P.O. Box 53055    
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CONNIE: Is it possible that your church is full of lonely people? Are you one of them? What can we do to help people feel more connected—to each other, and to God?

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko. We’re glad you joined us today—and I hope you feel a sense of fellowship with us as we open God’s Word in search of answers. But let me just say this: I hope you find more good Christian fellowship this week—I hope that our radio program isn’t a substitute for fellowship in a warm, loving church environment. God has created us with a need to be connected to one another.

CONNIE: And that’s why we always encourage people to search out a church in their community where they will feel welcomed and part of the family of God.

LONNIE: In an article in a recent issue of the Adventist Review, Adam Andreassen confessed his feelings of loneliness. He’s a pastor and a seminary student, but he realized that there were really very few people he could open up to and fellowship with on more than a superficial level.

CONNIE: He pointed out that church should be a place where we can form close friendships, based on openness and mutual respect. But in the real world, we don’t always find it to be that way. Pastor Mike Jones of Operation Reconnect has been working on ways to solve that problem—teaching Christians at church to be more welcoming, and encouraging people to get back in connection with the church. Lonnie spoke with Mike about this project recently, let’s listen in now.

LONNIE: Mike Jones, welcome to the Voice of Prophecy.

MIKE: Thanks Lonnie, it’s good to be here.

LONNIE: Now, you’ve started a new arm of ministry for the Voice of Prophecy to reach out to former members and get them active in the church again. Tell us a little bit about that and why are you such an authority on that.

MIKE: Well, perhaps it was because I was one of them. I was out of the church for 16 years and I have now been back for 8. But I know what it’s like to be out there, and away from fellowship, and it’s really good to be back.

LONNIE: In telling us that it’s good to be back, what does that mean, in terms of the joy of knowing Jesus, and being in His fellowship again?

MIKE: I guess it brings me comfort, and satisfaction to me or at least those are the two words that come to my mind off-hand. There’s just a certain satisfaction and joy that comes with fellowship and intermingling with other people that believe in the same faith as you do.

LONNIE: And as you are getting involved with the body of Christ you are realizing that there is some things, like smiling, or a word of encouragement, that we can do to help people feel more accepted. So you’re discovering that it pays to smile.

MIKE: People are sitting there half sleepy sometimes and you’ll go over there and put your hand on their shoulder and say, how are you doing today and they just light up like a lamp and it’s just really fun to do that.

LONNIE: It’s just contagious; you could really start an epidemic.

MIKE: When I was first coming back to church, I was in this church where nobody had spoken to us and I said to wife Diana, watch this…And I went to the front of the church, and I started walking down the aisle shaking hands with people I didn’t know, I was a total stranger, and they lit up, and I made probably seven or eight contacts.

LONNIE: Mike, give us some examples of people who have found their way back and are now experiencing their new joy.

MIKE: Well, Lonnie, there is a lady named Pattie, who started coming back to church about 6-8 weeks ago, and she had been out of the church for 23 years. She had been involved in things such as witchcraft and all sorts of other strange things. She started coming back and she had just been deeply troubled and she had done a lot of counseling with physiatrists for 20 years and hadn’t gotten very far. She just didn’t seem to have life, but we helped her get into church and just recently she gave her life and heart over to Jesus.

LONNIE: She’s found purpose joy and love through fellowship. Give me a few more examples about people that have been transformed through this ministry of yours.

MIKE: Well just from my personal experience I have enjoyed fellowshipping with others so much now, and getting involved has done so much for my life…

LONNIE: A fdinal thought…

MIKE: I talked to a lady who told me she was back in the church and fellowshipping with others, and she told me that she will never again let people or problems take her eyes away from Jesus, and I think that that was the perfect way to explain it.

“Sweet, Sweet Spirit”, Trio Celest, from Praise Shall Be My Song CD.

CONNIE: Amen! And thank you to Trio Celest for that music. I hope you find that kind of closeness to the Lord and to your fellow believers in your church. When the Holy Spirit is really working on our hearts, He will draw us closer to one another in love.

LONNIE: That’s right, Connie. That’s the true reason for the church’s existence. Jesus spoke of the fellowship of His disciples as a place where people would be recognized as Christians because of the love they had for one another. And one of our goals here at Voice of Prophecy is to help people find a church in which they can have the kind of fellowship that Jesus intended.

