Audio Transcript

We’ve addressed the challenges of being a Christian loner in APJ 109 and APJ 212. A lot of helpful counsel can be found in that pair of episodes: APJs 109 and 212. A listener named Brian heard them, and he writes in to us with a question that complements what has been addressed previously in those two episodes. Brian writes this: “Hello, Pastor John. What would you say is the difference between being a loner who is a Christian and a loner who fails to ‘love the brothers’ as John puts it in 1 John 3:14? Is that the same thing? Is being a loner the same thing as being an unloving person? How would you work through this, Pastor John?”

Well, as often, let’s start with a definition. We can’t talk about what we don’t know what we’re talking about. So, here’s my definition — I’m just going to choose one — of loner. A loner is a person who is quite comfortable being alone. He’s comfortable reading a book in the evening with nobody else in the apartment. He’s comfortable spending time on his woodworking in the garage with nobody else around. She’s comfortable working in the kitchen, or on her handiwork, or hiking in the mountains without any friends around.

That’s what I mean by loner. Whether because of genetics, or upbringing, or experiences later in life, a person now finds himself or herself to be quite comfortable being alone. So, the question is, Does being a loner mean that you are a person lacking in love for other people?

Our Innate Personalities

For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that human beings are by nature so different from one another, and what they’re prone to do, what their bent is, is so various because of their innate personality. I’ve been fascinated with what moral significance this has since it seems to be so rooted in our personality and doesn’t seem to change, essentially, when we become Christians.

Let me give an illustration from the Bible of what I mean and how this fascinates me. In Romans 12:6–8, Paul gives some instructions about using your spiritual gifts, and it’s an unusual list. Let me just give you the three unusual ones that provoke me, and fascinate me, and set me to pondering about being a loner. He says, “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: . . . if service, in our serving; . . . the one who contributes, in generosity; . . . the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness” (Romans 12:6, 8).

Service, giving, mercy. Now, what’s surprising about calling those spiritual gifts is that all Christians are supposed to serve, all Christians are supposed to give, and all Christians are supposed to be merciful. So what is Paul saying? I take Paul to mean that even though these three traits should characterize every Christian, nevertheless, some people are inclined to them in an unusual way. It’s just what they’re like; that’s what they do — it’s just part of them. Service — they’re just given to it. And the same with giving and mercy.

So, here’s the inference that I draw: there are real differences between human beings, including Christians, in how naturally, or how readily, dispositionally, we are given to, or not given to, behaviors that are real Christian duties for everybody.

“You could be more of a loner, or you could be more sociable, and in either case not necessarily be sinning.”

This fact that we are less given to certain good things is not necessarily sinful. It doesn’t mean we’re sinful — that we’re committing sin when we don’t do those good things to the same degree, or with the same intensity, with which other people do them. You could be more of a loner, or you could be more gregarious, or more sociable, and in either case not necessarily be sinning. That’s what I infer.

Truth from Various Angles

When I ask myself why God designed the world that way, there’s an interesting part of the answer in the way Jesus spoke about himself and John the Baptist. Here’s what he said:

To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.” (Luke 7:31–32)

Then he explains in Luke 7:33–35,

For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a demon.” The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is justified by all her children.

So, here’s the point: this is an unbelieving generation, and God has exposed their hardheartedness by showing them that whether a person like John or a person like Jesus speaks to them, they still won’t believe.

John is one kind of person — a real loner, not a party person at all, likes the wilderness — and he spoke the truth, and you didn’t like it. You didn’t like the way he said it. Then Jesus comes along, and he’s very different from John. He comes eating and drinking, he’s sociable, gregarious, attending parties, and you don’t like the way he speaks about it either, which in God’s wisdom shows you can’t blame your unbelief on the speaker.

God’s wisdom is seen in sending all kinds of different people into your life in order to show that your rejection of them is really owing to your rejection of the message, not the messenger, because he has sent so many different kinds of personalities to you. You won’t have the message no matter what kind of personality brings it.

So, I’m inferring that one of the reasons God has designed the world with loners and gregarious types, among many others, is to make sure the world hears the truth from different vessels, different voices, different forms, different personalities to make clear what the real issue is.

