Not Alone | Genesis 2:4-7, 18a)
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens. When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
…
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone;”
(Genesis 2:4–7, 18a ESV)
Introduction
If you are wondering about the tents in the parking lot, we do what we call a Ministry Fair in September so we can help engage people and connect everyone to what is going on here at Main Street as people begin to commit and land at churches for the year. We will share more about those later. Just last week we also started a new series that called “In Between,” about how God has given us this moment, here on this earth, for a reason. I am going to be taking us through Genesis this year and we are going to be looking at God’s Plan for us in this In Between moment as we read through Genesis. Even though we just started in Genesis 1:1 last week, Genesis 2 that we just read seemed like the right passage to pair with our Ministry Fair today. So, indulge me this morning while we skip ahead in a little bit in Genesis…we will come back next week to Genesis one where we started last week.
Now, I know in this room we have people who would identify as both introverts and extroverts and a range of ways that people that interact in between those two definitions. On the one extreme we tend to think of an extravert as someone who can’t imagine being alone, someone who draws energy from being around other people. On the other side we tend to think of someone who is an introvert as someone who longs to be alone and draws energy when they are away from others. Yet, what we usually mean in those definitions is something quite different from what being “alone” really means. Those definitions of introverted and extroverted seem to presume that being alone is only about having people around us versus not having people around us. However, I am sure every extravert in this room knows the feeling of being around a lot of people but still feeling alone. And I know as much as an introvert may want to have some time and space to think, thinking and processing is only helpful if you are not truly “alone” in life. Aloneness is not merely the presence or absence of people at any given moment. Aloneness speaks to something much deeper in our lives. A sense of belonging. A sense of connection. A sense of being cared for. A sense of being loved.
Every now and then there are sermons where I believe I can confidently say that everyone feels what the passage is talking about. Today is one of those sermons. I don’t believe there is a single person here who hasn’t, at one time or another, felt alone. Not just alone in the sense that there was nobody around, but alone in that sense I just mentioned—feeling unconnected, like you don’t belong, feeling uncared for and unloved. And those can be some of the darkest and most sorrowful moments of our life.
I’ve felt that way at times in my life. In the summer between my second and third grade I woke up one morning and I had a huge scab on my back of my head. I woke up, rubbed my head, and was shocked as my head hurt and my hand had blood on it. I ran to my parents who were, understandably, similarly worried. Did I hurt myself? I didn’t remember doing anything. They wondered if I had been sleepwalking and bumped into something and didn’t remember, but there didn’t seem to be any evidence of that in the house or my room. The blood seemed contained to my pillow and my bed. Clearly, this was a moment to go to the doctor.
It took many weeks and many other moments where my head broke out in scabs and the many other painful parts of the process before we figured out that I had a disease called “Tinea Capitus” or commonly called Kerion. It was a complication from another disease I had the year before called Cat Scratch Disease which weakened my immune system and then a ringworm infection I had gotten that spring from wearing too many headbands while I was playing tennis that had spread to my head unnoticed (I just wanted to be like Andre Agassi! I didn’t know how true that would become). I literally only have one photo from that season of my life because my parents didn’t want to keep any memories of it.
I eventually lost most of my hair. Part of the reason things got so bad for me is that this disease most often effects people of African descent. A white boy in Boise, Idaho in the 1980s was not immediately assumed to have this disease. Because it took so much time to figure out, what should have been a relatively easy treatment at first became quite complicated. As they treated me, I had open wounds on my head for months.
And as we all know, kids can be harsh. There was not much about that summer where I felt like I was accepted. I felt very alone. At that stage of life, I was used to swimming and playing tennis during the summers, but I wasn’t allowed to do either of those. Kids in my neighborhood and others would make fun of me. I even remember some parents who wouldn’t let their kids play at my house out of fear of their kid getting the disease even though there was no chance of me giving their kid this disease once they started treating me. It was one of the moments in my life where I acutely remember feeling alone. I felt like I did not belong. I was feeling uncared for, feeling unloved.
Not Alone
That type of experience is not unique to just me, and I am sure many of you have even more painful situations where you have felt alone. Many of you have had way worse illnesses—clearly I don’t still have that disease today and this is not a toupee. Most of my hair grew back. But it isn’t just physical illnesses that cause aloneness. Many of you have times of aloneness that have come about because of ethnicity, family dynamics, skillsets, personalities, or even just the clothes you wore. Often times our aloneness has nothing to do with anything physical but rather psychological or emotional aloneness. Aloneness really is a universal human experience.
