Loneliness. When we experience it, it’s as though we’re the only one on the planet that’s lonely. I guess that’s the definition of it because we feel all alone. But the truth is, that loneliness is a global pandemic. And it’s time we did something about it.

I was doing some research the other day on world populations. And discovered that the current world population is just a tad under six and a half billion (6.5 billion). Every second that ticks by sees that number grow by another 2.3 people. So in one year from now, there will be an additional 75 million people added to our number. By 2050, they’re saying there should be around 9.2 billion of us.

The most populous nation in the world is China, with just over 1.3 billion people. But what’s the least populous nation? It’s the Pitcairn Islands, and it has exactly forty-five (45) people in it. Amazing!

Yet, with the world population that’s never been higher, loneliness is running at epidemic proportions. There have never in all history been more people on the planet. Yet, as people we have never been more lonely. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?

My hunch is that it’s just as easy to feel lonely in China surrounded by 1.3 billion people, as it is to feel lonely in the Pitcairn Islands surrounded by just another forty-four (44) people. Why is that?

Well, it’s important for us to understand that loneliness is different to being alone. We all choose to have some time alone. One of the things I love to do on the weekend, is just read the paper over a cup of tea or coffee on Saturday morning. And you know something? As much as I love my darling wife and my beautiful daughter, I love to do that on my own.

So being alone is not loneliness. Loneliness is that feeling of being alone and being sad about it. It’s like a painful awareness of a lack of meaningful contact with other people. You feel empty inside, it’s like there’s a hole in your chest. You can be utterly desolate and lonely in a crowd and yet, be delivered from that loneliness by just one person. That’s the China/Pitcairn Island’s thing.

In the developed world, single person households have increased from 10% of all households in 1950 to around 30% today. So almost one in three households that you drive past or walk past only have one person living in them. The Boston Globe reports that 36% of people, over one-third, feel lonely. But have a listen to the impact, the statistical impact, of loneliness.

People who are isolated by health are twice as likely to die over a period of a decade as those who are not isolated. A study showed that the more isolated men are up to 25% more likely to die of all causes, at any age, versus non-isolated men. Isn’t that amazing? And the odds for women are up 33%.

Living alone after a heart attack significantly increases your risk of dying. People with heart disease have a poorer chance of survival if they are unmarried or don’t have a partner to assist them. Women who are alone and have breast cancer live half as long as those who do not.

What does that all tell us. What does that tell you?

Well, I think they’re compelling statistics and they point to a crisis of loneliness. Why are we so alone? I mean those figures tell us we need one another. We need other people around us. Being alone is a precursor to loneliness. Why? Well, the more money we have the more choices we have. Divorce rates are up for a whole range of reasons, but one of them is the fact that women can now be financially independent. They have a choice, whereas 50 or 60 years ago there was just no choice to divorce.

Single parents, well those numbers are up too, they have a choice to be single. In those circumstances, relationships become less enduring. The less we feel we desperately need each other for physical survival, well, the less enduring relationships become. Why not end a marriage? Why not terminate a long-term relationship?

You think of a subsistence farming community, I visited some not long ago in India. And what really struck me in the subsistence farming communities was people, by and large, people were well dressed; looked pretty happy, were pretty healthy even though they had very little. You go to the cities, however, where they don’t rely on each other in the same way to produce the food together so that they can survive, those people were not happy. They were not well connected. They were poorer.

And so there’s this amazing breakdown that’s happened over the last century as our economies have “developed” (I use that word in inverted commas!) where we tend to be far less connected. We use cars instead of public transport.

In the past, before people could read and write, we needed each other to learn. We needed each other to communicate; well we don’t anymore because we can read. We watch TV, we get isolated from one another. We use the internet.

A man who I really respect, a man by the name of Peter Webb, I heard him speaking at a conference once. I used to work with him in the Information Technology Industry. And he made the observation that every radical invention or development in communications technology has been designed to let us communicate from further and further away.

Just think about that for a minute; every invention in the communications industry has been designed to let us communicate from further and further away.

