Editor’s Note: The following article was written by A. W. Tozer, one of Christianity’s outstanding citizens of the Kingdom of God. In this article he writes of the loneliness that is experienced by those Christians who desperately seek intimacy with God, and who subsequently live a life of holiness – holiness meaning “to be set apart from the world, unto God.”
My hope for you the reader is one of two hopes: (1) That this loneliness that Tozer describes will already be familiar to you, or (2) that this loneliness will strike a chord in your heart, a chord that says, “This is the life that I have been missing out on with God.”
Thanks for reading. ~ David
Most of the world's great souls have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness. In the morning of the world (or should we say, in that strange darkness that came soon after the dawn of man's creation), that pious soul, Enoch, walked with God and was not, for God took him; and while it is not stated in so many words, a fair inference is that Enoch walked a path quite apart from his contemporaries. Another lonely man was Noah who, of all the antediluvians, found grace in the sight of God; and every shred of evidence points to the aloneness of his life even while surrounded by his people. Again, Abraham had Sarah and Lot, as well as many servants and herdsmen, but who can read his story and the apostolic comment upon it without sensing instantly that he was a man "whose soul was alike a star and dwelt apart"? As far as we know not one word did God ever speak to him in the company of men. Face down he communed with his God, and the innate dignity of the man forbade that he assume this posture in the presence of others.
