now you ran into some pretty serious problems as a missionary out in North Africa in 42. Tell us about that. Well, toward the end of 1942, you may remember that the Germans and the Italians moved in to occupy Tunisia and Tunis.

I was one of the last Britishers to remain in the city of Tunis. And very shortly they came, the adversary came and took me as a so-called British spy. And I was their guest for another few years.

I'm sure you were asked the question many times, but were you a spy? I was an ambassador. Right. Ambassador for the Lord Jesus.

That's good. That's a good answer. So they arrested you.

What happened to you? You were put into prison? Well, they asked me who I was and I told them that I was a missionary. And they said, you're not a missionary, you're a British spy, you see. And they took me off with, I had literally nothing materially, just a light summer suit.

And I was at least two weeks in solitary confinement in Tunis. And then from there, the best part of six months in solitary confinement in Naples, the city of Naples, just alone. You were telling me this afternoon that it was particularly scary perhaps those first two weeks because you asked for a Bible and what reply did you get? I'm not absolutely certain that it was so scary.

Now I don't say that because I'm a particularly courageous kind of a person, but I think that the Lord has a way of taking away physical fears at that time. But I asked if I could have a Bible, have my Bible. And they said, why do you want a Bible? We're going to shoot you.

To which I made the not very tactful comment, if you're going to shoot me, that's all the more reason why I should have a Bible. You said you weren't particularly scared, but you must at that moment have felt very alone because there you were, you weren't allowed a Bible, you'd been told that you were going to be shot, you're there in solitary confinement. You must have felt a long way from the Lord? Oh no.

Certainly I was alone. Now that's a fact of life materially and physically. I was alone.

But you can be alone without being lonely. And the Lord gives you to understand in times like this that the Lord keeps his word. The Lord honors his promises.

If you're a Lord has sent you into your ministry, then for example, the last verse of Matthew's gospel, I am with you always. I am. Great I am.

The Lord Jesus Christ is with you. And then when I came home finally, 1945, I summed up my testimony at that time. You remember Paul's word in 2 Timothy chapter 4 verse 16, everyone forsook me, but the Lord stood by me.

And that's a great word. Everybody, every man forsook me, but the Lord stood by me and strengthened me. And I think it's encouraging for us to realize that men, good men, don't willingly break their word, do they? And if a good man seeks to honor his word, then the living Lord will always honor his word.

When the Lord says, I am with you, then you can count on it. He is with you. Bob, you were saying that you were in prison for six months in solitary confinement in Naples, was it? Yes.

Did you have a Bible? Were you allowed a Bible in the end? Ultimately, they let me have my French Bible. See in Tunis, the European language was basically French and Italian. They let me have my French Bible.

And so I had this lovely French Bible. And how many hours a day were you able to read it? That's the great thing. In this cell, there was very little light, but there was a grill about that large, I would suppose.

And the light came through this. And so I opened it and stood like this and read and read and read the word of God. And that was a great thing.

Absolutely marvelous to have God's word at any time, but to have it under those circumstances was just tremendous. Did God reveal himself in a particular way to you during that period where you were there alone with your Bible in that cell with that knowledge that God was with you? Yes. I think in these situations and in giving a testimony, you do have to keep your feet on the ground because you can't claim every day and every hour you are on cloud nine, whatever you call it.

There were times of depression, of a feeling of loneliness. And yet basically, and my overall recollection is this, that the Lord was with me. Now, there were times when this was just a matter of faith.

You knew it. There were other times, I hesitate to say this, but it was true, that the very walls of a prison cell about this wide and about three feet up, three paces up, three paces down, yes, very walls seemed to glow with the presence of the Lord. Now, I'm not a romantic type, but that was true.

You just knew that the Lord was there, even toward the end, may I say this, toward the end of the six months. And I felt that I couldn't last another matter of days. I went back to my cell.

I was having a little exercise round at that time. And I remember saying so definitely to the Lord, Lord, you know that if I go back into this cell, then this will be my last day alive. And I went back into the cell.

And the next morning, as I looked through this little grill, there were some soldiers about to take me off into Germany. So the Lord has his perfect timing. That was just the moment for him to come and come he did.