You think about it … before there were telephones and internet and satellites and all the stuff we have today, if you wanted to communicate with someone you had to see them face to face, or at least you had to be in earshot of one another. Then we invented letters and postal systems. Well, maybe it took two years for a letter to travel from England to Australia but it was an amazing invention. You could write and maybe months later someone would pick that up and read it, and you could communicate.

When two-way radio and telephone came along, all of a sudden you could talk to someone without the displeasure of having to look at their faces. Have you ever wondered why video-phones have never happened? Because we don’t want to see the person! We enjoy the fact we can talk without looking at them.

And now with email it’s even better because we can type something and tic-tac at different times of the day and night right round the world and be a long way apart and yet – communicate quickly.

And so the nature of our world is a slow downward spiral in community. It’s a gradual slide to isolation, punctuated by the odd critical life event, like divorce or death or retrenchment.

We have a misconception about loneliness. We think that being alone equals loneliness. I’m not alone therefore I shouldn’t be lonely. That’s simply not true. And sometimes we say, “Well it doesn’t effect me, I’m okay”. Are you? We often don’t use the label lonely but you stand back and you think about it, are you? If you go through a crisis like divorce and you see a happy couple enjoying each other, you feel lonely.

I heard the other day of a woman who was dying of cancer whose husband left her when she was in remission. And two of her best friends came over with their new baby and she said to them, “I don’t ever want to see you again, because I can’t bear to see you so happy.” And if it’s not a crisis, maybe it’s just a dull ache.

But stand back and really examine our hearts. Are we lonely?

Maybe, that guy’s right. Maybe, I am. Maybe, the pain and resentment and sadness I feel is because of no real connections.

Come on! If it hurts, are you lonely?

The rest of this week we’ll be looking at what to do about loneliness – from A Different Perspective. I really hope you can join me.

Loneliness isn’t an easy thing to deal with when it strikes. When we’re all alone, it seems as though there are no answers, no solutions. But actually, nothing could be further from the truth.

Whether you live in China surrounded by 1.3 billion other people, or the Pitcairn Islands (in the Pacific), surrounded by just 44 other people, you can feel lonely. We can be desperately lonely in a crowd yet be delivered from loneliness by just one other person.

Today, if it’s okay with you, we’re going to continue looking at the whole question of loneliness.

I’d like you to meet the first of two people who can help you with loneliness, without you ever having to pick up the phone or open the front door. We’ll meet the second one in tomorrow’s program.

Today, we’re going to meet the first one. Someone you’ve known all your life, someone who’s with you constantly, every minute of the day – that someone … is you!

The problem with loneliness, it’s not so much in being alone, we all want to be alone (sometimes). The problem is feeling alone. The problem is feeling that terrible sense that I’m not connected in a meaningful way with another person. It’s painful, you can get angry, you can get distressed, you sense this loss. And the other thing about loneliness is that often, it’s accompanied by a sense of powerlessness. We end up in a passive state.

I remember ten years ago being single again. One minute, I was surrounded by a family – you go out, you go out with your family, go out with your wife. The next minute, not only is there the pain of a broken relationship, but you see all of these other people in relationships. I truly hated seeing couples together; their enjoyment seemed to hurt me. You know, you see a man and a woman walking hand in hand down the street. And I’d just been through what I’d just been through and it was painful seeing them enjoy themselves. You feel so powerless when you feel lonely.

I felt like a second-class citizen, I felt like a failure. It’s like it wasn’t okay for me to be alone. It’s a state that I felt I couldn’t change. Have you ever felt like that … “I’m the only one?”

I’ll let you into a secret, we all do that sometimes. We’re not Robinson Caruso. Everybody at some stage in their life feels devalued because they’re lonely. We feel rejected because we’re lonely. Part of the loneliness trap says, “I can’t function unless I have other people around me.”

Well in part that’s true; we certainly all need to have meaningful relationships with other people. But the idea of “I can’t function without other people,” misses something. It misses an opportunity – an important opportunity.

When we go home, you know at the end of the day or (I used to do this when I was going through my lonely stage where I was on my own) at the end of church, you know I’d go home on a Sunday and all these other people went home with their husbands or their wives or their children. And I went home alone.

When we go home, whether we go home to a family or whether we go home alone, you and I are home in our space, maybe people there, maybe not. Whether there are people there or not, it can be a lonely place. Well for me there were no people there at the time. And what I discovered in that place was to my surprise … I enjoyed my own company.

