The Fellowship of His Sufferings

Growing in Christ is depending less and less on anything other than God. Last night I wrote about loneliness. A friend on Facebook sent me two verses of Scripture she said helped her more than anything to combat loneliness. Those two verses are Hebrews 13:5 and Matthew 28:20. These verses are both about Jesus promising to be with us forever. I have known since I was born again that Jesus promised to be with us forever. I have known that the word of God says, "The just shall live by faith." Put those two together, and you have the formula for combatting loneliness forever. What is loneliness? Feeling isolated, abandoned, no one to talk to, no one to be with, no one to do things with, no one to share your life with, maybe even rejected. Yes, rejected--by your unsaved relatives, by friends at work, even by friends at church. Loneliness creeps into your heart and mind like a dark invading spirit, a cloud of gloom that descends upon your mind and emotions. Loneliness follows you from room to room where you live and covers you with a blanket of heaviness and melancholy. Sometimes you can cry and get a moment of release, while sometimes you can't cry but you want to. Emotions can batter you like a cruel messenger from the pit of hell attacking you with a club. But if you have faith, even the size of a mustard seed, Jesus said, you can move mountains. You can say to that mountain, "Be thou removed and cast into the sea!" (Mark 11:23) That is what faith can do. What is faith? "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). Here, I think words fail to express this completely. Well, words never do, but the Word does. When the word of God has had a chance to work its way down into the center, or the fiber, of your being, if you have become grounded, faith is something you can rest in, something you can rely on, something that is growing there, seemingly without your help at all. I have been walking with Jesus for 46 years. That is a long time. Paul prays for the church at Ephesus, "...I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height--to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:14-19). Well, there is a pretty powerful prayer and one that should cure you of loneliness, or any of its accompanying maladies. I am finding the most difficult part about being a Christian is dealing with people, especially family members, who are not yet walking with Christ. A lot of them think that they are, but you know that they are not. You can't tell them that they're not, you simply have to pray for them and ask God to give you wisdom on how to answer them when they come with their various affronts and when the enemy uses them to attack you. I don't want to dwell on this, I just want to say that when it hurts, you know that it hurts the Lord as well, and that is when you can draw near to him and let him express his love to you. You will feel his love. It will be tangible and real. You will know that no matter what they say, you are not condemned if you are in Christ (Romans 8). You will not have to work yourself up into a state where you don't feel so bad, you will be able to calm down and let the Lord heal you. You are partakers in his suffering at that time, and that is an honor and a privilege. The whole book of Philippians is a good one for getting through hard times like that, and I close with this: My prayer for me, and let it be for you, is... "...that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead" (Philippians 3:10-11).