At our core:
Everyone desperately wants to be known and loved.
Everyone deeply fears being known and not loved.
That is the dynamic that being alone feeds on. We find ourselves without connection in one way or another. Sometimes we are outright told someone doesn’t like something about us or we assume that our feeling of aloneness is because someone has seen something in us and has decided they don’t want to be around us. We then believe we are known and unloved. We are alone. That is a fear that all of us have felt, and we often try to find different ways fix, avoid, or ignore that feeling of being alone. And all of us can attest that it doesn’t always work. Many of us, even today, are walking around feeling alone.
The universal nature of feeling alone brings us to Genesis chapter two this morning. Right before this, in Genesis one, we have the first creation account where God tells us a high-level overview of all that he has done. The magnificent breadth of his creation from stars and galaxies to grasshoppers and daisies. We are going to look more at that in the next couple of weeks. After each amazing creative act we see the same phrase again and again in Genesis chapter one:
“And God saw that it was good.”
(Genesis 1:10b, 12b, 18b, 21b, 25b)
Five times God looks at his creation and he declares that what he was doing was good!
Day and Night. Waters separated from the earth. Good!
Plants with their rainbow of flowers and tress with their multitude of fruits. Good!
Stars and celestial bodies. The sun and the moon. Good!
Creatures in the sea and birds and bugs in the sky. Good!
Every type of walking creature on the land. Good!
And then, on the sixth day, God makes man and woman in his very image, and the writer of Genesis tells us:
“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”
(Genesis 1:31 ESV)
There is so much to talk about there in Genesis one the coming weeks. But here, in Genesis chapter two, we have God’s second creation account. This account zooms in on God’s creative act of making man and woman on the sixth day and his relationship with them. And we see that God started first by creating man before woman.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens. When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
(Genesis 2:4–7, ESV)
And after God places man in the garden and gives him some instructions, especially concerning the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, this is what God says to himself:
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone;”
(Genesis 2:18a ESV)
Not good. That is astounding! Here we are, reading along, reading again and again the phrase “And God saw that it was good.” And not just good, but very good (as God says after making man and woman). But here, God says something is not good. Something dynamic he created, some dynamic he allowed, was not good. That just floors me! How could anything God was doing, as he perfectly makes everything, before sin even enters the world, be not good?
I know many in the Christian church have been taught this passage so often that your first thought might simply be, “Well, this is about marriage. Adam needed a wife, so God made him Eve.” Yes, providing husbands with a wife and a wife with a husband is a specific way that God solves part of the problem of aloneness. Marriage is God’s path for solving parts of our aloneness for many people. But God didn’t say, “It isn’t good for a man to not have a wife.” He said:
“It is not good that man should be alone.”
There is something much more foundational, much more core to who we are that is at stake here. Husbands and wives can help solve the problem of aloneness and are often part of God’s solution to aloneness for many people. But especially in sin, husbands and wives don’t always solve this problem by themselves. Ask any married couple and they will likely tell you they have at times felt alone even in their marriage. Maybe especially in their marriage. No, something else is at stake here.
In Genesis two we trust that God is creating things rightly and there is no sin or brokenness involved in God’s creative process. That means our need for one another is actually a FEATURE and a PURPOSEFULLNESS in God’s creation of us, not a flaw. God WANTED us to have a need for one another. What was not good would be to leave the process unfinished. If God stopped with just man, one human, then it would not have been good. That purposeful hole that God had built into humans would forever remain unfilled if God didn’t provide other people. God is graciously bringing us into his thought process in Genesis chapter two as he works towards the end and to make things “very good.”
I worry that we often seem to think we can’t admit that we need one another. As though to admit that we need other people and not JUST God would be heretical. I don’t know about you, but I have heard people ask before, “Would you be happy if you were in the new heavens and on the new earth with just Jesus, and no other people were there?” We feel like the right answer to that question MUST BE yes. We would have God what else would we need?! It seems like it is a litmus test for Christians to prove they really love God more than anything to say that, yes, I would be happy with only God.
But that isn’t true in Genesis. And it isn’t true for you and I today. And it won’t be true in the future. God designed you and I to need one another. To not be alone. That is as true for us today as it was for Adam and it seems to me like it will continue to be true for us in the new earth. Everything God tells us about our future is beautiful BECAUSE we get him AND because of the multitude of people he has saved to bring himself glory. We will be with others. We won’t be alone.