CONNIE: One of the ways we do this is through the Discover Bible School, and another way it is through the Exploring the Word television program. The simplest way to access both of these—if you have an Internet connection—is at our webpage at VOP.COM. You can enroll in the Discover lessons, and you can view the television program right at your own computer.

LONNIE: For those who are not looked up to the Internet, the Discover Bible lessons are also available through the mail. One of the great features of this Bible school is that no matter whether you sign up on the Internet or take the course by correspondence, you’ll have a personal instructor who is interested in your progress, in helping you with your questions, and praying with you for your needs.

CONNIE: You can sign up for the Bible lessons at VOP.COM, or by calling our toll free number 1-800-872-0055. We’ll share our mailing address and the phone number again at the end of the broadcast, but right now let’s listen to Pastor Lonnie as he shares today’s message: “You’re Not Alone.”

You’re Not Alone

Have you ever felt like you were totally alone—totally on your own—that your life or death depended on you, what you could do, and no one else? It’s a lonely feeling—and one I don’t plan ever to have. Because no matter where I go, or what I do, I know I’m never alone. With the Psalmist I confidently affirm that wherever I go, the Lord God of heaven goes with me:

“Where can I go from your spirit?” the Psalmist cries,
“Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast”
(Psalm 139:7-10, NRSV).

But if you’ve ever seen the PBS documentary film Touching the Void, I think you can get some sense of what it must feel like to believe you are absolutely, totally alone in the world, totally dependent on no one but yourself.

The film tells the story of Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, two young British men who, in the summer of 1985, set out to climb a 21,000-foot peak in the Andes Mountains of Peru. With no support team and only the food and supplies they could carry on their two backs, they made the grueling ascent—becoming the first men ever to climb that particular side of the mountain.

The ascent proved more difficult than they had anticipated. But it was the descent that would really test their mettle. Just a short distance below the summit, in a blinding snowstorm, Joe slipped off the side of a ridge and came to a crashing halt fifty feet down the side of the mountain with a badly fractured leg.

There was nothing for Simon to do but attempt to lower his friend thousands of feet down to safety. All went well for the first thousand feet, but then Simon found himself literally hanging over a cliff with no way to go up or down.

150 feet above him, Joe tried desperately to hold on, to somehow pull his friend back to safety, but in the sub-zero wind chill it was just plain impossible. Finally he did the unthinkable and cut the rope just before being dragged over the cliff himself.

Joe fell another 80 feet, landing unconscious at the bottom of the crevasse. When he came to sometime later, he found himself in total darkness with his body screaming in pain. “Simon! Simon!” he called out into the darkness, hoping that his friend was nearby. But the horror of his situation slowly dawned on his consciousness, and by the time the gray light of morning filtered down into the abyss, he realized that he was alone. Totally alone.

I don’t know what that must have felt like, but in the film Joe tells of pounding his fists into the wall of ice, screaming in frustration until finally he collapsed in exhaustion, realizing that that sort of tantrum wasn’t doing anything to help him get himself out of his fix.

He also tells of some of the thoughts that ran through his mind. Having been raised in a Christian family, he had abandoned his faith years earlier, and he says he always wondered “whether if I got in a bad fix I’d say a few Hail Marys or not.” But he says the thought never occurred to him. He simply set out with grim determination to find a way down the mountain all by himself.

I won’t spoil the story for you by telling how he did it, because I want to fast forward to the time, several days later when, in the dark of night, he realized he was finally somewhere near the base camp he and Simon had begun their climb from.

“Simon! Simon! Simon!” he called over and over again into the darkness.

You see, even this doggedly determined individualist, who had decided that if he was going to survive he would have to do it with no outside help, didn’t really want to be all alone. He didn’t want to continue to face life’s rigorous challenges all on his own. He wanted there to be someone out there in the darkness. Someone he could call out to. Someone who would come to his rescue.

Let’s face it. We are social creatures. We all need to be connected to others in some way. And if we feel like we’ve been cut off—like someone has gotten out their pocket knife and severed the rope that connected us to them, allowing us to fall into the void alone, we cry out in pain and terror.

And then we call out again, plaintively into the darkness: “Is there anyone out there? Anyone who cares?”

The apostle Paul admonishes us to stay connected. Not to cut that rope: “Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2, NRSV). “Don’t cut that rope!” he says. Stay connected! You need each other.