Now that might seem trivial and trite to you. But in my life where I’d been a busy business person and working long hours and working hard and having people around me all the time. Here I was, at age 36, alone for the first time (in a very long time). All of a sudden, I had time and space to figure out, “Berni, you enjoy your own company.”

The first thing I had was time to think, time just to sit at nights and let the imagination roam across the hills. Time to dream, time to hope, time to contemplate the day, time to plan for tomorrow. What an incredible gift! And even though we all do that to some extent, you know something, when you’re on your own (particularly when you feel lonely), it’s somehow sharper, somehow it’s more important to be able to do that. It’s so evident in a lonely place that time to think and imagine and dream and hope and contemplate is a wonderful gift.

And it was in the middle of that … that I learned to turn the TV off. It was still. It was quiet. And in that place I discovered I liked myself.

It’s one of the biggest gifts I ever received out of that time of loneliness. And you know this is a habit that has never left me. Today, I’m wonderfully, happily married to the most beautiful, lovely women on the planet and have a wonderful family. Yet, I still draw away into my own space – into that quiet peace to enjoy me, to spend time with me, to discover who I am, to think and dream and hope.

We are created in the image of God. And God looks at us and He delights in us. So why shouldn’t we delight in ourselves? Why shouldn’t we like ourselves?

The second thing that … that period of loneliness gave me was time and space to do things I had never had time and space to do in the past. I discovered I really loved walking. I’ve always played the piano but I’d never had time and I relearned the playing of piano. I love to read, I love cooking. Some people say, ‘Well, it’s not worth cooking for one’. What they’re really saying is, ‘I am not worth it, I’m not worth cooking for’. Yes you are!

The third thing was that I decided I liked my own company. And the step that precedes that – I liked me. It doesn’t mean I can’t improve. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things that I’d change. But basically, in that time alone, I decided I like me. That brings some serious healing. I realised I wasn’t a second-class citizen. I realised the real joy of discovering me.

Now, there was another inseparable part in that healing process … another person that we’ll talk about tomorrow, when I introduce you to the second person, who can help you and me in a period of loneliness, without ever picking up the phone or opening the front door.

Loneliness … absolutely, we need to get connected meaningfully with other people. But a time of loneliness is a huge opportunity to connect meaningfully with ourselves.

Have you ever been traveling through a lonely patch? Maybe, you’re traveling through one now. Go look in the mirror. You are a beautiful person. You are so wonderfully hand-carved by God. You have some abilities and talents and humour in you that other people don’t have. And sometimes God takes us through times of loneliness to help us to discover that.

It’s no substitute for relationships with other people; it’s no substitute for having family and friends around. But you know what I think? I think for us to really enjoy our relationships with other people, to really connect with other people, first – we need to connect with ourselves.

If God is God, if God made you and me the way we are, if God delights in who you are and who I am, isn’t that a valid thing that we should delight in who we are? Isn’t it a wonderful thing to have time and space to enjoy our own company? To think, to go and do things and develop skills and develop talents that sometimes we never realised we had?

I learned to play the piano when I was a young boy and I’d almost forgotten, and I relearned that in that time of loneliness. And it’s such a wonderful blessing.

You are made by God … go on take the opportunities He gives you to discover yourself.

When loneliness strikes, it can be the bleakest, darkest, most inhospitable place on the planet … in the universe! And if you’ve experienced loneliness, you’ll know what I mean. But in that loneliest place, at that loneliest moment (as things turn out), you and I – we are never alone.

I wonder on a scale of 1-10 how content you feel in your relationships; zero is desperately lonely, ten is stunningly fulfilled.

This week, we have been looking at loneliness from A Different Perspective. Because loneliness is a disease that is afflicting people in plague proportions, more work, more money, less time with the family, less time being part of a community. So we have a silent social pandemic that is sweeping the globe. The question is, what to do about it?

Yesterday, we talked about the first of two people who can help you with loneliness – that person is you. If you missed that program, you can listen to it again on our website, I’ll let you know how you can do that at the end of the program.

