Section 04 - Origins of Separation and Loneliness Part 1

Where two or three have been gathered together in my name there I am in their midst

We can have a certain amount of power by ourselves. But when we combine together, somehow it amplifies the presence of the Lord.

The same thing happened way in the Old Testament with the Israelites. We read in Leviticus it says,

Five of you will chase a hundred; and a hundred of you will put ten thousand to flight. Your enemies will fall before you by the sword.

You see the moment you increase the number, it doesn't increase proportionately; it increases in a far greater measure.

And so at least two people coming together can accomplish far more for God than two individuals on their own. That is why from the beginning God created relationships, and the closest relationship of course is the male/female relationship.

We look back at the garden of Eden and see how Adam was there all on his own and he could only accomplish so much. Then God said,

"I'm going to give him somebody to help him so that he can do a lot better."

And so God made Eve and the two came together.

It is not God's order for us to function on our own. I know Paul does teach that sometimes it is better not to be married. That is because Paul probably was married to someone who was not with him in the ministry and she likely left him once he served the Lord. So for him it was better to get rid of that weight around his neck.

Certainly if your partner is not with you and flowing with you, according to God's order it can be a weight around your neck. But it is so much better if you can have someone that is with you.

And so I would like to share some principles in this section on how relationships are developed.

I want to show you some of the problems that occur in those relationships, what causes relationships to break, and what causes people to separate and end up living lives of loneliness.

All Levels Involved

Let me start by asking you, what is a true relationship? A true relationship is when two people join together in spirit, soul and body.

We know that God has created us to have three parts to our being. So we can have two people coming together, each of them having a spirit, a soul and a body.

Example - Spirit, Soul and Body:

The ultimate relationship is when two people come together and form a unity and interaction in all three parts of their being.

That ultimate relationship of course is only fulfilled in the marriage relationship between a man and a woman. But other relationships can form at some of the more superficial levels.

For example any two believers can form a relationship in the spirit. They can become united together spiritually. I am going to explain shortly how that works.

Any two human beings can also come together and form a relationship in the soul. The full relationship between a man and a woman involves spirit, soul and body. But yet there is even a degree of physical affiliation between two people.

All three parts of our being are always involved when we develop relationships. That means that any problems that are going to occur in the relationship will take place when there is something that is blocking a spiritual unity.

It will take place when there are things that are blocking a unity of souls, and when there are things that are blocking a physical unity.

So I am going to look at all three of these areas now as we consider what makes for a good relationship and what prevents a good relationship from forming.

Spiritual Unity

I want to start with the spirit. The human spirit has several functions in it, one of which is a function that we call communion. Communion is the ability of a human spirit to interact with another human spirit.

In the Scriptures the word communion is often translated as communion or fellowship. It is an interaction that takes place.

When we meet other people, the communion function of our spirits allows us to spiritually reach out and touch them. It works at a level that is even below the conscious, but our spirits combine together and we reach out and touch other people.

Fellowship Not Automatic

Man is a social creature. We are designed to interact and fellowship with others. But we are not animals. You know we have an expression that goes,

Birds of a feather flock together.

That is because we know that animals of a certain species are automatically attracted to each other and drawn to one another. God has made it that way.

But as human beings we are not just animals. We have a lot of what the animals have but we have far more. Animals don't have a spirit. They have an instinct built into them which causes that to take place.

For human beings there is no automatic birds of a feather flock together. Yes there is to a degree. When it comes to our physical side we tend to associate with people of the same race, the same stature and education.

There are a lot of things like that that can bring us together, but nothing is automatic. It is something that is developed over time.

So relationships don't take place automatically in human beings like they do in animals. Animals just follow their instinct and relationships are developed.

In human beings nothing is automatic. We have to make an effort, and we have to use firstly that function of the human spirit to begin to interact with and develop a relationship with people.

Affected by Life Experiences

Here is the problem that can occur. Although the communion in our spirits is in its purest form when we are first born and when we grow up in innocence, it gets affected during life.

Have you noticed that kids can get together and just have fun? They can interact without any problems. They don't look down on one another and say,

"I don't want to play with you."

That develops over time. You put a bunch of babies together and they will play together. They will love one another and interact because their communion is untainted.

They automatically reach out to one another and touch one another. But life's experiences begin to cause a corruption to take place that affects that natural function of the human spirit.

Bad experiences in life and pressures that come upon us from the world system cause us to withdraw and to not easily open our hearts to others.

We find it difficult now just to open heartedly accept people and to interact with them; to open our spirits wide and to reach out and touch them.

Parental and Religious Programing

Next we become programed by the things that we are taught. You are told by your parents,

"Don't play with those other kids because they are not of our social stature. They are a different race and we don't want you to be involved with them."

Whatever the case may be we become programed to close our hearts to others.

The worst kind of programing of all is religious programing. This is where we grow up with religious mindsets. I am afraid that this is so prevalent especially in the body of Christ.

If you grow up in a Christian home as I did, you are taught that the world is evil and that unbelievers are of the evil one. You are taught that you should not be having worldly friends. and that you should not be associating with worldly people or getting into their worldly practices.

You are not allowed to have close friends that are unbelievers, because light cannot mix with darkness. There is an element of truth there and the Scripture says,

Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world.

However because of this religious thinking believers become social dropouts. They are incapable of mixing with anybody in the world. They can only mix with people in Sunday school or at church because they are the only ones they are allowed to mix with.

The communion function has become warped, and their understanding of the love of God has become warped.

Love vs. Hate

Do you know how many people know that Scripture I just shared with you about not loving the world?