Well, that's wonderful how the Lord brought you through that experience. You were telling me this afternoon how you were engaged during the period of the war for seven years, the engagement, was it? Really, you ought to have my wife, she does a much better job. I think we were engaged for ten, nine.

Any advance on nine? It seemed like ten to me. Well, I think you're certainly living testimony that when the Lord saves, he keeps. He took you out of that situation and was able to use you for all those years in North Africa.

And we do praise God's name for that. And thank you very much for sharing that with us tonight. Thank you very much.

Stand to sing. Amen. Please sit down.

Father, we come again before your throne. We thank you for what has taken place thus far in this service. A note of praise with sound that God is good.

And Lord, we struggle sometimes to believe that in every circumstance, you do work things to our good. We've been honest before you as folk have given testimony as to the trials through which they went, and then discovered that in the middle of the trial, there you were. Now, Father, we come as a congregation this evening with differing personalities and differing circumstances.

Some of us are young, some of us are not so young, and some will be hearing this address by means of tape. And we just ask, Lord, that you will minister to us now and hit us at the point of our loneliness if there should be such. And if that loneliness at this moment seems to be devoid of the compensating presence of God, help us to discover that you do never leave and you never will forsake.

In the name of Jesus our Lord. Amen. So we look again to our theme of loneliness.

The personal columns in the newspapers, I'm told, I'm really not referring so much to the personal columns as the agony columns, often give valuable space to people writing in, highlighting this as being the most difficult thing that they have to cope with in their lives. When we think of loneliness, we often feel that we're dealing exclusively with the subject of single people, but that's not the case. You can be lonely in a congregation.

You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be lonely as a pastor. You can be lonely in the church foyer.

You can be lonely in the lounge. There are so many areas in which loneliness might well become part of our experience. One lady received a letter not that long ago.

The lady who was the recipient, her name is Elizabeth Elliot, known to some of you because she lost her husband. He was savaged along with four other colleagues in the early 1950s in Latin America. Jim Elliot was done to death.

And Elizabeth received this letter from a contemporary missionary lady who said to her later on, bereavement is not the worst sort of loneliness to face. My missionary husband told me a few weeks ago that he was walking out on me, and ultimately she submitted to divorce. There are so many ways in which loneliness can dog our footsteps.

Elizabeth Elliot goes on to say that in one sense the whole of life is punctuated by experiences of dying and being born again. She refers to the experience that all of us had, although we can't recall it, when we were in our mother's womb, the safest place on God's earth, at least it used to be, and that incredibly dangerous journey into life. The finishing of the experience that we had in the womb, almost dying to that, and then being born as a child.

And then the difficulty perhaps of leaving home when one is four or five years of age and going to school. And then the difficulty of taking on the years of puberty. Or the difficulty and the loneliness that sometimes comes to a mother when the last of her fledglings have left the nest and she knows full well that her life is going to be different from that moment on.

All of these dramatic, changing experiences in life can bring with them their own sense of loneliness. When, to put it a little bit more optimistically, God changes our marching orders. When no longer we are running alongside our partner because he or she has gone to heaven before us, and now we have the instructions from God to live out the remainder of our lives possibly on our own.

That brings its own challenge, doesn't it? Or perchance the objective that you had lived for as far as your life is concerned, the thing that you wanted to do, it never comes your way. And as a result of that you feel a little bit of jetsam and flotsam, making your way through life lonely and unfulfilled. What do you do in these sort of circumstances? I read a story which amused me the other day about a little girl from New York and she wanted to find a green pastor.

Now there were many white pastors and there were many black pastors in New York, but she wanted help from a green pastor. And her mum says, there isn't such a thing as a green pastor. And she said, mum, there must be, because it says so in the Bible.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He leads me by still waters unto green pastors. And the little lass somehow felt that God had given in his church a peculiar breed of people who could be of far more assistance to her than she had received in terms of help thus far.

Well there are no such things as green pastors. White and black pastors are only men at best. But there is one to whom you can go when loneliness does engulf you.

And there is a book to which you can turn in order to discover some help. And that's what we now proceed to do. Because I want to talk to you first of all about a loneliness imposed by circumstances.

