The Cure for Loneliness

By Charles F. Stanley

What do you do when you feel lonely? Some people try to numb the pain with drugs or alcohol. Others escape through television, videos, the Internet or other media. But when loneliness engulfs us, the first thing we must do is to turn our focus away from what we don’t have to what we do have. And what do we have? God Himself.

You can’t ever be alone once you have trusted in Jesus Christ as your Savior. He says that He comes to dwell within you when you receive Him into your life. He becomes connected to you just as a vine and a branch are connected. In the same way that sap flows through a vine and its branches the love of Christ flows in and through you. He abides in you, and you abide in Him. You are one being with Christ. You share with Him the most intimate relationship possible—an eternal spiritual intimacy. (See John 15:1-9.)

The depth of that intimacy is, to a great extent, up to us. It relates to how much we desire to be intimate with the Lord, allow Him to fill us with His presence and reveal Himself to us. But the truth is that we can never totally isolate ourselves from the Lord. He is always there, desiring to be ever closer to us.

In the creation story of Genesis 1-3, we see that God desires fellowship with human beings. He says, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Genesis 1:26)—a likeness complete with an emotional capacity to long for companionship. That intrinsic desire in humankind to seek God, and long for Him in the deep inner recesses of the heart, is mirrored by God’s desire for humankind.

Time and time again throughout the Old Testament, we find the Lord reaching out to His people, revealing Himself, and desiring to be and communicate with them. The Lord’s desire is for companionship, fellowship and communion with those who will respond to Him in like manner.

In the New Testament, we read how Jesus developed a very close relationship with a group of men we call the apostles. He promised to send them a Comforter, or Helper—the Holy Spirit—who would never leave them and would be not only with them but in them (See John 14-16). The close communion the Lord desires and is willing to experience with us is something we can count on, even if everyone else abandons us.

Jesus’ final words to His disciples in Matthew 28 were these: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Jesus seemed to have an intense concern that His disciples would know with certainty that that the Lord God was closer to them then the air they breathed. Though they would feel lonely at times, they were never actually alone.

We might ask the question, just as the apostle Paul did, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” Paul provides the answer: “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35, 38-39).

You simply cannot be alone once you have the Spirit of God dwelling in you. You can experience a tormenting feeling of emptiness, fear or desperation. These feelings are subject to what you do about them. You can let your feelings drive you away from the Lord—and experience less intimacy with Him. Or you can let these feelings drive you toward the Lord and greater intimacy with Him.

When we choose to turn to the Lord, we say to Him, in effect, “I need for You to fill this ache, this voice, this loneliness, in my life. I am trusting You to do it. There’s nobody else to whom I can turn. I turn completely and totally to You.” In doing so, we are inviting the Lord to reveal His presence to us—a presence that does, indeed, take away our loneliness.

Today, Jesus is your Friend of friends. He is one Friend you will always have, who will be “the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). To escape your loneliness, seek the one Friend who promised to never leave or forsake you.

Adapted from “The Source of My Strength,” by Charles F. Stanley, 1994. pp. 13-16.