Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The Loneliness of The Christian

I am amazed at how God brings people, circumstances or "words" into our lives at just the right moment. I was reading a fellow bloggers page this morning and came across a passage from a book by A.W. Tozer that really spoke to my heart in light of all the troubling relationship issues I have had recently. Here it is:



THE LONELINESS OF THE CHRISTIAN By A.W. Tozer

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 of his kind, 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 he 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 [or woman] who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. 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 shoptalk. 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. His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else.

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