Today, I’d like to introduce you to the second person who can help you with loneliness without ever having to make a phone call, or open the front door. This man, a carpenter by trade, knows all about lonely places and what to do with them.

Have you ever thought about Jesus being lonely? Now here is the Son of God who becomes a man … little boy, grows up as carpenter’s apprentice with his Dad and He becomes a carpenter. And then His public ministry begins around age 30. He has a dozen or so close disciples, many more who follow him around, huge crowds, who flock to see him and hear him speak and be healed by him. There are people clamoring to get a piece of him. This Jesus had rock star status.

There was one time He healed a leper and said to the leper, “Look, just go and show the priests, don’t tell anyone”. (Yeah right!) Luke in his Gospel, (Luke 5:15, if you want to look it up), Luke writes this after the healing of the leper:

Even though He told the leper not to tell anyone, obviously the leper did. And the news about Jesus spread more and more, so that crowds of people came to hear Him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

Isn’t that amazing? By choice, Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. That word lonely means solitary, desolate, uninhabited places, to pray.

Jesus knew exactly what it meant to be lonely. Here is the Son of God, He has been with God and in God, and part of the God Head, part of the Trinity for all eternity – Father, Son, Holy Spirit. He steps out of that and becomes a man. He was surrounded by people who didn’t understand. God was doing a new thing through this Son of His, Jesus, a new thing of grace. Jesus would go to the cross and be beaten and reviled and crucified and killed. The religious hierarchy, they hated Him, they plotted against Him. In fact, they were so threatened by this radical Jesus, eventually, they killed Him. The disciples (well most of them, most of the time), they just didn’t get it. Jesus was misunderstood, misquoted, misrepresented and mistreated.

Jesus, of course He experienced loneliness. He was called to do something radical that people didn’t understand. Imagine being surrounded by these twelve Disciples who, who you know will be the foundations of the church when you go. And for the whole time, they just didn’t seem to understand. Every now and then, they’d have a flash of insight but most of the time they didn’t get it. Who did Jesus have to talk to? Who was His peer? Who was His equal? Who was His support? He experienced everything that you and I have to experience and loneliness is one of them.

Jesus has been lonely in a crowd and He makes a decision, a decision of choice. He withdrew often to a lonely place and prayed. Why did He do that? Well, despite His superstar status, the one relationship that gave Him His strength (to give out all that He gave out) – the one relationship sustained Him, the one relationship that gave Him wisdom and love, and grace – was the relationship with His Father, God (in that lonely place).

I mentioned yesterday that I went through a lonely time in my life about ten years ago, when I went through marriage breakdown and divorce. And I experienced loss, and betrayal, and hurt, and fear, and loneliness … what a poisonous cocktail! I was in a new city with new people around me, a new empty house. And I remember meal times, sitting down at the dinner table that used to have a family around it, and now there was just me.

At the dinner table, my aloneness became so desperately lonely. And in that lonely place, I got a growing sense and a knowledge that Jesus was there. And I prayed, I talked, I listened, I read, I learned who I was and enjoyed my own company (I talked about that yesterday). That was great, but in that dark and lonely, and desolate, isolated place there was one light shining – and that light was the presence of God. That light was Jesus in that place with me. A Jesus who Himself had experienced the loneliness, who himself had prayed in lonely places.

’Berni what do you mean, what did it feel like? How did you get that?’ Well, the best way I can describe this is, in the bitterness of betrayal with a fear of the future, lamenting the loss, in that bitterness of fear and lament, the sweetness of His presence was so piercingly sweet. I just knew He was there. It was such an incredible joy. It took my breath away. In the lounge room, in the dining room, in the kitchen, the bedroom, God’s presence, His presence just filled the place. Wherever I went, whatever I did, He was there just whispering in my ear, ‘I love you, I will never leave you, I’ll never, never forsake you’. And that was ten years ago.

Now that I talk about this, just like it was yesterday. As I speak about it, it’s though, I am there. And I remember the pain and I remember the enormous joy of God’s presence in the middle of that loneliness.

Have you noticed right now that He’s here? Why am I going through this? Why am I so lonely? What’s going on? Why is it so dark? Why is loneliness so painful? Why can’t I do anything about it myself?

