In my briefcase I have one and a half Snickers
left over from the three that I bought two
days ago and then I have a application for a
medical weight loss program that gives out
Fin Fin and I've got a discount and then I have
a Weigh Down Workshop tape and then I
have a copy of How to Be on the Zone, have you
read the Zone?
It's the latest, yes.
You can tell that I need therapy in the weight
loss department.
So nice for you all to come back, this is late
in the day and I wish I had candy to
keep you awake.
I should have bought Coca-Cola or Dr. Peppers
or something for the last session, all I did
was get balloons because we're going to talk
about loneliness and you may think this is
odd to have balloons and Tim Hansel's little
quote, until further notice, celebrate everything.
I love that quote because he's basing it on the
character of God, he's basing it on the
fact that we're redeemed people, he's basing it
on the fact that spiritually we have a
lot of things to celebrate and he's not trying
to give pat answers or say that we don't have
problems but I think when we see the true
reality of things that we see in the Psalms
about God, there are a lot of things we can
celebrate, maybe not every day.
It's hard for us to be exuberant all the time,
just as human beings and I think joy is, we
notice joy because it's so rare and we notice,
I love balloons, I want to have balloons at
my funeral because I just, they're just happy
and hopeful but we don't have balloons every
day and I don't carry a bunch of balloons
around in the car and if I did, I would have
a wreck because you can't see out your rear
view mirror.
So joy is a special gift and it just comes up
most often I think when we get into contact
with God and when we know who he is, that's
what brings us true joy.
We're all looking for it all the time and we go
to movies to find it and we go to Disneyland
to find it and we have family reunions to find
it and we're usually disappointed, especially
in the family reunions but we're looking for it
and God knows that and in relationship
with him is where we really find the deep kind
of joy.
We're going to read, we're going to pray Psalm
103 but I want to introduce it by talking
about Elizabeth Elliot which I mentioned earlier.
You probably know the story of Elizabeth Elliot
and I hope I don't go, I don't think I will
go into too much detail but in the early
fifties, I remember the Life magazine cover
that showed
five men who were dead either on the shore or
floating in Ecuador killed by Aka Indians.
They were five missionaries, evangelical
missionaries and they had been making drops for several
days of gifts and trying to interest this very
remote tribe that they had been studying
their language for weeks and months with a
person who had come out of the bush and was
willing to talk to them and so they were
writing down things, they were trying to learn to
talk, they were sending them little notes and
little gifts, beads, things like that
so they would be interested and finally they
felt like, they felt confident enough to land
the plane and they were, they were just
casually sitting around being unfrightening and some
of the people came, some of the Akas came up to
look at them or to take what they had,
they would put the gifts out just a little way
so they wouldn't be too afraid and then
somehow they were spooked and they took up
their poison darts and other weapons, primitive
weapons that they had and began to attack these
men and killed all five of them.
They all had wives who were back at the base
camp listening on the two-way radio, didn't
hear anything from their husbands.
Finally they sent someone out in another plane
to see what had happened, they saw the bodies,
they saw the plane and discovered that they
were dead.
Elizabeth Elliott was one of those wives and
Jim Elliott was her husband.
If you've read, she's written many books.
One of her favorite books for high school and
college age kids is Passion and Purity.
If you've read any of her books she tells her
story quite often but her story is that
she met her husband, they fell in love but they
both wanted to do mission work and they
felt like that's what God wanted them to do so
he went away to study language, she went
to a different place to do mission work and
they finally married after I think maybe five
years of being apart.
I may not have that quite right but they were
apart a long time.
And she writes, she also has a great book about
loneliness and I appreciate her point
of view.
She's a strong, I guess I'm drawn to Elizabeth
Elliott and I'm drawn to Edith Schaefer because
they're so staunch in suffering and they find
joy in the Lord that is not forced to me and
neither is it Pat and I think that's another
reason I like them.
Later Elizabeth Elliott, Elizabeth Elliott had
a daughter Valerie who I think was between
one and two when Jim was killed and she decided
that after prayer that she would go back and
live with the Akka's which she did for several,
I want to say two years but I should find
out for sure.
I used to know but I don't know but anyway she
stayed there, she never converted anybody
she said.
She didn't feel like she was really doing
mission work but she was learning the language
and it's a very amazing thing that she did this.
She learned to love the people, she believed
God wanted her to be there, she was helping
with the translation of the book of John in
their language and she's written a whole book
about her time there with photographs and all,
it's very interesting.