Loving and Unloving Loners

So, my answer to the question of whether being a loner means being unloving is this: not necessarily. And I would say exactly the same thing about being a mingler or a gregarious or sociable person. Is that person loving? Not necessarily. People can need people for self-centered reasons, and people can love solitude for self-centered reasons.

So, the question then finally is, What makes the difference between a loner who is self-centered and a loner who is loving? I would just say two things.

Resisting Fear and Indifference

The loving loner seeks to purge himself of every form of fear of other people and every form of indifference to the good of other people. Everywhere he sees the motive of fear, he seeks to put it to death by the Spirit (Romans 8:13). Everywhere he sees indifference in his heart toward the good of other people, he seeks to put it to death by the Spirit, trusting God’s promises. He trusts the promise that God will take care of him — God will help him. He doesn’t need to be governed by any sinful motives like fear of man or indifference to people’s good.

“The loving loner seeks with all his might to make his loner personality a means of love.”

One of the ways that we detect and put to death sinful dimensions of our personality like that is by regularly stretching our comfort zone and acting contrary to our natural bent. Now, I don’t mean that we cease to be who we are or that we constantly live against the grain of being a loner or being gregarious, but I do mean that we test ourselves from time to time as to whether we are merely justifying a sinful behavior by a natural inclination. That’s the first test of how we know we’re a loving loner or a selfish loner.

Leveraging Aloneness for Love

Here’s the second thing: What distinguishes a self-centered loner from a loving loner is that the loving loner recognizes his natural inclinations, and instead of trying to totally be a person that he’s not, he seeks with all his might — and by means of all prayer, and faith, and creativity — to make his loner personality a means of love.

If he likes being in the garage doing woodworking all by himself, then let him dream and pray and work toward ways of turning his lonely woodworking into a ministry for the good of others. If she likes rummaging through historical archives in the library all by herself, let her dream of turning her lonely research into a ministry for the good of others. In other words, you don’t have to be paralyzed by the hopelessness of becoming a non-loner in order to be loving. You just have to really care about turning your loner bent into love.

One of the reasons to read the Old Testament is so you can be shocked at the right times when reading the New Testament. Philippians 2, for example, is a wonderful, glorious passage — but it becomes a shocking passage when read in light of Isaiah 45.

Isaiah 45 records the prophet’s oracle concerning Cyrus, king of Persia. Despite being a pagan ruler, Cyrus is the Lord’s anointed, his christ with a lowercase c (Isaiah 45:1). Though Cyrus does not know Yahweh (God’s personal name, Exodus 3:14), Yahweh knows Cyrus, names Cyrus, calls Cyrus, and equips Cyrus to fulfill God’s purposes by restoring the fortunes of Israel following their exile to Babylon (Isaiah 45:4–5). And Yahweh acts in this way so that all people will know that “I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God” (Isaiah 45:5–6).

“One of the reasons to read the Old Testament is so that you can be shocked when reading the New Testament.”

In fact, the uniqueness of the Lord becomes the dominant theme in the oracle of Isaiah 45. Again and again, Yahweh asserts his unique divine prerogatives. He alone is the Creator God. He forms light and creates darkness (Isaiah 45:7). He sends showers to the earth and causes plants to grow (Isaiah 45:8). He is the potter who forms the clay and the father who makes all mankind (Isaiah 45:9).

God Over All

Isaiah draws our attention back to Genesis 1:

Thus says the Lord,who created the heavens     (he is God!),who formed the earth and made it      (he established it;he did not create it empty,     he formed it to be inhabited!). (Isaiah 45:18)

Not only did he alone create the world, but he alone governs it from beginning to end.

Thus says the Lord,     the Holy One of Israel, and the one who formed him [Cyrus]:“Ask me of things to come;     will you command me concerning my children and the work of my hands?I made the earth     and created man on it;it was my hands that stretched out the heavens,     and I commanded all their host.” (Isaiah 45:11–12)

And not only is Yahweh alone the Creator God; he alone is “a righteous God and a Savior” (Isaiah 45:21). Yahweh is distinct from all the gods of the nations, since the pagans “carry about their wooden idols and keep on praying to a god that cannot save” (Isaiah 45:20). Yet even the nations will one day recognize the futility of their idols and acknowledge the God of Israel (Isaiah 45:14).

