Are You Lonesome Tonight?
As we move into short days and long nights, it becomes easier to feel discouraged. If we are increasingly secluded (by weather and, this year, by governmental edict), we can experience genuine loneliness. I enjoy being alone, but I have a choice in the matter; others do not. Solitude occurs when we want to be alone; loneliness happens when friends and family are taken from us. Solitude soothes, whereas loneliness looms. Because God knows all about us, His Word speaks to us about the painful subject of loneliness. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
Jeremiah is often called the “weeping prophet” because of the great grief that he expresses in the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations. He prophesied the destruction of Judah and its capital city, Jerusalem, and lived to witness the fulfillment of this prophecy. His sad sorrow is stirringly stated in Lamentations 1:1: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!” Anyone who loves his homeland can relate to the lonesome lament of the prophet. Probably every person reading this devotional is patriotic and loves our nation (and if anyone from another country happens to read this, the same can be said for you, I am sure). We want the best for generations to come, yet we are saddened by the godlessness of our increasingly postmodernistic culture and by the blatant corruption in our government. In stark and simple terms, we wonder if we have any influence on the course of history. The background to Lamentations assures us that our impact is disproportionate to our numbers. In Jeremiah 5:1, God promises to pardon the city of Jerusalem (and, by extension, the entire nation of Judah) if the prophet can find even one godly person there. The bitter truth is that even the priests did not care about the things of God. If even one of us had been in Jerusalem at that time, the city, the nation, and hundreds of thousands of people would have been spared. You may be the only Christian in your family or place of work, and we may be a small and shrinking minority in our land. However, God may well use our presence to withhold judgment. We matter.