She came home and I think as Valerie got maybe,
maybe Valerie was grown by the time she or
maybe she married a theologian who had cancer
and she went through that with him and he
died and then she took in boarders and one of
the boarders was a single man and he decided
he wanted to stay with her permanently and they
courted and married and she's still married
to him and she does a radio program etc.
But I think the interesting thing about her is
that she continually says suffering is
not for nothing.
Suffering has a purpose and she doesn't want us
to enjoy it, I mean she wants us to recognize
that it's painful but that it has a purpose,
that God knows that we're suffering, that
he's aware, kind of some of the things we said earlier.
And I think the, of course scripture says this
in many different ways but I want to
read from 2 Corinthians 7 which talks about, in
this paraphrase it has an interesting flavor
because it said, because he's saying that the
Corinthians distress that drives us to
God does that, it turns us around, it gets us
back in the way of salvation.
We never regret that kind of pain but those who
let distress drive them away from God
are full of regrets and end up on a deathbed of regrets.
And now isn't it wonderful all the ways in
which this distress has goaded you closer
to God, you're more alive, more concerned, more
sensitive, more reverent, more human,
more passionate, more responsible.
Look at it from any angle and you've come out
of this with purity of heart.
And that's what I was hoping for in the first place.
That's just what happened and we feel just great.
An interesting twist on that scripture I think
that God's distress that drives us to God
is good distress and I think loneliness is that
kind of distress.
And Elizabeth Elliot says that kind of distress
is not for nothing.
In the light of her struggles and her
loneliness and her sorrows, maybe yours don't
seem very
big but maybe they do.
You know suffering is defined as not having
what you want or having what you don't want.
So you're suffering probably one way or the
other, you probably don't have what you want
and you probably have something you don't want.
And loneliness means you don't want to be alone.
And I think there are, loneliness Elliot says
is like a wilderness and she calls it a wilderness
experience where we are so free of all things
that might support us emotionally and psychologically
and spiritually that we turn to God and we can
notice that he's there.
We notice the manna because we're not living in
a big city where we wouldn't see it falling
on the ground.
We're living in the wilderness where it's very
obvious if anything in the terrain changes.
And I want also to say that to me loneliness,
it may immediately make us think of singleness
but I don't think it has anything to do with singleness.
Some single people are not lonely and many
married people are lonely.
But I believe that everybody is lonely at many
points in their life.
In thinking about this, I've just thought, you
know you kind of accept it, you kind of
just say well this is just the way it is.
But I think God made us come into the world in
families and he meant for relationships
to happen.
He didn't mean, he said being alone is not a
good thing.
He wants us to have relationships.
He wants us to have this protective web of relationships.
That's the way we're meant to be.
That's how we're created.
And I think sometimes I have felt most lonely
on Sunday mornings at church.
Have you?
When you wish, when you are in a place where
you want so much to feel known by people of
like minds and yet the communication is so surface.
How are you?
How was your week?
Great, great, great.
See ya.
Hope you have a wonderful lunch.
It just crumbles me inside a lot of days, a lot
of Sundays.
I don't know, maybe you don't feel that way.
Maybe you are in a warm fellowship where you
have poured out your heart and people are
praying for you and they know what your
struggles are.
But I have found often, not always, but often
church is a lonely place to be.
You ever feel lonely at church?
We want more and I think God wants more for us
and he's trying to provide that web of relationships.
The answer to loneliness of course is not to
find somebody to love us, but to find somebody
to love and then we'll have that reciprocal
relationship, but sometimes that's hard to do.
It's a busyness, you know, I take it as my
problem if I am lonely at church, it's probably
because I'm just punching in and I'm just
trying to avoid the responsibility of having
a small group in my home or calling somebody
for lunch or trying again to get a prayer
partner or you know things like that that you
try over and over and sometimes they work
and sometimes they don't, sometimes they fade away.
God meant for us to be a relational unit and
there are no pat answers, I don't think there
are five easy ways to get unlonely.
Loneliness in marriage, you know American women
more than any others are brainwashed
to think that just a man is the answer and all
you have to do is be married for about
two weeks to figure out that that is not true,
that there are some other questions that you
had that haven't gotten answered and I think
even though we are blessed, we're so blessed
when we have a warm relationship, we still can
be lonely.
A lot of people, I'm a kind of person who likes
to be friends with my kids and I try
to be friends with my kids, but they also don't
call me up and wonder how I'm feeling
today and very often they have lives of their
own, I'm in the emptiness part of life.