There Is No Other

Again and again in this chapter, the Lord, through his prophet, shouts that he alone is God. Hear the trumpet blast of God’s absolute uniqueness sound seven times in this one chapter.

Verse 5: “I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God.”
Verse 6: “There is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other.”
Verse 14: “They will plead with you, saying: ‘Surely God is in you, and there is no other, no god besides him.’”
Verse 18: “I am the Lord, and there is no other.”
Verse 21: “Was it not I, the Lord? And there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me.”
Verse 22: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.”
Verse 24: “Only in the Lord, it shall be said of me, are righteousness and strength.”

And that is why it is no surprise in this passage when Yahweh declares,

By myself I have sworn;     from my mouth has gone out in righteousness     a word that shall not return:“To me every knee shall bow,     every tongue shall swear allegiance.” (Isaiah 45:23)

As the only supreme God, he has no one greater by whom he can swear (Hebrews 6:13), and his sure and certain word establishes that all shall bow to him and him alone. Every tongue will confess that Yahweh is Lord.

One Shocking Name

But what is not surprising in Isaiah 45 becomes unbelievably shocking in Philippians 2. Like Isaiah, Paul is celebrating the anointed of the Lord, Christ Jesus himself. Whereas Cyrus did not know the Lord, Jesus does, and his humility and obedience is the model for our own. Jesus humbled himself, and his obedience extended all the way to death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6–9).

And then the turn. Because of his humility and his obedience, God has highly exalted him. He has given him the supreme name in the cosmos. And what does this exaltation and name-giving mean? It means that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11).

“Jesus, the man from Nazareth, is not just a great prophet or the anointed king. He is Lord, the Lord, Yahweh himself.”

Paul knows what he is doing. He knows that this fundamental Christian confession — Jesus Christ is Lord — does not merely declare him to be a human ruler like Herod or Caesar. He knows that he is echoing the words of Isaiah in that great monotheistic chapter. The chapter that rang with “there is no other god” is now shockingly, surprisingly, incredibly redeployed to declare that Jesus, the man from Nazareth, is not just a great prophet or the anointed king. He is Lord, the Lord, Yahweh himself, come in the flesh to rescue and redeem, to suffer and to save.

Yes, Paul knows what he is doing. And he knows that he’s not the first to do so.

Jesus Is Lord

The shepherds heard it first, declared by angel tongues on the night of Jesus’s birth. The good news of great joy for all people shockingly brought together Isaiah’s words in a simple sentence. “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). Not merely the Lord’s Christ (like David or even Cyrus). This Christ is the Lord himself, now laying aside his divine privileges and emptying himself, humbling himself, taking on the form of a servant, and being born in the likeness of men.

Now when the ends of the earth turn to be saved, they don’t merely turn to the Creator God. They turn to the God-man from Nazareth, the boy from Bethlehem. Jesus is Lord, and there is no other. Jesus is Lord, and there is none like him.

My grandfather is no longer here for Christmas.

I scarcely remember one without him, and yet now his absence is becoming the new normal. We no longer gather in his living room to read Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth, sing “Joy to the World,” open presents together, or eat the Christmas dinner he prepared. His chair, once so full of fondness, infectious laughter, and gentlemanly repose, now sits silent, full of memories.

A new sensation now dines with me during my favorite time of year. As the dining table crowds with new faces, new grins, and new babies, nostalgias of past Christmases unfold in the background. Here, more than at any other place or time, days past and days present meet. Here I behold fresh holiday scenes with old eyes. So much is the same, and so much is different.

Loss has made me older.

I look around the table at the bright eyes of the children, and see a joy unburdened. The Christmas they have known is the same today. They can’t see what their parents see. They cannot detect the soft-glowing faces or hear the unspeaking voices. To them, chairs aren’t empty, they’re yet to be filled. They don’t know the ache in our celebration, the wounds that never fully heal.

I now know Christmas as my grandfather had for years — as a mixture of gladness and grief, gratitude and regret, Christmas now and Christmas then. I could not discern the others who dined with us around the table from another life ago — parents, friends, his beloved wife. I never realized his Christmases filled with more than just that single Christmas. I now see the unspoken dimension. I better understand that weathered smile, brimming fuller, yet sadder than once before.

