Divorce Recovery

Divorce Recovery Lesson 9 I am So Lonely Tonight

God’s Design • God designed most of us so that we would be lonely without the company of a lifelong companion. • Genesis chapter 2 verse 18 says, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

How Lonely Will I Be? • Here you are, alone again, longing for a permanent solution to your lack of companionship. • You wonder how lonely will I be without a companion? • Your mind is thinking that you are doomed to a life of loneliness.

God Knows • The sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the universe knows what your future holds. • Your job is to trust Him to meet any need for companionship you might have. • You must trust Him to do this His own way in His time.

What’s Our Goal • Most of us think it is a good thing to be married. • Solomon said in Proverbs 18:22, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor from the Lord.” • Our primary goal, when we are unmarried is not to get married but rather to please God. • We must trust in the assurance that, “No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly,” (Ps. 84:11b).

What Is Loneliness? • Loneliness is not having the company of others. • It can be the result of not being in fellowship with God. • This is not a mystical intimacy where the Holy Spirit whispers in your ear words of comfort and assurance. • This is the assurance that comes from confessing and forsaking all known sin and the sense of closeness to God that comes from having a clean conscience and drawing near to Him through Bible study and prayer

Blunt the Edges • Fellowship with God doesn’t necessarily displace a person’s desire for marriage or companionship but will provide a sense of contentment that will blunt the edge of loneliness. • Heb. 13:5, “Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” (Heb. 13:5).

The Heat of the Feelings • In order to change your feelings, you have to change your thoughts and your actions. • Loneliness is more of a state of mind than it is a feeling. • The way you think about being alone will affect the way you feel about it. • If you believe that you must always have another human being at your side to avoid being lonely, you are likely to be a very lonely person.

A Room Full of People • There are times when you will probably be lonely in a room full of people. • If you arm yourself with the biblical mind-set that loneliness is primarily the results of not being in fellowship with God, you may find that you feel less lonely even when you are alone.

Left Alone and Being Alone • Jesus knew He was going to be forsaken by His disciples (John 16:32). • He also knew He wasn’t really alone because the Father was with Him. • He viewed being left alone and being alone as two different things. • His mind-set was not “I will necessarily be lonely as a result of being left alone.” • His mind-set was, “As long as the Father is with Me, I will not be lonely even though all forsake Me.” • He knew that God’s presence and provision were more than adequate to make up for the loss of all other company.

Meet My Needs • The Results • Loneliness is sometimes the result of expecting others to meet our needs, rather than God. • When loneliness is the result of such unbiblical thinking, it reveals an idolatrous heart. • You grow accustomed to having your ex keep you company. While it is not wrong to experience such companionship, especially in the bond of marriage, sometimes people substitute the company of companions for God’s company. • Have you been guilty of displacing God with your ex? • Could loneliness be God’s way of letting you know you have been guilty of idolatry?

How Does God Meet My Desire? • Your questions are often how can God, who is a Spirit, meet my desire of companionship? • Is loneliness in your heart God’s built-in alarm system to let you know that it’s time to draw nearer to Him? • God is able to minister to us in our loneliness through other people. • He also ministers to us in a more immediate, direct, and personal way, through prayer and the Word.

Where is the Spirit • The Holy Spirit will comfort us in our loneliness as He will in any other trouble (2 Cor. 1:3-5). But He will do so in proportion to the time we spend in Bible study (reading, memorizing, and meditating on Scripture) and prayer. • The Spirit works in conjunction with the Word. • You must give the Spirit His most powerful weapon if you want Him to assist you in your trails. • Take the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God (Eph. 6:17) so that He will have what He needs to comfort you most effectively.

Where Do You Spend Your Time? • How much time did you spend in the presence of your ex cultivating a relationship when you were together? • The time you spent communicating with your ex helped diminish your loneliness. • How does the time you spent in the presence of your ex compare with the time you now spend in prayer and the Word? • What do you suppose would happen to your loneliness if you spent even half as much time with God as you did with your ex? • What if you invested half as much time meditating on Scripture as you did being mentally preoccupied with him?