We just tend to look for the answers from human
beings when God tells us that the answer
is to be involved with him and then to seek
this relational.
A lot of you have a small group in your home
and we've had one in ours recently and just
really it's a precious thing to get to know
people, but it takes a long time to get to
really be friends and if God blesses you with a
spiritual partner, you are truly blessed
and you can be thankful for that.
I think a lot of times we're disappointed in
groups because we don't feel like we can
tell the truth about how we're feeling because
we don't want to appear weak or we don't want
to appear too needy so we have to gauge just
exactly how much we're going to let out and
how much we're going to let in and that
probably has some wisdom to it because you all know
the feeling of letting out too much and being
very disappointed in their response.
So God's love overarches all of this I think
and the reason I chose Psalm 103 is that it
reminds us so beautifully of who he is and when
we know who he is and when we can trust
in his character, then I think we have
directions to go to reach out to other people,
then we
have the confidence that he is for us and that
our suffering is not for nothing and
that there is a plan over our whole life and
that we may not see the plan fulfilled even
in our lifetime, but that he has a purpose for us.
This psalm is just so wonderful, I think it's
just definitely one of my favorites and I
think it's interesting that it has no requests
and it has no complaints, it just tells the
truth about God.
It really gets us involved in praising God and
I think that's an interesting thing too
is our emphasis on praise now, which sometimes
can be very empty because you can't just say
praise the Lord and just start, you have to
start with a relationship with the Lord, you
have to start with the true truth about God,
you have to know who you're praising, praise
isn't just something you just turn on like you
turn on a switch and turn on a light and
the man gets up or the group gets up and says
let's praise the Lord and we just all start,
praise comes from a deep knowledge, it's a
response to somebody, it's a response to the
living God, it's a natural response when we
know who he is, but I think most of the time
when I come into praise I've kind of forgotten
who he is, I have to be reminded again to
get my mind in gear, but when we do know who
we're praising we know we're born to do this,
we're just made to praise.
We like compliments, we like to compliment
other people, if you've ever made a meal that
you worked hard on that you chopped up a
thousand different vegetables and everybody sat down
and ate and got up in five minutes and didn't
say one word, you know we were born to be
praised and we were born to praise, everybody
needs to be recognized for what they did,
we need to be praised and God doesn't need to
be praised, he's not a needy, I think sometimes
our emphasis on praise makes God look like a
real wimp, you know does he really need
this much attention, what is his problem, does
he have low self-esteem, God doesn't
need our praise, our praise to him is good for
us because we're telling the truth, we're
telling what's real, we're getting away from
the lies of the world that say this is the
answer to what you need, you just need more
stuff, you just need to take a cruise, you
just need a different husband, you just need
your children to all be in therapy and then
everything's going to be okay, but it's the
truth about God and when we tell the truth
about God that he is marvelous, that he is
wonderful, that he is worthy of praise, that
he is full of compassion, then we're healthier
people because we're telling the truth, the
truth makes us free and I think that's an
important aspect of praise that maybe we don't
talk about, I think in C.S. Lewis it says
praise is inner health made audible, praise
is inner health made audible and this is a
wonderful praise psalm, I'll start, praise
the Lord O my soul, all my inmost being, praise
his holy name, praise the Lord O my soul and
forget not all his benefits, who forgives your
sins, heals all your diseases, who redeems
your life from the pit, crowns you with love
and compassion, who satisfies your desires
with good things so that your youth is renewed
like the eagles, now if you're lonely you
need all these things, you need a God who heals
you, you need a God who forgives you,
you need a God who redeems you, you need a God
who crowns you, who gives you honor and
who renews your youth, the Lord works
righteousness and justice for all the
oppressed, he made
known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the
people of Israel, the Lord is compassionate
and gracious, slow to anger, unbounding in
love, he will not always accuse nor will he
harbor his anger forever, he does not treat us
as our sins deserve or repay us according
to our iniquities, for as high as the heavens
are above the earth, so great is his love
for those who fear him, as far as the east is
from the west, this is what lonely people
need too, they need to know how big God's love
is, so far has he removed our transgressions
from us, as a father has compassion on his
children, so the Lord has compassion on his
children, so the Lord has compassion on those
who fear him, for he knows how we're formed,
he remembers that we're dust as for man, his
days are like grass and woman too, he flourishes
like a flower of the field, the wind blows over
it and it is gone and its place remembers
