Of Loneliness and Saintliness: True Spiritual Fellowship is Hard to Find

   Always remember you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man be surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone to carry. This marks him as a man set apart. “But know that the LORD has set apart the godly for Himself; the LORD hears when I call to Him.” Psalm 4:3. 

   The pain of loneliness arises from the constitution of our nature. God made us for each other. The desire for human companionship is completely natural and right. 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. 

   The man who knows the divine Presence will not find many who understand him. Nor will he find those who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent in the midst of noisy, religious “shoptalk.” For this he earns the reputation of being dull and overly-serious, so he is avoided and the gulf widens between him and others. 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. 

   He learns in solitude what he cound not have learned in the crowd — that Christ is All in All, that He has made upon us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption. “Whom ...

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