Well, God didn’t cause your loneliness. God didn’t cause my loneliness. But when I was there and when you’re there, He is there. Because in the middle of that loneliness, sometimes that’s the only place that’s quiet enough for us to hear Him. Sometimes that’s the only place that He can get our attention. Sometimes (as much as it hurts), that place of loneliness is a place that Jesus Christ touches us, and reaches out, and loves us in a way that we cannot … we cannot miss or mistake.

Loneliness can be the biggest opportunity that God ever hands us. It was certainly the biggest opportunity that He ever gave me. And that time that I had with Him, during that lonely period, I remember as if it was yesterday.

I have a wonderful life now, but I remember that time. And even now, in the dark times, He sustains me.

When we’re going through a lonely patch in life, the most common response is – introspection. We withdraw into ourselves and have a pity party about how terrible things are. Well, as it turns out, that’s absolutely the worst thing you can do, because it just makes things worse. What we really want, what really need is something that makes things better, right?!

Loneliness – that deep hurt inside, that rises out of the painful realisation that we’re not connecting with other people. And a key part of that downward spiral of loneliness is a sense of powerlessness, a sense that we’re not good enough, or worthy enough, or important enough to do anything about it.

That’s why this week we’re looking at dealing with loneliness. I really believe that if God is God, He doesn’t want us to be lonely. If you’ve missed any of these programs this week on loneliness, I’ll let you know at the end of the program how you can listen to them again online. You know when we’re lonely the last thing we think we can do is to help other people, but amazingly reaching out turns out to be very much a part of the solution.

Go and stand in the local shopping centre and just watch for five or ten minutes, you see people rushing around, doing stuff and not connecting. Now my local shopping centre is a really large, new, flash shopping centre. And you almost never see people stop and recognise each other and connect. A century ago and more, communities had like the village square, you know that green patch and the houses were all around the village square and families connected. That’s been replaced by the shopping centre, the shopping mall. The connection and community have been replaced by lots of lonely people wandering around aimlessly, in and out of shops.

Here’s a tough reality … the world is not going to stop and help you or me just because we’re lonely. Let me say that again – the world, the way it is today, is just not going to stop and help you and me because we feel lonely. It’s true in many families, it’s true even in many churches, not all but in many. That’s painful but it’s not our fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not about you or me, it’s just the way the world is.

Probably, this is not what you want to hear if you happen to be feeling lonely and powerless right now. But the fact is that Social Darwinism is alive and well. It is a jungle out there and it’s all about the survival of the fittest. It’s not that people are horrible; it’s not that people don’t want to help; it’s not that everyone is nasty; it’s just not a neighbourly kind of world anymore. People are too busy.

Great, so now what? If I’m lonely in a world where everybody’s too busy to stop and connect with me, what’s going to happen to me now? With loneliness, with a sense of being desperately alone and not connected with people, comes a sense of helplessness – I can’t do this; I can’t change this; I’m no good; no one’s going to want me. Now that’s understandable but it should be temporary. Unfortunately, the further people go down that downward spiral of loneliness, it sets in and becomes permanent. Some people just plan on being perpetual victims for the rest of their lives.

Maybe you are walking through loneliness right now? Maybe someone that you know is walking through loneliness right now? And this sounds particularly tough. It is, it has to be. Here’s the rub, maybe being the victim would’ve worked thirty or forty years ago. But it’s not going to work today. No one has got time. Bottom line, wallowing won’t work and that’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing because if you’re someone that’s lonely, one of the biggest needs that you have is to get over self-pity; is to get over that sense of powerlessness; is to get over this reality that ‘I can’t do anything and it won’t work’. What you need is to reach out. Maybe you know someone who is lonely and who feels powerless, they need to take this step and reach out. They need to connect.

If you’re lonely you have this deep need but how, how do you do that when everyone is just too busy? Comes back to something we were talking about the other day – loneliness gives us a time and a space to discover who we are, what we enjoy, what we’re good at. Maybe that’s basketball or maybe you’re like me and you’re vertically challenged and you’ll never be any good at basketball. Maybe your gift is sitting down and talking to people and making them feel better, drinking coffee. Maybe you’ve got a coffee ministry coming up, maybe your gift is serving.