Suffice it to say, Christmases these days aren’t quite the same.

Out with the Old?

With this new experience of Christmas with an empty chair, comes certain threats and temptations.

Jesus once warned about sewing a piece of new cloth onto an old garment; or putting new wine into old wineskins. The wineskins might burst, he taught; the cloth might tear. But here we are. In the mind of the man or woman who has lost, the new is patched with the old; new wine pours into old family wineskins.

Perhaps you can relate. The pressure of sitting and eating and singing where he or she once sat and ate and sang can tear at the heart. You may have lost more than a grandfather. The strain of grief you feel around the holidays nearly concusses. The spouse whose name inscribed upon the ornament is no longer here. One stocking is missing. The beloved child you watched run down the stairs Christmas morning has not made it down for some years now. Christmas, this side of heaven, will never be the same.

I do not pretend to know such depths of despair. But I do know twin temptations that greet those of us who have lost someone. I hope that naming them might help you this Christmas.

Past Swallows Present

The first temptation is to the variety of grief that kidnaps us from life today. This bottomless ache comes when we begin to stare and stare at the empty chair. The grief overwhelms all gladness; the past swallows the present. The good that arrives is not the good that once was, so all current cause for happiness becomes spoiled or forgotten.

This is to step beyond the healthy grief and remembrance of our losses. It poisons the heart by entertaining the question the wise man bids us not to: “Say not,” he warns, “‘Why were the former days better than these?” For, he continues, “it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). This grief poisons the what is with the what used to be. It hinders the ability to go on.

Grief threatens to lock us in dark cellars of the past, keeping us from enjoying the child playing on the floor or the new faces around the table.

Over-the-Shoulder Guilt

Second is the temptation to bow to the over-the-shoulder guilt bearing down on us. Lewis captures this in A Grief Observed:

There’s no denying that in some sense I “feel better,” and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness. (53)

“The empty chair can threaten to overwhelm all joy in this Christmas or shame us for feeling any joy this Christmas.”

This temptation sees the empty chair frowning at us. “Why aren’t you sadder? How can Christmas still be merry? Didn’t you love him?” The memory, not remaining in its proper place, looms over our shoulder, patrolling our happiness in the present. This shame is a sickness that tempts us to hate wellness.

So, the empty chair can threaten to overwhelm all joy in this Christmas or shame us for feeling any joy this Christmas — both must be resisted.

Melt the Clouds of Sadness

So what do we do? There the empty chair sits.

Fighting both temptations, I need to remind myself: Christmas is not about family around a dinner table, but about Jesus. And Jesus has promised that for his people — for my grandfather — to be absent from the Christmas table is to be present with him.

I ask myself, Should I wish my grandfather back? Would I, if it stood within my power, recall him from that feast, reunite his soul with his ailing body — reclaim him to sickness, loneliness, sin — summon him from the heaven of Christ himself to a shadowy celebration of Christ on earth?

Somedays I half-consider it.

But I know that if I could speak to him now, he wishes me there. The empty chair heaven longs to see filled is not around our Christmas dinner, but the empty chairs still surrounding Christ. Our places are set already. Better life, real life, true life, lasting life lies in that world. That empty chair of our loved ones departed is not merely a reminder of loss, but a pointer to coming gain.

“That empty chair of our loved ones departed is not merely a reminder of loss, but a pointer to coming gain.”

This place of shadows and darkness, sin and Satan, grief and death, is no place yet for that Happy Reunion. The dull Christmas stab reminds me that life is not what it should be, but it can also remind me life is not what it will soon be for all who believe.

Jesus will come in a Second Advent. He will make all things new. Christmases with empty chairs are numbered; these too shall soon pass. And the greatest chair that shall be occupied, the one that shall restore all things, and bring real joy to the world, is Jesus Christ, the baby once born in Bethlehem, now King that rules the universe. He shall sit and eat with us at his eternal supper of the Lamb.

And until then, while we travel through Christmases present and future, I pray for myself and for you,

Melt the clouds of sin and sadness;Drive the dark of doubt away;Giver of immortal gladness,Fill us with the light of day!