I’m talking about loneliness. Not just missing someone you love, but the invasive sense of loneliness that controls the lives of so many people. Indeed, we find ourselves in a loneliness epidemic today, with more and more people feeling alone, left out, and isolated.

It’s important to understand that activity, people, marriage are not the cures for loneliness. If they are, then we are doomed to a roller-coaster life, because none of those things are guaranteed to us. Activities ebb and flow, people come in and out of our lives, the most wonderful marriage in the world can be severed through death.

If you’re lonely today, are you willing to let God change your thinking about being alone? That’s where we begin. But it takes more than that. God recognized our need for companionship, our need to be loved and to feel secure. And he has provided for that need completely.

Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you (Hebrews 13:5).

If you will apply this incredible promise to your life, it can be the beginning of knowing freedom from those awful feelings of loneliness.

Please believe what I’m telling you. It’s not a cliché; it’s truth! That lonely place inside you can be filled when you learn to live in the knowledge that Jesus is the ever-present Lord. That is his gift to you when you are born from above.

Let me share with you a poem by an anonymous writer which says this so well:

There is a mystery in human hearts;                                

And though we be encircled by a host

Of those who love us well, and are beloved,

To every one of us, from time to time,

There comes a sense of utter loneliness:

Our dearest friend is stranger to our joy,

And cannot realize our bitterness.

So when we feel this loneliness, it is

The voice of Jesus saying, “Come to me”;

And every time we are “not understood,”

It is a call to us to come again;

For Christ alone can satisfy the soul,

And those who walk with him from day to day,

Can never have a “solitary way.”

And would you know the reason why this is?

It is because the Lord desires our love:

In every heart he wishes to be first.

He therefore keeps the secret key himself,

To open all its chambers and to bless

With perfect sympathy and holy peace,

Each solitary soul that comes to him.

With Christ you don’t have to feel that ever-abiding despair of being lonely. He has come to abolish it, and he is totally capable of doing just that, if you will allow him to.