We don’t discover these things until we’ve had time and space in a period of loneliness to explore them. I truly believe that’s true. It was true in my life. I had some things I was good at but I never really had time to develop them and to nurture them and to come to grips with them. Me, I discovered in that time that I was good at story telling. So, in the period of loneliness we have time to discover our gifts and what we’re good at. And we can now go and take those gifts and add value to someone.

Busy people don’t notice victims. Busy people do notice other people who add value, that’s one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is lonely people need to develop their self-esteem and they can do that by adding value. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me, like those two things are made for each other. When Berni was lonely and single again ten years ago, God was doing stuff in my life so I ended up going to a church. It was a little church in a place called Oyster Bay, in the southern suburbs of Sydney, in Australia.

There were only about 30-35 people in this church and I went along all broken and lonely and not knowing whether anyone would ever think anything of me again. And I discovered they only had one piano player. Well, I can play the piano and so I practiced and practiced and practiced and I ended up playing the piano during the services. And people noticed that I seemed to be good with words and so I was asked to lead worship. And so the pastor of the church asked me to preach. I’d been a Christian for five minutes and this guy said to me, ‘Hey Berni, why don’t you get up and preach one Sunday?’

All of a sudden, I discovered I could contribute to other people’s lives using my gifts. Have you noticed I’m still doing that? Right now, I’m doing the thing that I discovered when I was lonely. Isn’t God fantastic, isn’t God just wonderful? And that was great for me; I needed to have a sense that I could add value to other people’s lives. Wallowing won’t work, adding value will.

Jesus was just a crummy carpenter. He was misunderstood, misinterpreted, mistreated. He often went to lonely places to pray, but that loneliness didn’t debilitate Him; that loneliness didn’t stop Him from doing what God had called Him to do. That’s the picture, that’s the model!

Are you in a world that’s too busy to notice that you’re lonely? Well get up, take up your cross and follow Jesus – not to be served, not to be the victim – but to serve. And as you take the gifts that God has given you and you serve other people with those gifts, you’re going to bless your socks off. You’re going to do things in your heart and your soul and your spirit that you never dreamed that you could possibly do, because God is a God of grace.

You get up and follow Him and watch out what God does with that.

There’s nothing like sharing in someone else’s loneliness to get a handle on overcoming your own loneliness. And today, we’re going to meet a man who, well, if anyone has a reason to wallow in self-pity, it’s this guy. But that’s the last thing he ends up doing in his loneliness.

For me, I think prison would have to be one of the loneliest places on the planet. The loss of freedom, infrequent visits, perhaps none at all, the threat and the danger of prison politics. I was re-reading a letter from a guy called Paul who was on death row (in Rome, around about 60 or 61 AD), the letter he wrote to some good friends in a Roman outpost called Philippi. And there’s one bit in there that really struck me, the sort of thing you just wouldn’t expect from this guy in a damp dungeon, waiting to die.

The reality of prison … I cannot begin to imagine being in jail let alone, like the Apostle Paul, being on death row. You see, Paul had quite some fall from grace. As a young man in Jerusalem, he was a religious hot-shot. He was a member of the ruling body of the Sanhedrin. He was well-known academic. He was busy persecuting Christians. Man this guy had his career all cut out. And then one day, as he was traveling to Damascus, on the road he encountered Jesus and that turned his whole world upside down.

He left all of the prestige and status behind and spent over a decade traveling around Asia Minor, preaching, telling people about Jesus Christ. Now, Paul was thrown out of synagogues; Paul caused riots; Paul was beaten and flogged and run out of town and imprisoned several times. And now as we look at this letter that he wrote to the Church at Philippi (it’s known as the book of Philippians in the New Testament), he is on death row in Rome.

He has every right to feel lonely, has every right to feel resentful, has every right to say to God and shake his fists, “Come on God, what’s going on here? I did all the stuff you asked me to do and now I’m on death row in Rome, what’s going on?” And while he was locked up there are others out there doing what he was supposed to be doing, getting all the limelight.

Got the picture? A dark, dank, dungeon, in chains, actually chained to a guard. Now I am sure that prison today is no cakewalk but this, we cannot begin to imagine. Got the picture?