This is so important for us, especially as Christians, that in other places the apostle likens us to a single body—all parts of one being that needs all its limbs and organs to function properly. We are all “one body in Christ, and individually members of one another,” he says in Romans 12:5 (NKJV). And in 1 Corinthians 12, he elaborates further on this principle:

“For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free--and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For in fact the body is not one member but many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body,’ is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body,’ is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling?” (1 Corinthians 12:12-17, NKJV).

Do you see here, why it is so important for us as Christians to be a part of the body of Christ—to be a part of the church? It is our lifeline of connection to other Christians. But more than that, it is our very blood line. A hand severed from the body soon ceases to have any life or function, and unless it can be quickly reattached by skillful surgeons, it will never be useful to the body—or to itself—again.

We were created to have a strong bond of connection with other human beings. Do you remember the story we shared last week, from the Garden of Eden? How God created Adam first and allowed him to take the better part of the sixth day of creation week to look around the garden in search of a partner suitable for himself? How God let that sense of anticipation build up in Adam’s heart over and over again, as he brought different creatures by to be inspected and named?

Over and over Adam’s hopes for someone he could “connect” with must have been built up and then dashed as he discovered that elephants couldn’t talk with him. Birds could sing, but not in his language. Even the chimps and gorillas and the cute little kitty cats and puppies were not suitable for fulfilling that aching void that cried out for human companionship.

Only other human beings can fill the need that God has created in our hearts for connectedness.

But how do you make that connection?

We live in a world where traditional forms of relationship have faded into the background. In years gone by we formed natural connections with our neighbors because we spent so much time around them. But nowadays most of us don’t even know the names of the people two doors down from us. We’re lucky if we have more than a waving relationship with the people right next door.

We tend to look elsewhere for connections. Maybe in the workplace. But few people spend their whole lives working in one place—so long-term relationships don’t form easily on the job either. Where to look for lasting friendships then?

Well, there’s the tavern down the street. If you’re into watching reruns of Cheers on TV, you may believe that’s the place to find enduring relationships. It seldom works that way in real life, though.

No, the best place to make good, firm, meaningful connections is not the office, not the tavern, and often not the neighborhood anymore. There’s someplace better. It’s called the body of Christ. It’s called the church.

Now, admittedly not every church lives up to the full expectations of the founder Jesus Christ, who described the way relationships should go on in His body this way: “ ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ ” (John 13:34-35, NRSV).

But that’s the goal of the church. That’s the ideal we strive for. And if you’ve encountered a church where that hasn’t been the attitude of the believers toward one another, that’s a tragedy. I know I’ve met many people through the years who have become disillusioned with the church because of the way the members treated each other.

Perfect love and connectedness between people is not easy to achieve, but it can be done. Could it be that the church just needs someone to come along and set them a better example—maybe someone like you?

It’s not always easy to achieve—but Jesus’ beloved disciple John, in his first epistle, tells us just how to go about it. Listen to this one simple verse: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7, NKJV).

Do you see how many secrets for successful Christian fellowship John has given us here?

If we walk in the light: This is so important for churches, for Christians, for followers of Jesus. To live in the light. To be constantly searching the word of God for the kind of light that will brighten our path. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path,” the Psalmist says (Psalm 119: 105).

We have fellowship with one another: If we are walking in the light along with others who are seeking to stay in the light, we will have fellowship with likeminded friends. It’s when people start operating on their own agendas, marching to the beat of different drummers, following different sources of light, which the fellowship breaks down.

And the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin: How often has disharmony broken out in a church as the direct byproduct of sin in the camp—unconfessed and unforgiven sin? But God’s Word provides the solution to that problem as well, in the next two verses:

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8, 9, NKJV).

There is provision in Jesus, and in His sacrifice for us, for salvation from sin, and for creating and maintaining the kind of fellowship that we were designed for.

Friend, it’s easy to get to feeling that you are all alone in the world. To feel like your climbing partners have all cut you loose and let you plunge into the void to struggle for survival all alone. But that’s not the way it’s intended to be. You’re not intended to have to make it through life without a support group around you. The church is designed to be that support group—that fellowship connection—that body with many members working together toward a common goal.

If you haven’t yet found a group like that which you can be a part of, I urge you—don’t give up the search. Continue your study of God’s Word, continue to seek a group who walks in the light as Jesus Himself is in the light, and find that fellowship—that connection—that lifeline that God has created for you.

“My Faith Has Found a Resting Place”, T. Marshall Kelly, from For Your Encouragement CD.