Remember what we talked about just last week? When we looked at Genesis 1:1 we noticed that it said:
“In the beginning, God…”
(Genesis 1:1, ESV)
And when we looked at that, we then asked ourselves the question:
What if in all of this you get more of God?
Would that be worth it?
And last week we answered, YES! It is incredible and amazing that God would offer himself in relationship to us. God himself is what fills our deepest desires and our core needs. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need each other. In fact, according to Genesis 2, it isn’t good if we don’t have each other. God gives us himself to satisfy our deepest needs AND he designed us to need one another. It isn’t a problem to say those are both true! God designed it to be that way. And I think we get a glimpse of why it is this way when we look to the New Testament. To start with, hear what Jesus has to say in his high priestly prayer to the Father. Listen to Jesus’s prayer in John 17 for a moment:
I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.
(John 17:20–26 ESV)
In our relationship with one another we (and the world) begin to get a glimpse of the “oneness” that God experiences within the trinity as we have relationship with each other. That is what Jesus is saying here. He wants his disciples—from the disciples of his day up to today—to experience the same oneness that he experiences with the Father. One reason God has given us this hole, this need for one another in our lives, is because in relationship with one another we begin to see the very nature and glory of God THROUGH our relationships together.
And don’t miss that this must happen in the right order. We can’t simply make oneness occur with each other. First, we know God through Jesus. We find in Jesus the relationship with God that we were designed for and are brought back into life with God that satisfies our hearts. We see that God himself is for us and with us. We see passages like Deuteronomy 31 and Matthew 28 becoming true for us:
It is the LORD who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.
(Deuteronomy 31:8 ESV)
“And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.””
(Matthew 28:20 ESV)
In Jesus, God truly is with us as it was always meant to be for his image bearers. Then God inhabits us through his Holy Spirit and he does the work to connect us with one another. Then, and only then, can we begin to experience this type of oneness that models God’s own relationship within the trinity. We get to image for one another the same kind of presence that we experience with God with one another. What broke in sin, starting way back in the garden and rolling all the way through history to today, is that without God in our lives we cannot begin to live this way with one another. And in Jesus, God is reversing that reality so we can truly be for one another! So that we aren’t alone anymore!
But that isn’t the only reason God built this need for one another into us. In addition to Jesus’s prayer in John 17 God gives us other images of why he built in this need for one another.
1 Corinthians 12 God says that together we are meant to be a holy temple to God together:
“Do you not know that you (plural, y’all) are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you (plural, y’all)?”
(1 Corinthians 3:16 ESV)
Clearly the worship of God is magnified when we all, together, are praising him as his living, holy temple. Paul takes the analogy even further in Ephesians 2:19–22:
“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”
(Ephesians 2:19–22 ESV)
We aren’t just a temple, we are co-citizens, a family, AND a temple. God gets even more glory as we work together as his new kingdom people and family. And 1 Corinthians 12 even says that we are being made into the body of Christ:
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many.”
(1 Corinthians 12:12–14 ESV)
As the body of Christ we care for one another and model Christ to one another in our gifts and talents. We don’t have time today to jump in and unpack every image here and what God wants to do with our togetherness, but I want you to see that aloneness is NOT what God designed us for. When you feel alone, when you feel unknown and unloved, God would look and say:
It is not good.
God solved our deepest problem of being alone by bringing us back to himself in Jesus Christ. God gave us one another to show that oneness we have with Jesus to each other in practical ways that we might never be alone.
You and I were not meant to be left alone in any way—not physically, not in our emotions, our thoughts, our illnesses, our brokenness, or even our sin. God did not mean for us to ever be alone. He wants to use US—all of us, together, as believers—in one another lives, to demonstrate so many aspects of his goodness to us. To show us the very nature of the Godhead and trinity. To show us what true worship and life with God looks like. To help one another with our varied gifts, talents, and strength. To be family to one another. That is how we are to live for one another in this in-between moment.