And this is what he writes towards the end of this letter. You can read it in the book of Philippians, the last chapter. He says to them:

Finally my friends, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about those things. (Philippians 4:8)

I think this is one of the best pieces of advice from someone who had every right to be lonely and resentful, to someone who is lonely, that I have ever heard.

You look at loneliness and there’s this kind of downward spiral. People are lonely, they’re not in meaningful connections with other people, there’s no one to encourage or support or to strengthen them. And so the mind wanders and wanders and goes down the gurgler. It focuses on rubbish. It focuses on regret, on anger, on revenge, on disappointment, on the inevitability and on the powerlessness of the situation.

You know, when we feel lonely, we want to blame someone. When we feel lonely, we want to exercise our right to be resentful don’t we? When we feel lonely, we just want to grumble and because we are alone we got time to do that, and do it “par excellence’. Often, lonely people spend all of their thinking time and feeling time in this bad, rubbishy, regretful, angry, revengeful, disappointed place.

And Paul, our buddy, sitting on death row there, who has every right to feel angry, says, ‘Hang on … no, don’t do that. Think about the good stuff, anything that is honourable or just or pure or pleasing or commendable or excellent or worthy of praise.’ What do you think about that stuff?

Now, what are you saying here Berni? Are you saying, ‘Just think positive thoughts. Be positive?’ I don’t think that’s what Paul is saying. I think he’s saying, “Consume positive stuff, exercise your mind in a space, that’s healthy”. You know the routine: eat junk food, you’ll carry extra weight. You don’t do any exercise and your cholesterol will be up – your triglycerides will be up, your blood pressure will be up, your blood sugar will be up, you’ll be diabetic, you get a heart attack, you have a stroke, you die young. Right? Simple. They’re the consequences.

On the other hand, you eat cereal, fruit, go walking and exercising, lose some weight and all of a sudden the consequences are good. You have energy, you feel stronger, you’re not as tired, you reduce your health risks, your blood levels go to all the right levels. There’s vigour and sparkle and joy, because there are consequences to what we do with our body. It’s simple cause-and-effect stuff. We all know this.

If it is true with our bodies, it’s also true of our hearts and minds. It depends on what we read, what we listen to, what we say, what we think, what we believe.

‘Oh, I’m never, ever, ever going to get over this loneliness. I’m never going to be able to do this.’ Well, that’s one place you can spend your time. Or maybe, you can go and buy a book like The Mystery According To Susie, which is about someone who struggled with loneliness and depression and fear and overcame it. We can spend time mulling over the bad stuff or – we can take deliberate steps to consume good stuff.

Paul goes on though. He doesn’t stop there. He says, in effect:

I have learnt to be content with whatever I have. Whether I have a lot or a little, whether I am happy or sad, whether the world is good or bad. I’m going to be content anyway.

And then he reinforces it with this, he says:

You know why, you know why I can do that? I can do all things through Christ Jesus, who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:13)

He can do this stuff. He can be sitting there on death row and instead of grumbling, he can be saying to his friends, who are free, ‘Think about good stuff, do good stuff. Don’t get tired of doing that.’ Why can Paul do that, on death row, in the dungeon? Answer, he tells us. Because he can do anything, he can do everything through Jesus. He can give this good advice to someone who is lonely and disappointed. He can give this advice because, and only because, he has a real relationship with Jesus Christ.

I would challenge you … pick up a Bible or go on the internet, and read the letter in the New Testament called Philippians. It’s Paul’s letter from the dungeon to some dear friends of his. You will not find a more encouraging, upbeat piece of prose than those four chapters of that letter written by a guy on death row.

What does that tell you? We can choose to exercise our mind in disappointment; or we can decide to consume good things. We can choose to let our heart rest in loneliness and fear; or we can choose to give our heart over to Jesus Christ. That positive language and positive sentiment wasn’t coming out of positive thinking, it was coming out of a mind and a heart given over to Jesus Christ. It was coming from a heart flooded with the presence of God.

The dungeon of loneliness can be a reality. But it’s an opportunity to get to know ourselves, to get to know God, to reach out to other people with our gifts and to consume goodness and grace and peace and joy from the one person that will never disappoint – Jesus Christ.