Can You Live With It? • A little loneliness is more tolerable than you may realize. • Be careful to guard your heart from magnifying what is a tolerable trial into one that is an unbearable one. • We will all probably have to live with some amount of loneliness as long as you are “absent for the Lord,” (2 Cor. 5:6). • Living in a sin-cursed world precludes ultimate happiness in this life. • We live not for this world but for the next. • Until the Lord returns sin, suffering, sickness, and Satan will be with us. • Loneliness can be a good thing, not only because it lets us know that it’s time to draw closer to God, but also because it makes us long to be with Christ for all eternity.

The Problem of Loneliness • As social creatures, we naturally have the desire and capacity for fellowship, and we cannot be happy unless this basic need is met. • The problem of loneliness often has two aspects and will not be solved unless both of these aspects are addressed. • Loneliness has a human and a divine dimension. • The feeling of loneliness is a symptom of a deeper problem.

See The Church as Your Family • Fellowship with other believers is necessary to combat loneliness.

Think of Christian Friendship as a Covenant • A covenant is binding, enduring relationship characterized by obligations and sanctions. • A covenantal friendship is not to be taken lightly. • It binds two people together as twine binds a bale of hay. • It presupposes a willingness to be vulnerable with others.

A Covenant is An Enduring Relationship • There is a commitment to acceptance, loyalty, and trustworthiness. • A covenant involves stated obligations. • The obligations include the imperative from the Lord to, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” • God expects us to love one another.

Learn Contentment • The essence of contentment is to rejoice in God’s presence, love Him above all else, and live for God’s glory, not our own. • The basic question of human existence becomes, “How can I bring glory to God?” • The question is not, “How will I meet mylongings?”

The Tug of Our Hearts • One tug constantly pulls us outward to God as servants of His will. • The other tug pulls God inward as servants of our longings.

What Do We Reflect? • Do we reflect an image of I need relationship? • Do we reflect an image of giving glory to God? • The needs view suggests that the image is a place inside you. • It is a hollow core that is passive, or acted upon, and easily damaged.

Active Image • The image of God in man is a verb. • Faith is the means by which we image God. • It is expressed in the way we live. • We live by imitating God, Ephesians 5:1. • We live by representing God, 2 Corinthians 5:20. • We live by mirroring God Exodus 34:29-35. • We live by loving God, and by living according to His will.

A Longing for Relationship • All people already exist in relationships to God and also to neighbors, but mostly bad relationships. • These relationships are bad for a specific reason: sin and falling short of the image of God. • The Bible focuses our attention on the reason, not on the result and our wishes that the results were different.

What Do We Long For? • We may long to enjoy tension-free relationships filled with deep, loving acceptance. • But preoccupation with that longing evades the chief issue: do we ourselves love, accept, and make peace?

The Core Issue • Jesus summarized the core issue of human life not by a statement about our longings but by the Two Great Commandments. • These expose exactly how we fall short of the image. • But, Jesus is the perfect image-bearer, incarnated love for God and neighbor. • He did this specifically while he endured terrible relationships, betrayal and atrocity at the hands of others, and finally the cup of the wrath of God.

Jesus Demonstrated the Renewed Image • Not by looking to God to fulfill an instinctive longing for relationship where He would be accepted. • Rather, He imaged God in man by pioneering and perfecting faith and obedience, fulfilling the conditions of acceptability. • Now by grace we are accepted because He was acceptable, and by grace we are progressively remade to be like Him in faith and obedience. • Image-bearing is seen as the way we live rather than what we want to get.

Image-Bearing • Image-bearing leads directly and naturally to the heart of the Scriptures: “faith expressing itself in love,” (Galatians 5:6). • Image-bearing is expressed in simple acts of obedience, seemingly small obediences that have eternal implications. • Imaging is loving God and loving your neighbor.

God’s Glory is Manifested • In concrete acts of love and justice; we are to mimic God in love and justice. • How is love and justice expressed? • By imitating, in the name of Christ, the various images of God provided for us in Scripture.

Divorce Recovery