The main problem you and I bump into is we don’t really believe this. We don’t believe that God doesn’t want us to be alone. Sometimes that is especially hard for Americans and maybe even more hard for those of us in the western US who believe we alone need to make our destiny come true. This land around us was settled by pioneers who went out on their own and we seem to act as though we still need to do that today. We struggle to admit that we ever feel alone and definitely don’t want to tell others. Paul Tripp says this:
[We] buy the lie that we are unique and struggle in ways that no one else does. We get tricked by people’s public personas and forget that behind closed doors they live real lives just like us. We forget that life for everyone is fraught with disappointment and difficulty, suffering and struggle, trials and temptation. No one is from a perfect family, no one has a perfect job, no one has perfect relationships, and no one does the right thing all the time. Yet we are reluctant to admit our weaknesses to ourselves, let alone to others.
Tripp, Paul David. Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change (p. 164), Kindle Edition.
And one of the most core weaknesses, the most core challenge we all feel is that we will all, at times, feel very alone. To admit that we feel alone is simply an acknowledgement that we live in a broken, sinful world. That we ourselves are broken and sinful. And it means acknowledging that we desperately need one another.
That is not an easy thing to admit! It comes with great risk to admit you feel alone and you need others. It goes straight to what we said earlier:
Everyone desperately wants to be known and loved.
Everyone deeply fears being known and not loved.
If we admit we are feeling alone, that we have needs that are not being met, and then someone doesn’t respond as we would hope, we sink even further into despair because we become convinced that now, now that someone knows and they are not responding to me that is because I am not loved. That is usually not true (especially with other believers) but it is how we often feel. I think all of us really struggle to take the first step of admitting that we feel alone in many ways and that God WANTS to solve that for us through those around us. I struggle to admit this as a pastor. Even pastors and leaders feel alone a lot—maybe especially leaders. And we all struggle to believe that God would say that it is NOT GOOD for any of us to be alone, and he specifically has given us one another, fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, to help with that.
I know it isn’t easy to admit we don’t want to be alone. Like I said, I lost my hair in the summer between my second and third grade year. Then, as the school year approached, I was crushed. I couldn’t imagine going to school, with a disease where I had experienced that people might not care about me. I was so sad at the idea of being alone, every day, at school. How would I ever make it through that experience?
But praise God He had a plan! My parents as well as my principal (Mr. Roberts at Jackson Elementary), and my teacher from second grade and my teacher for third grade (Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Anderson) got together and they made a plan. They decided that they would let my entire class wear hats for the year so I would feel less awkward and to help hide some of my scars and wounds. They wrote letters to the parents before school even began. They took the time to talk to the entire class, to explain what had been going on with me, and implore them to be understanding. They also asked the class to try to care for me, to love me, and help me not be alone.
I only have amazing memories from that school year. I wasn’t alone! My class was the envy of every other class in the school as we all wore hats every single day when no one else at school was allowed to wear them. Teachers and parents were incredibly kind to me. And I got many friends including Ian. I think Ian must have been held back at least a year because Ian already had some facial hair in third grade and he was huge. But Ian decided I was going to be his buddy and he was going to take care of me. He was my friend and played with me and hung out with me every day. And he was a very good friend. So much so, that one morning during recess, when his older sister who was in the fifth grade came over and began to make fun of me, Ian decked his sister and laid her out flat on the playground.
Now, I am not advocating that what Christian care for aloneness would look is hitting people. I doubt that is usually ever the case. But we all need someone like my teachers, my class, and like Ian in our life. Someone who will see our aloneness, care for us, and do real and practical things to care for us. We need people to show us the kind of closeness and care we have in God through Jesus in ways that let us know we are not alone.
Friends, those of us here today in Christ at Main Street Church surely have this call to care for one another. God has cared for us in this way and he is allowing us to demonstrate the same care he has for us in caring for one another. God is promising us that he is providing FOR us through our relationship with him and then in our joint relationship with one another bound together by his Holy Spirit. We get to experience the tangible presence of God that deals with our physical, our emotional, and our mental need THROUGH one another.
That is why I went to Genesis chapter two today. In a day and age where we are being told we should be against one another and we all need to disagree and fight on every issue, where we are told that no one understands you, where social media works to make us think we have friends but isolates us more than ever, and where people (known and unknown) in cities all over this country are being hated and shot for differing ideas, we desperately need to remember that we were created with a God-given hole that is filled by one another as we each walk with God. We need each other! Our motto of Love God and Love Others is simple BECAUSE it is radical! If this body of believers—Main Street Church—were to truly seek to love God with reckless abandonment and to love one another in all our feelings and situations of aloneness, that would be an incredible church body to be a part of! This is one of the great goals God has given us in this in-between moment, and it is such a sweet thing we get to be a part of—caring for one another in our aloneness and realizing we are definitely not alone.
