John 16:32

John 16:32

Loneliness

I. There is a loneliness inseparable from the spiritual life. To cherish such loves and hopes of heaven, such desires for God's honour, such delight in Jesus' grace, as you dare not drag from the sacred silence of the heart, is not that the burden of all the saints? "Yet not alone." Let it console us under our hidden hopes and fears, under weariness of sin, and under unappreciated efforts to do good, to remember not only that Christ felt it all, but that in the midst of it all He drew into His bosom the sweet companionship of a heavenly confidant and Father. To us, as to Him, shall the sense of such society prove balm to our pain and solace in our loneliness.

II. A special variety of spiritual solitude arises when a Christian is called to endure temptation. In such assaults a Christian can expect little aid and hardly any companionship from man. But it is when no man stands by us that our Joseph discovers himself to His brethren, and the presence of Jehovah is a secret place.

III. There is a loneliness in sorrow. Deep grief loves silence and retirement. When a man would weep, he goes apart to do it. Where is the mourner who has not experienced the twofold desire desire for a solitude within, that is felt to be indispensable; desire for fellowship within reach, as near at hand as may be, about a stone's cast off. He who could face His trial with the assurance that One above would never leave Him entirely alone, knows how to save you by the angel of His presence.

IV. Exactly in proportion to the preciousness of the Divine presence is the unspeakable solitude of the Divine absence. Yet, has the forlorn soul, under such loneliness of desertion, any right to say that it is passed beyond the fellow-feeling of the Son of God? Out into an absolute loneliness of outer darkness He peered; He crossed the line; He lost the consciousness of that Presence, and felt Himself for the first time alone indeed, bereft of that secret inward instinct whose conscious sympathy had sustained Him in every earlier solitude. "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" If He too went through such an awful experience, must He not be drawn to watch you in it with the interest of fellow-feeling?

J. Oswald Dykes, Sermons,p. 326.

References: John 16:32. Contemporary Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 363; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 81; Preacher's Monthly,vol. viii., p. 367; J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,10th series, p. 9; E. Bersier, Sermons,1st series, p. 299; Church of England Pulpit,vol. xiii., p. 253.