A loneliness imposed by circumstances. And I take as my example the prophet Elijah. Now one of the greatest lonelinesses to come up against and to be able to overcome, to counteract, is that loneliness that comes on you unexpectedly.

Some things that happen in life you can perhaps take some precautions against, or you can steal yourself, some preparation. But when your loneliness comes around as a result of circumstances which are beyond your control, then I say you have a tremendous challenge. And added to it there will probably be certain psychological factors, maybe overwork, maybe added tensions, maybe nervous energy has been dissipated and as a result there are sleepless nights.

And the consequence of all that is that dwarfs appear to be giants. And hillocks have Everest proportion. And when you look to the future all you can see is bleakness.

And when you do a statistical survey between the fortunate and the unfortunate you discover yourself in the latter category and everyone else is in the former. And if that seems hyperbole, exaggeration from the pulpit this evening, I tell you it's not. Here is Elijah and he fits in with all the descriptions, with all the diagnosis that I have just made.

And I could bring you not just Elijah as a witness, but if I were to breach pastoral confidence I could bring to you at least two people who sought me out during these past few days whose experience in principle is exactly the same as that of the prophet. Loneliness imposed by circumstances. Some of you here, though not all of you, are too young to remember Frankie Vaughn when he was in his heyday.

And he used to sing a song, I doubt whether he composed it, but actually it was taken from the character of Elijah and his particular situation in 1 Kings 20. It went something like this, the words hold on to your safety's belt, I'm not going to sing it. 1 Kings 19, if ever a devil was born without a pair of horns it was you, Jezebel, it was you.

And he had this problem with this queen who tyrannized him. And the interesting thing is that Elijah actually had come through a tremendously successful spiritual experience. He was really all psyched up.

The prophets of Baal, they'd crumbled as far as the power that the priests reckoned they had before the people. And Elijah was the mighty victor of Carmel. And yet you now discover him in the nineteenth chapter of the first book of Kings as a man who is engulfed with a loneliness imposed by his circumstances and he says, I, only I, am left of all the people in Israel who acknowledge the Lord God.

Do you sometimes get angry with God because of the situation in which you find yourself? Moses in the eleventh chapter of the book of Numbers and in the fifteenth verse says this to God, if this is how you are going to treat me, put me to death right now. If I have found favor in your eyes, do not let me face my own ruin. And as for Job, listen to him, I loathe my very life, therefore I will give free reign to my complaint and speak out in the bitterness of my soul.

I will say to God, do not condemn me, but tell me what charges you have against me. Does it please you to oppress me? Shall I shock you with another translation? Does it please you to be cruel to me? Have you ever felt like that? Then let me tell you this, God can cope with your anger. God can cope with your anger and God in his grace can do for you what he did for Elijah and what he did for Job and what he did for Moses.

He can show you that through your circumstances in which the loneliness has been imposed, he will draw near and he will vindicate his word. I believe in the sun, said someone, even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I cannot feel it.

I believe in God even when he is silent. And listen to one of the most wonderful verses of scripture, Isaiah 63 9, in all their distress, he was distressed. Loneliness imposed by circumstances can be one of the most difficult types of loneliness to cope with.

But then there is loneliness that is composed by design. A loneliness composed by design, not just a loneliness imposed by circumstances. What do I mean? Well here is our Lord Jesus and in Luke chapter 5 you discover him in the 15th and 16th verses which Alan read, moving away from the hustle and bustle of his busy life as a minister.

And we are told Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. I use the word composed inasmuch as it was really part of his own orchestration. He moved away from his situation because that's what he wanted to do.

All loneliness is not to be shunned. To be alone and shut up with the Lord is perhaps the best way in which to invest in your life, draw strength for those times when you really feel absolutely at sixes and sevens with your circumstances. Having drawn alone and been with the Lord, you receive from him of his grace and you come to a realization when you're under pressure that this God indeed is still with you and he's working out his purposes in your life.

Our Lord Jesus withdrew to a lonely place and prayed. A loneliness composed by design. There is a sense in which our Lord was a solitary man.

Inasmuch as early in the morning he would be up before the sun broke in order to have intercourse with the Father. And as a result of the strength that he got, he was able to apply stamina during the day to all the pressures that broke in upon the shore of his life. And our Saviour became self-contained but not insular, fully integrated but not exclusive, the man of God and yet still the man for others.