And on a day where we are sharing our ministry areas and opportunities through our Ministry Fair it would be a tragedy if you had heard these ministry opportunities as another “thing” to do. There is nothing special about the ministry opportunities we have tried to put together at Main Street. But they are all meant to be paths, venues, and ways that where you might be able to relate to one another and to truly help one another not feel alone. To see the very Holy Spirit of God work in you and through you to both meet your needs for one another and to no longer feel alone.
Gospel Communities and small groups are an amazing place where you can gather and share the real struggles of the week and know that people see you, love you, and want to care for you. Some of you relate best over an idea, and classes are a place where you can find other people with similar passions who ALSO want to love you and care for you in other ways. We all have the opportunity to serve the one another as greeters, café workers, worshipers and other ways that people here at Main Street might be pointed to Christ and know that they are not alone in their pursuit of loving God and loving others.
And you may think that serving is often not about solving your aloneness but that isn’t true. Even in children’s ministry you may find that those you think you are pouring into really begin to see you and can remind you that you are not alone and you matter. I was at a concert the other night and there, out of the blue, came little Bridger John running up to me and hugging me right there on the spot. I was walking downtown other day and out of the blue I begin to hear the voice Layla Andersen and her family yelling, “Pastor Ryan!” In those moments, I felt very seen, very loved, and not alone. From children!
We need one another. We need opportunities like the different ministries we have here at Main Street church, but we are going to need much, much more than these options. We will need coffee dates with one another, dessert hang outs, ways to serve alongside one another, and a variety ways of to care for one another. We all are going to need to continue to grow together in our knowledge of God that we might truly present him to one another as our greatest treasure—the one who makes all this worth it. And then, as we know him well, to care for one another.
It is not good for man to be alone.
Application / Response
Main Street, friends, we have an amazing opportunity in this in between moment. Look around for a second. Today, by God’s grace and purpose, he placed you here, with these people. And we can make a choice. We can choose to continue to go through life believing we are meant to be alone. We can hide our hurts, our problems, our aloneness. Or we can begin to share. We can be bold and believe that God sees our aloneness and says it is not good. And we can believe that he would want us to be challenged to look to one another to begin to fill those holes in very real and practical ways. Some of that sharing may even mean sharing how we have missed one another in ways I think no one would want, so we can begin to care rightly for one another.
That will take an amazing amount of trust! Trust in God and trust in one another. And it will take change. It will mean we as elders and staff will need to be willing to change how we use our time, our ministry methods, even the way we preach sermons, to be able to care as best we can for one another. I will need to know what you need. We all will need to know what you need. And we will need to truly be for one another. We will need to believe that in God, through his power, that he will provide everything we all need through this body of believers, if we only ask and trust him. We will talk next Sunday more about how that trust can surely come through our God who created everything out of nothing.
This morning, I really think our application comes in three parts. The first is our own introspection. The second is considering if God is already providing some ways we can be for one another and our aloneness in the paths and patterns we already have at Main Street. The third is maybe sharing other needs you see and have.
As a response I want to start by asking you three questions:
Where do you currently feel alone?
What do you need from others to meet that need in Jesus?
Who can you share that with?
I want to give you time to think about that and really ask the Lord what that will look like. After a time of response through prayer and singing I am then going to have some of the staff and some volunteers come up and share the areas that we already have to connect with others for your own aloneness and needs, but also ways you can serve the needs others have.
And I am confident these are not enough. That is why we need the third category of response. Today, as you all have an opportunity after the service to head out to the booths outside to think about if there are paths of connection through our current ministry areas, if you think there is something more—whether that is something more personal to you and your aloneness or something that we just don’t do yet—please come talk to me. Myself, Steve Collard, Brian Marinelli, we will stay here in the auditorium and we would love to hear how we can help any of you if you feel alone. We desperately want to help provide that for you as we both seek Jesus together.
We really believe that in this season we need to know that God sees our aloneness and says it is not good. We need to believe that God wants to provide a path out of that feeling through one another, and we need to say again and again, “We need each other. How can I help you?”
It is not good for man to be alone.
Take a moment and pray through these questions. The band is going to play for a moment and then we will sing a song and I will come back up so we can hear more about the Ministries at Main Street.
Communion
We are one in Christ, and in that oneness we need to provide for each other.
Benediction
Now, may “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
(2 Corinthians 13:14 ESV)
