THE JOY OF BEING ALONE

"When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force to make him a king, be departed again into a mountain himself alone" (John 6:15).

The gospels frequently tell us of Christ's going into solitude for prayer. Luke mentioned Christ's praying eleven times. Mark tells us in his very first chapter, that after a busy evening of healing many people, "in the morning rising up a great while before day, He went out, and departed into a solitary place and there prayed" (Mark 1:35). Before He chose His twelve apostles "He went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God" (Luke 6:12). This thought of complete retreat from others appears to have deeply impressed the disciples. John uses the significant expression, "He departed into a mountain Himself alone." Matthew also had written, "He went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, He was there alone" (Matthew 4:23). The man Christ Jesus felt the need for perfect solitude. Let us humbly seek to find out what this means.

Alone (Like Jesus)

Jesus went entirely by Himself, alone with Himself. Relationships with people can draw us away from ourselves and exhaust our energies. The man Christ Jesus knew this and felt the need to come apart by Himself. He needed to renew the consciousness of who He was and to realize His high destiny, His human weakness, and His entire dependence on the Father.

How much more does the child of God need to come apart by himself? It may be for the maintenance of our own Christian life, or the renewal of our power to influence men for God, but whatever the reason, there is an urgent call to every believer to follow in His Master's steps. We must find the place and the time where we can indeed be alone with God.

Alone With Spiritual Realities

When we withdraw completely from contact with temporal things, we are free to yield ourselves to the powers of the unseen world. Jesus needed quiet time to realize the power of the kingdom of darkness with which He had come to contend and to conquer. He needed a fresh awareness of the needs of this great world of mankind, which He had come to save. He needed to be reminded of the presence and the power of the Father whose will He had come to do. It is essential for a person in Christian service to set himself apart to think intensely on the spiritual realities with which he is so familiar, yet which often exercise so little power on his heart and life.

The truths of eternity have an infinite power. They are often powerless because we do not give them time to reveal themselves. Taking time to be alone with God is the only remedy.

Alone With The Father

It is sometimes said that work is worship, that service is fellowship. If ever there were a man who could dispense with special seasons for solitude and fellowship, it was our blessed Lord. But he could not do His work or maintain His fellow. ship in full power without His quiet time. As a man, He felt the need to bring all His work, past and future, and present it before the Father. He needed to renew His sense of absolute dependence on the Father's power and His absolute confidence in the Father's love in seasons of special fellowship. When He said: "The Son can do nothing of Himself," "as I hear so I speak," He was but expressing the simple truth of His relationship to God. It was this relationship that made His going apart a necessity and an unspeakable joy.

Every servant of His should understand and practice this blessed art of coming apart with God. The Church should train its children to exercise this high and holy privilege. Every believer may and must have his time when he is alone with God. It is a blessed experience to have God all alone to Himself.

Alone With The Word And Prayer

Jesus had to learn God's Word as a child. During the long years of His life in Nazareth, He fed on that Word and made it His own. In His solitude, He conferred with the Father on all the Word spoke of Him, on all the will of God it revealed for Him to do.

One of the deepest lessons a Christian has to learn is that the Word without the living God is of little value. The blessing of the Word comes when it brings us to the living God. The Word that we get from the mouth of God brings the power to know it and to do it. Let us learn this lesson: personal fellowship with God alone in secret can make the Word alive and powerful.

Prayer allows a person to lay open his whole life to God and to ask for His teaching and His strength. Just try for a moment to think what prayer meant to Jesus, what adoring worship, what humble love, what childlike pleading for all He needed. This must make us realize the joy that awaits the person who knows how to follow in Christ's steps. God can do great things through the one who makes being alone with God his chief joy in life.

"Himself alone" —these words reveal to us the secret of the life of Christ on earth and of the life that He now lives in us. One of the most blessed elements of our life in the Holy Spirit is that He reveals and imparts to us all that it means to be Himself alone.