How does he have these distinctive characteristics? Well, I tell you by this composed loneliness there is a sense in which you should deliberately choose to be alone with the Lord. There's a lovely line in one of the Puritan hymns which speaks of God's sovereignty in our experiences and it says, he will sanctify to thee thy deepest distress. What does that mean? It means being able to hand over to the Lord the difficulties through which you are now going or ultimately one day might go through.

And ask God to sanctify those difficulties as you take counsel with him in your quiet times when in your own personal devotions you are before the Lord. Listen to a theologian of yesteryear, being alive means being in a body, a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone.

This is true of every creature and it is more true of man than of any other creature. He is not only alone, he also knows that he is alone. This aloneness he cannot endure, neither can he escape it.

It is his destiny to be alone and to be aware of it. Not even God can take this destiny away from him. You see the point? We are called in one sense to aloneness.

Someone has said, religion is what a man does with his solitariness. Now hear me because this is important and I've touched on this on so many occasions from this pulpit. The most important thing for you to do in your life is to cultivate a relationship with God.

Did you hear that? Now that's what you might expect me to say, but I don't say it simply because this is what you would, perhaps a judge would come from the lips of a preacher. This is true to the teaching of the whole Word of God. There is a in which God will not be known to you by proxy as a result of your wife, as a result of your husband, as a result of your closest friends.

The only thing that can keep you when you pass through difficult circumstances as you make your way through the pilgrimage of life is your relationship with the Lord on your own, seeking God for himself. How do you do that? Because the day might come when the blanket may fall on you and darkness may eclipse you, when you have your own period of solitariness, perhaps not literal solitary confinement, but out of touch with any other human agency that can be of help to you. And it's in those blessed moments, mark my words, that God can come so very real and the deposit spiritually that you've built up over the years, all the investment of time in his presence, in his Word, can carry you through the nightmarish experience.

God has not called Christian people to a life that is insured against any difficulty. Jesus said, let a man, if he follows me, take up his cross. The path of the Christian is not strewn with primroses, it is stained with blood.

And that's not just negative preaching, because within that route, within that road down which you traverse comes the Son of God, and he can minister to you and make you aware of his presence. And what I'm teaching is exactly what you find in his life. This is why he didn't skip his devotions.

He needed to bank up the grace and the strength. He needed to go to the throne in order to discover the stamina that he would need for Gethsemane and for Calvary. And in a moment of cosmic loneliness, when he's there suspended on the cross, the darkness has fallen on the scene and all looks bleak and horrid, there is a voice that pierces the darkness, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But out of hell almost itself, a hand is raised, a nail-pierced hand that speaks in all its pain and all its felt rejection of a God who exists and a God who is mine.

And my friend, even if your sense of being rejected was as bad as that, the investment of the hours in the weeks and the months and the years gone by would be paying untold dividends, because at the cross of our Lord Jesus, he still makes reference to my God. He still realises that God is and that God is personal. And I say our Lord Jesus was able to go through the horror of those experiences.

Why? Because there was in his life a loneliness composed by design in which he banked up spiritual resources for the great struggles of Gethsemane and Calvary. Now when the drummer beats to a different tune in your life, when you're no longer in the flush of youth, when your partner is gone and God in his sovereignty has told you that your furrow now seems to be a solo furrow, can you not take from that reservoir, from that interest that you have built up so that you and God, to quote a poster that sometimes we had up in our kitchen at home, you and God together can make it? A woman on one occasion was expressing to other Christian women that she was going to get divorced. And she was asked why she had come to this conclusion.

And she spoke most critically of her husband. And she said of him, he is unable to satisfy my every need. And there was a gasp from the Christian women who listened to that feeble retort.

Have you got some sort of ideal? Some sort of fantasy? In terms of your partner? In terms of your friend? In terms of a church? That they can meet your every need? Only God is sufficient to meet our needs. Only God is the one on which you can build a whole of your life I do believe in the communion of the saints. I do believe in marriage.

