New Morning Mercies #309

If you’re God’s child, don’t ever tell yourself that you are alone—for you, “alone” is a redemptive impossibility.

Walking away from the funeral of a loved one, you can feel very alone. Dealing with long-term sickness is a very lonely experience. Facing financial difficulties that you have no means to solve can make you feel very weak and alone. It’s a lonely experience to deal with the personal rejection of a loved one. Standing for what is right in a culture that mocks the morals you hold dear can make you feel fearful and alone. Assessing that you don’t have what it takes to face what you cannot escape can make you feel unprepared and alone. Loneliness of some kind is the universal experience of people living this side of eternity. Sin brought alienation and separation into the world. It first broke the fellowship between God and man, and because it did, it also shattered the fellowship between people and their family members, friends, and neighbors. This aloneness is spiritual, emotional, relational, and cultural. It’s nearly impossible to escape.

The drama of human aloneness is captured by the apostle Paul, but there is more. He also captures how the grace of Jesus Christ reconciles us to God and, in so doing, reconciles us to one another so that we will never again be alone:

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (Eph. 2:11–22)

Let the words sink in: from “having no hope and without God in the world” to “reconcile[d] . . . to God” and “being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” What is the movement of grace? We have gone from being hopeless and alone to being reconciled and inhabited by God, and therefore never alone again! Don’t forget to remind yourself again today that as God’s child you simply cannot be alone, no matter what you feel.

For further study and encouragement: Genesis 3 contrasted with Ephesians 2