Loneliness

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. When I came home from college, I'd open the door and my mom would give me a hug. She'd do my laundry, you know. Isn't that the way it works? Alex, do you take your laundry home? Absolutely. It's better than the machines at school. What? Way better. Way better, especially when she does it. And you don't have to. But the whole idea is you get an embrace, you get welcomed. But can you imagine? You open the door to your world, you come into the world to your own people, the people who should have been looking for you all along. Right? Every prophet anticipated the day and you show up and it's like, huh, go away. We don't want you. We don't need you. To me, that's where loneliness hits. It's when you're not welcomed, when you don't fit in. So today we're going to look at this because, by the way, the Surgeon General in 2023 put out a report on the loneliness epidemic and isolation in the United States. You can read this. It's online. It's worth reading through. I mean, it's a little depressing. But the actual fact is it's so bad right now in the United States that the Surgeon General says here are the medical problems that happen as a result. Twenty-seven percent, by the way, of young adults, college students, are chronically lonely. One-fourth of our population. And then there are others that are facing isolation. There is a difference, right? Like for college, you're on a campus of thousands of students and yet you can be lonely. You can be lonely in a crowd. You can also be alone and not be lonely. So we're going to quite get to the heart of this. When we look at today, we're going to be looking at these three points. Why Jesus experienced loneliness. Why loneliness is difficult. And how loneliness is ultimately overcome. So, why? Why does Jesus experience loneliness? Thomas Wolfe says this. He says, Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. Well, it wasn't always that way. But it is now. Everybody's probably faced it in this room at some point in time where you feel like you didn't fit in. You weren't quite sure what to do with, how does this work? You're always looking for connection and you feel disconnection instead. It can be within your own family. It can be in your community. It can be when you move somewhere. In some form, it can happen. And Jesus, I think, according to Hebrews, experiences everything you did. That's his whole point. Hebrews 4.15 says, We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect, did you hear that? In every respect, has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. It's not a sin to be lonely. There's no real shame in it, although I think a lot of people feel ashamed if they would admit it. It's just where we're at now in this world that has alienated itself from God, but also from each other. You see that already in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, when they said, no, I'm going to do it my way. All of a sudden, they mistrust each other. They start casting blame on each other and God. And the alienation started and continues to this day. So, besides the fact that Jesus experienced everything we do, the text says, I think there's a couple of reasons why he really did face loneliness. The first is that he was misunderstood. One of the instances of this, this is amazing to me. It's just kind of one sentence in the Gospel of Mark, but it comes up and shows just how misunderstood Jesus was. So, he began his public ministry. He's doing this ministry up in Capernaum. And this is what Mark 3 says, when his family heard about this. Now, who is his family? Mary, and according to the text, his brothers. He had some brothers or sisters. And so, they come, the people closest to him, his own household, the people who grew up with him for 30 years come. And it says, they went to take charge of him. That means they're basically saying, it's the first century Baker Act. If you know what that is. Because it says, they said he is out of his mind. Can you imagine if your family members say, this person's, he's totally misunderstood. They didn't understand why he came, what he was about. I mean, his parents already at age 12 at the temple. I mean, he's sitting there waiting for them because it's like they should know if I'm going to get lost. This is the safe place. This is where I'd be in my father's house. His parents were looking for days in Jerusalem. They finally find him and he says, basically, of course, I would be here in my father's house. They don't understand him. They seem to not have a clue as to who Jesus is. And by the way, even his disciples, you think sometimes maybe you felt this way. I don't know. There were times when I grew up, I felt like my parents didn't understand me ...