Wisdom 33 Aloneness and Vulnerability

[HKHaugan]

Wisdom 33 Aloneness and Its Vulnerability

 Aloneness is our single greatest internal stress factor. Just ask anyone who has had a breakup, a lost job, an impending surgery, a visit to a dentist’s office, a call to go into battle or a dreaded confrontation with someone who has power to do you in. There is no question it is you and you alone that must go through the experience. Fear-laced anticipation forms and spews out all kinds of ominous imaginary outcomes.

 It’s a jungle out there.

 If we dare venture into what drives our lives and ask the questions of who I am and why I exist, only lonely frustration emerges. As one book title describes it, “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” for which a saddened old Elvis Presley song advises “…go down to the end of Lonely Street, there’s Heartbreak Hotel. I’m feelin’ so lonely baby, I’m feelin’ so lonely, I’m feelin’ so lonely I could die.”

 The reason we are alone is because we inherited that condition from Adam and Eve who made a spiritual choice. They chose to live their lives apart from God. The Spirit that bound them to God left them and they discovered that they were not only separated from God, they were separated from each other. What filled the spiritual void in them was what is called sin, which produces an all-consuming self-centeredness, which is the essence of aloneness. Instead of a sense of oneness with the world of others there came the dread of being alone and its companion fear that made them try to outrun being alone, which they could never do. They were alone and knew it.

 As generations passed, the distance between man and God grew until “Every inclination of a man’s heart was only evil all the time (Gen.6:5).and its victims” As the writer of Ecclesiastes put it, “This only have I found: God created man to be upright, but they have gone in search of many schemes” or in a more contemporary way “God made man simple but man complicated it (Ecc.7:29).”

 Aloneness and its sinful origin is truly separation from God and others. The fact that we must make a choice, a leap of faith about how to overcome our aloneness, hits deep within. The insecurities we feel when the pressures of daily living come upon us, being sick, depressed, feeling isolated and rejected, therein lies our nagging aloneness. Think about the times we are involved in an issue that is highly emotional. Think of all the situational guesswork each of us goes through as we attempt to figure out what’s going on in the minds of those around us. Most of our communication is based on guesswork or ‘one-ups-man-ship.’ The reality in each is lost in the melee of fear and pride. Aloneness and its victims are the reality of sin’s history of separation, conflict and war; exactly why Jesus came, His mission to recover us from our alienated lostness.

 So, our first and deepest need is to face sin, its isolating aloneness and relief from the spirit of fear that is its fuel. You can’t see aloneness, but you can sense it and feel it. Our need is to replace it. Realizing we are created in the image of God is how we deal with aloneness and become its master instead of it mastering us. Through a personal relationship with Jesus, God gives us His grace to face, trace and replace, the deadly spiritual disease of sin that alienates us from God and one another.

 Aloneness is the condition Jesus took upon Himself to show God is willing to bring us out of it by coming into our aloneness and taking part in it. The way He overcame aloneness was by faith in His Father and His Father's will. Unlike us who are born through lonely people, Jesus was born by the Holy Spirit through Mary, a willing servant of God.  

 This brings in the whole issue of the virgin birth of Jesus. He was not conceived out of the frustrating aloneness and sin like us. Nor was He born out of the need to maintain an ethnic family line or the satisfaction of a biological need or a child who reflects a man's ego. All that is outside of God (Jn.1:13). Jesus was conceived by the Spirit of God in the virgin body of Mary. He came full of grace and truth not sin. The virgin birth was the guarantee of a sinless birth, a perfect image of God in the flesh.   He believed and trusted His Father in everything. He thought, lived and acted by the power of the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of Jesus. By His Father’s will His birth was spiritual, personal and relational (John 1).

 So, this brings us to the main reason for God giving us marriage; to overcome the aloneness with which we are born. Then to have children, the extension of ourselves, the surrounding of ourselves with the fruit of relational hope, the inherent need to multiply what loneliness steals from us and to foster, manage and raise children to know God. With God we are spiritually bonded to an eternal Person in Jesus who gives us an earthly companion to restore us and our children to His eternal purposes. In Jesus we are relationally connected. Can you see the image of the Cross as God connecting us to Him in the vertical beam and the cross beam connecting us as man and wife to live as horizontal witnesses in the world around us?

 Secondly, Jesus showed us that our parallel need to being right is to live by faith. The only difference between Jesus’ aloneness and ours is that, being born by the Spirit and living faithfully, He never sinned. He was faithful to the core. It was by faith He loved His Father first, obeyed His Father’s will first and taught others to do the same. While sin consumed everyone else, temptation could never dominate Him. When He was crucified He went through it by faith defeating the power of sin, death and its aloneness, then, through faith He overcame death by His Resurrection.

 Jesus showed us our third biggest need. We need to be born again (John 3). We need to be born spiritually. Then, through faith, we overcome our aloneness and live for God with one another from one moment to the next. While we were born in the flesh we were not born in the Spirit because we inherited separation from God from our parents all the way back to Adam and Eve. We must be born by the Spirit of God to be restored to Him who is Spirit by nature. This is why the Father offers us the ability to be spiritually born by accepting a relationship with His Son who gives the Holy Spirit to restore us to His Father and Him. As He said, “You must be born again (John 3:7).”

 It is Jesus who redirects us to see things spiritually as He sees them. When we have Jesus, we are given a spiritual perspective on everything. We look through His Word to see what is taking place around us. By His Spirit we discern the invisible attitudes and spirits that motivate the world. With His Spirit we can differentiate between good and the evil outside of us. We can see the effects of sin and its temptations within and, with the Lord as our guide, the truth of His Word as opposed to the false standards of an evil world. As Paul said, “Now we see through a glass darkly but then we shall see face to face, now I know in part but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known (1Cor.13:12).”

 Next, we’ll look at real needs as opposed to perceived needs and how we meet them.