The Word says that he who loves the world is an enemy of God. I really had this one programed into me. But we also forget what John 3:16 says,

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son..

You might say, "Hang on God, did you not know what John wrote in His epistles about loving the world? Didn't you read it, God?

Jesus had fellowship with unbelievers all the time. He went to their homes, ate and drank with them and had fellowship with them.

You see we have to know the difference between the love of God and the hatred of evil. Unfortunately in this world we mix with people whom God loves, but also people who are influenced and driven by demonic forces that God hates.

We have to learn what to love and what to hate. But we often do according to the old proverb which says that you throw the baby out with the bath water.

We can't separate the two. Instead of learning to love the person and hating the evil that is in them, just to be safe we cut ourselves off from them completely and say,

"I will have nothing to do with you."

But God loved that person and paid the supreme price for their salvation. And we are going to have to learn to take our religious glasses off and get rid of that religious mindset.

Learning to Love Everyone

We need to see that God loves the evil ones out there, even the ones who are committing atrocities and that are as evil as can be.

God loves every one of those individuals. And until we can learn to see through the evil and love the person, we will never develop a relationship with anybody.

How can we, because we all have evil in us, even us as believers? We then start setting a standard by which we are going to associate with people.

It is okay if they come up to our religious standard; if they believe the way we believe and think the way we think.

Do you wonder why you are sitting at home lonely? You have no friends and you have no partner. You are single and you say,

"When is God going to give me the right person?"

You see we have developed no relationships in life at all. And Satan wants to make sure that we stay that way, because he knows that on our own we are not going to be as powerful for God as we will be combined with somebody else.

So Satan is going to go out of his way to make people ugly. He is going to make people unlovable so that we want to get away from them. We don't want to come near them and we only see the evil in them.

You may be extremely sensitive in the spirit to evil. If you are like that, when you come into the presence of someone and sense that evil, the first thing you want to do is get out of there.

But you know what? We have become little loners, sitting all on our own in our smug super-spirituality. Then we say,

"I don't under it. Why don't I have any friends?"

Learning to See Things Differently

You know I grew up in a Christian home and I was taught that we must avoid the world.

I grew up in Sunday school and in church, but at school there were no believers. My associates in the class were all unbelievers. I use the term associates because I didn't have any friends.

I never allowed myself to be friends with them because they were evil. They told bad jokes, used bad language and did sinful things that I was not allowed to do. How could I associate with them and mix with them?

Then we rise up, our knowledge of the Lord increases and it gets even worse. Because now we start to separate ourselves not only from the world but even from believers who don't come up to our level of spirituality.

We take the Pharisaical approach and say,

"We the Pharisees are set apart. We are above all of you. We are the leaders and the law keepers. You miserable bunch of sinful peasants, we won't associate with you. You are too far below us."

We look down on them and begin to judge them. We see all of their faults and their failures. And when we meet a person, we do the same and just see everything that is wrong with them.

Well Jesus was different. He didn't condemn them at all. He saw the good in them and He reached out to them. Even though He could have done so, He didn't set Himself up as the ultimate standard of perfection. He didn't put Himself on a pinnacle.

For a start He humbled Himself just to become a man. And He humbled Himself just to work amongst all the prostitutes, publicans and sinners. They were all the people who were avoided by the religious folks.

No Judging Others

Do you know what the biggest thing is that breaks relationships? It is judging other people and setting yourself up as a standard over them. It is seeing the bad instead of the good.

You might say to me,

"But you know it is not only Christians that do that."

No it is not, but Satan is not going to wait for you to become a Christian before he tries to stop you having happiness in relationships.

You just go into the work place and see what happens when the supervisor walks out. You will see what all the staff say about her behind her back. Just try and speak about somebody when they are not there and you will find all the negatives.

You say, "That is human nature."

Yes it is, but it is also Satanic influence in this world. Satan does not want human beings who are created by God to walk in blessing, to fellowship together and to get to know Him. He doesn't want them to enter into that joy.

Satan does not want good relationships to develop even in unbelievers. Because if those unbelievers should become Christians, he knows he is in trouble.

Satan hates humanity. He hates Adam, because Adam took over what was rightfully his. The enemy is against relationships of any kind that could produce happiness.

This whole judgmental thing is something you have had all your life, even before you became a Christian. You just started to use an excuse now.

You started to justify your judgmental attitude, because now you have become a believer. You are not living in sin anymore. And now you are walking in a form of righteousness and you know the Word better.

If we want relationships we had better learn to start seeing the good in people. Yes we are going to see the bad, and we are not going to ignore it and pretend it is not there. We are going to try and displace it, but let's first look for the good.

It is so hard sometime isn't it? There is just so much bad around that you really have to dig and scratch to find the good. But you know what? There was enough good in humanity for Jesus to die on the cross for each one of us.

So here is the first origin of separation and loneliness. It is judgmental attitudes and a judgmental spirit. And we are without excuse.

We want to complain and bewail our woes in life because we don't have any friends and we don't have any relationships with others. But go and look at your beam first.

Go and look in the mirror and you will probably see the main cause of why you do not have relationships with other people. All of these things have affected the function of communion. They have made it so that we won't open our hearts.

People say, "I can't open my heart. I may pick up something evil."

No, you only pick up something evil when you open your heart to need. And a need relationship as I will share in the next chapter is not a healthy relationship.

We are there to pour into other people. And unless we are prepared to be transparent with them, open our hearts wide and be real, we are not going to develop any relationships.

Purchase This Book

Post A Review For This Book