I had an interesting conversation with a friend who was struggling to connect with people at church. My heart hurt for them in that moment because I’ve heard that many times and, unfortunately, experienced it myself.
We are created to live connected. God created mankind to be in relationship, first with Himself, and then with others. When God put Adam in the garden, He first put him there alone, as if to say, “You need Me first” before any other relationship. Later, He brought Eve to Adam. Together, they were to live in fellowship with God in the garden as they tended it.
The story unfolds in an unfortunate way for all of us when they both choose to disconnect from their Father—and from one another.
And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Genesis 3:8-13 (ESV)
Our present-day
Adam and Eve’s disconnection from God, their Father and Creator, echoes into our present-day reality. We deeply desire to belong to a community, yet we also tend to quickly believe God cannot be trusted. The consequences of that conflict can be disastrous.
We would never admit to doubting God (or maybe we would), but our actions often betray the conflict within us. If we truly trust God, then why do we struggle with:
Doubt when life goes sideways.
Anger when we don’t understand.
Declaring the Christian life to be unfair when the world prospers.
Satan’s tactics are not new in our modern world. He whispers doubt in our ears about God’s faithfulness, and we, like those from generations before us, easily slip into that deception because we are searching for a logical explanation.
Risking it all
Who we connect to will greatly influence the outcome of our lives. How can we handle the longing for connection when true relationships seem scarce?
It’s essential that we nurture our closeness with God, our Source, Father, and Friend. He is the relationship we need first. When that relationship is strong, we aren’t asking other people to fill a place in us they were never created to fill.
If our need for friendship overrides our need for Him, we are risking it all. We can find ourselves moving backward spiritually instead of forward, looking to people to provide what can only be found in God.
It’s a good time to ask, in light of this, where are you?
John on Patmos
In my morning devotional reading today, I started reading Revelation. John wrote this book while exiled to the island of Patmos because of his faith in Jesus. I imagine he longed for friends and connection. This John, who had walked with Jesus, seen His miracles, and ministered with Him to multitudes, found himself alone, isolated on an island.
And it was in this place of isolation that John met with God and received extraordinary visions of things yet to come. I wonder whether the loneliness of Patmos drew him even closer to God. Whatever John felt in that place, it is significant that in the first chapter of Revelation he penned these words:
I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
Revelation 1:9 (ESV)
John was writing to the seven churches in Asia. Before offering his counsel and warnings to these churches, as well as the revelations that followed, he called himself their partner. Despite the successes and failures he would later highlight, he identified himself with them as one sharing in the labor of the Kingdom.
Here, the word translated as partner is Sugkoinonos (συγκινωνός). This compound word combines the prefix syn (“together with”) and koinonos. It means a co-partner or fellow partaker who shares deeply in another person’s burdens, grace, or mission.
John identifies three areas in which he was their partner:
- Tribulation, which is what Jesus foretold in John 16:33 (ESV): “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” Paul also expresses appreciation for others partnering with him in his troubles in Philippians 4:14. This tells me that true partners aren’t only those who share the pleasant parts of life with us. They are those who will share our troubles, particularly the difficulties that come because of our faith.
- The Kingdom, in 2 Timothy 2:12 (ESV), Paul states that “if we endure, we will also reign with him;” Those who are worthy partners in this life are those who are willing to endure for the sake of God’s Kingdom. Our connection isn’t based only on what we share here and now. We are headed toward the same Kingdom.
- Patient endurance is required and reiterated in Revelation 3:10 (ESV): “Because you have kept my word about patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on the earth.” Anyone can be patient for a moment. It takes pairing endurance with patience to be marked with faithfulness. And those who we partner with, who we connect with deeply, should be marked by patient endurance.
Where are you?
Why such a strong warning about those we connect with, or partner with, in life? Because who we do life with will influence who we become. If we connect deeply with anyone just because we crave connection, without first looking at the fruit of their lives, whether they are faithful, patient, and working for the Kingdom, we risk allowing those relationships to affect our relationship with God.
So, where are you in your relationship with God?
Not really alone
John, whom we think was alone as he penned the words of Revelation 1:9, wasn’t really alone, was he? When writing Revelation, John was living in another revelation he had received long before Patmos: his relationship with Jesus supplied the connection he needed to sustain him. He had seen enough in his lifetime to understand something Jesus Himself lived:
But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people 25 and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.
John 2:24-25 (ESV)
Jesus lived in the world and loved the people in it, but He didn’t depend on people for what He received from His Father. He understood that people, even those who claimed to follow Him, were imperfect. His primary connection was with His Father.
John had learned this. On Patmos, separated from the people he loved and the churches he served, he could connect so deeply with God that isolation didn’t have to mean disconnection.
Scripture gives us other examples of people whose relationship with God defined their lives:
- Enoch, who walked so closely with God that one day, God just took him home (Genesis 5:24).
- Elijah was taken to heaven in a whirlwind, bypassing the need for a funeral (2 Kings 2:11).
- Paul, the apostle who authored most of the New Testament, spent his life giving himself for the Kingdom of God, eventually laying it down for the sake of the Gospel.
On our way, passing through
No, we’re not alone on this Kingdom journey that takes us places that can seem barren. But if we, like John and others, can learn the lesson that God is enough, we can live in the reality that our lives here are temporary. We are seeking a city whose Builder and Maker is God. We’re on our way, just passing through.
Scripture reminds us that those who went before us had opportunities to turn back. They could have returned to what they had left behind, but their eyes were fixed on another homeland. We face that choice too. Without connecting first and foremost with God, we may find ourselves looking backward for something to satisfy us. That’s a destination I don’t want to map myself to.
These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. 14 For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15 If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.
Hebrews 11:13-15 (ESV)
Instead of letting loneliness send us searching for connection wherever we can find it, perhaps we should first allow it to show us what might be happening spiritually. Are we filling that empty place with God, or are we searching for a substitute?
God is calling. Where are you?
Did you know?
According to early church tradition, Patmos wasn’t the end of John’s story. After Emperor Domitian’s reign ended in A.D. 96, John is traditionally believed to have returned to Ephesus, where he continued serving the church into old age. Church tradition also holds that, unlike the other apostles, John died a natural death.
Want to know what happened to the other disciples? Read more here.
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