I do believe in close friendships. But hear me, the most important relationship for you to cultivate in life is that relationship with God who seeks your companionship. Who in the beginning of time says of Adam, it is not good for man to be alone.

And there he was referring to bringing Eve along as a partner. But there is a more spiritual meaning to that proclamation from the Lord. It is not good for man to go through life alone, divorced, dislocated from me.

You remember this man who has written the satanic verses? I went through his lecture with a tooth comb. He claims to be an atheist. Feels that he's been badly treated by the Muslim community because they reckon him as an apostate.

He said, it can't be an apostate. I was never a believer in the first instance. But the thing that's a tragedy about Rushdie is this.

He has no faith whatsoever. He can make neither rhyme nor reason out of life. He is unable to find anything that could really speak to our world in terms of a message of hope.

And he reminded me of what one philosopher said of another philosopher by the name of Hegel. He can explain everything in the universe except what it is to be an individual and how to live and how to die. But the Christian gospel will tell you about this.

So I argue that there is a loneliness imposed by circumstances which is a very difficult one to overcome, but God can give you the grace to get your way through. There is another sort of loneliness which is composed by design as you take stock of your relationship with the Lord and develop it. And finally, there's a loneliness transposed by grace, a loneliness transposed by grace.

Here is the apostle Paul and he writes towards the end of his life to his young friend Timothy. And he tells Timothy that everybody has forsaken him, yet he is not alone because the Lord is on his side. A loneliness transposed by grace.

Do you know what transposition means? One of the most lonely moments in any service for me is when I try and start a song or a hymn unaided. And our musicians know that if I really blow it and I pitch it in a key that is utterly unmanageable, then they have to lift it, they have to transpose it. Now I'm saying there is a loneliness that can be transposed by grace.

Paul is in a cell like Bob was and he discovers that though everyone has left him, the Lord is by his side. Now this is for real. We are not here just telling a mythical story.

We're not presenting a picture that sounds attractive just for the sake of. This is reality. This is not the American version of dealing with loneliness.

I say that because I came across a comment the other day about a shop in Massachusetts, a superstore, and Friday nights you can only go and purchase stuff there if you're a single. So all the people are single come and purchase stuff on Friday nights and hold it. They call it the meat market.

I'm wondering if they shouldn't open up next door for everyone who's through with their situation and wants to get away from life. They could call that the flea market. But you see when the Bible talks about dealing with circumstances that are unpleasant, it says that these circumstances can be transposed.

And so the apostle here on his own is able to say, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held to them, but the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength. The Bible tells us in Hebrews chapter 13 and verse 5, which is a repetition of what Moses said to the Hebrews in the book of Deuteronomy, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

But there is at least four negatives in the Greek construction of that sentence. I will never, never, never, never leave you. He won't.

It doesn't mean to say that he's going to make your circumstances palatable as far as external things are concerned, spring you from them. What it does mean to say is that as you go through them, you can know his love and his grace. John Wesley gets us to singing one of his hymns, Thou, O Christ, art all I want, all my needs supplied in thee.

That's the sort of relationship I want you to have with him. So that come wind, come weather, God forbid, come divorce, come ill health, come solitary confinement, Lord if I have you, I've got everything. And there is a sense in which the man, who though he, who though is a prisoner, if he knows the Lord, he is the freest man on earth.

Because the presence of God can break through into his cell. And the lady who's been taken through the horrors, the nightmare of bereavement, can discover that though the drummer is beating to another tune, the march still goes on and the Lord still remains her God and her Father. Loneliness, three aspects.

There's a loneliness imposed by circumstances. God help us to get through them. There's a loneliness composed by design.

God help us to develop such a loneliness from time to time. And then there's a loneliness, reverting back to my first part, a loneliness which can be transposed by grace. Let's pray.

I can't really think that there are many people here this evening who would have come on such a bleak night unless they were Christians. Enough of the gospel, however, has been mentioned as to why Jesus died, for you to find your way by his grace to him and to have your sins forgiven and your life set on its right course. But what I want us to do right now, as a largely Christian audience, is just to take a moment and ask God to get our relationships with him right.

Ask the Lord to ensure that we don't lean too much on anyone else, that if all our props were taken away, we could still continue because we have such a strong relationship with him.