it no more, well he's telling us the truth
isn't he, it's a relief to hear the truth,
but from everlasting to everlasting the Lord's
love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness
with their children's children, with those who
keep his covenant and remember to obey
his precepts, the Lord has established his
throne in Heaven and his kingdom rules over
all, praise the Lord you his angels, you mighty
ones who do his bidding, who obey his word,
praise the Lord all his heavenly hosts, you his
servants who do his will, praise the Lord
all his works, everywhere in his dominion,
praise the Lord, oh my soul, Kosher says God
is easy to please, and I think that when we
pray this psalm to him, we are saying I am
willing, I'm willing to know you, I'm willing
to accept what you've given me, and I want
to please you, praise is talked about as a
pleasing aroma, and I think that the highest
praise that we can give God is to tell him who
he is, to tell him I recognize who you
are, isn't that the greatest praise that you
want, it's such a relief when you find somebody,
a friend, a spouse, who recognizes in you what
you sent, but you can't even verbalize,
and who loves that, who brings that out in you,
who builds it up, I think declaring what
we are and declaring what God is, is very
healthy, I love this quote from Roger Palms
about God's compassion, he wants you near him
and wants lovingly to guide your life,
there is still that one clear certainty in an
age when nothing else is certain at all
that God wants you to be his friend, he wants
to give you the pleasure of his company, boy
in our stressed out times I think to give
someone the pleasure of your company is a
real gift, we need this as best friends, we
need this as learning to love each other friends,
we need this as spouses, to give each other the
pleasure of our company, in a recent program
for to improve marriages that we attended at
Pepperdine, one of the tips they gave was
when you're going off to have a good time,
don't talk about the serious stuff, don't
dig out the garbage, and usually when you're
with a friend, that's when you say oh good
we can talk about all this serious deep under
the table stuff that we need to get talked
about, and I thought that was a good point,
just enjoy each other, and I think that's
true with our relationship with God, that
sometimes we just need to sit and soak in
Psalm 103 especially, it's the best one to soak
in, just sit in there and enjoy the truth
about the Lord, just bathe in the truth about
the Lord, just get saturated in it, just let
your skin wrinkle up in his compassion, because
I think one of the things that we struggle
with the most is letting God love us, when I
mentioned that I had surgery in the first
of January on my parathyroid, and coming up on
30 years of marriage, knowing my husband
as well as I know him, I would never have
guessed at his compassion, even though he's
very compassionate, but he's kind of queasy,
and he was right there, I mean it was not
fun, because I was sick to my stomach, I was
sick in every way, I was just miserable for
at least a day and a night, he was right there,
he was patting me, he was wiping me, he was
doing all those things that you think, just
call the nurse, it's
okay, but there he was, I'll never forget that,
the compassion that he had, and he said
the sweetest thing to me afterward, he said, I
think that's the most important thing I
ever did, well that's being loved, I'm going to
be okay, and I think, you know, moms are
used to cleaning up after people, and we just
expect that, but men who wear white shirts
every day don't usually do that, so I'll never
forget that kind of compassion, and I think
that's the kind of compassion, of course, that
God's talking about, all these benefits,
that he forgives my sins, that he accepts me
like I am and forgives my sins, and I love
the song, My Sin, Oh The Blitz, of that
glorious thought, my sin not in part, but the whole
is nailed to the cross, recently, did you read
about, they tried to pull up the Titanic,
for historical purposes, and they hooked these
huge ropes, the strongest that they could,
and pulled it up, I think maybe a mile, and
then it just sprayed those ropes, and went
down to the bottom again, and I love that
story, because I just thought of my sins,
you cannot get them up, the psalm says, they're
as far as the east is from the west, that's
how far my sins are away, and you can try to
dig them up, and you can get strong ropes,
but you will not dig up my sins, because they
are too far away, God has forgiven them, and
the heaviest chain can't pull them up, he also,
he is the healer, and I think for lonely
people, most people who are lonely, have some
kind of a broken heart, everybody has some
kind of a broken heart, and God is the healer
of our hearts, he knows how to put us back
together, and he may not do it instantly, he
may not do it in mid-prayer, although he
can, but he may choose to take his time, he may
choose to bring people into our lives,
he may choose to give us new experiences that
will be healing, but he is the healer, and
we can count on that, and we need to soak in
the promise of that, and the fact of that,
that he's the healer.
Ryan Campbell is one of the best friends of my
son, Mark, who's 19, who's here as a freshman,
and his senior year, he was in a terrible
automobile accident, where he was thrown out
onto the freeway, and was in a coma for several
weeks, we didn't know if he was going to live,
and he's just such a talent. Ryan.