Cultivate Your Relationship with God

My soul cleaves to the dust; revive me according to Your word.
–Psalm 119:25

How do you conquer the mountain of loneliness? Remember your ABCs: A stands for Acknowledge your feelings of loneliness. B stands for Be proactive in conquering loneliness. C stands for Cultivate your relationship with God.

Saint Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it finds rest in you.” Having a relationship with God does not prevent loneliness, but not having a relationship with God guarantees loneliness.

For David, cultivating his relationship with God started with his confession of sin. In Psalm 25, after admitting his loneliness, David asked God to forgive his sins (v. 18). If sin in your life has isolated you from God, confess that sin and receive His forgiveness.

Then commit time to God’s Word. Psalm 119:25 says, “My soul cleaves to the dust; revive me according to Your word.” Spending time in Scripture revives your relationship with God, even when you feel isolated from everyone else. When Paul was in prison, he asked Timothy to visit him and said, “Bring the cloak which I left at Troas with Carpus, and the books, especially the parchments” (2 Timothy 4:13). This was probably a reference to parchments from the Old Testament and early drafts of the Gospels. In the midst of isolation, Paul needed God’s Word.

Fifteen hundred years after Paul wrote to Timothy, preacher and Bible translator William Tyndale wrote a similar letter from prison. He asked for warmer clothes and a lamp, then he said, “But above all, I entreat and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the Procureur that he may kindly permit me to have my Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Grammar, and Hebrew Dictionary, that I may spend my time with that study.” After studying Hebrew in seminary, I can tell you that if I were languishing in prison, the last thing I would ask for is a Hebrew Bible. But for Tyndale, studying the Hebrew Bible was pursuing God. The way we pursue God is through His Word.

If you are in the shadow of loneliness, the beginning place for conquering that loneliness is renewing your relationship with God.

Today’s devotion is adapted from “Moving from Loneliness to Companionship,” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2021.

Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Philip Burton (Everyman Library, 2001), p. 5, 1.1.1; William Tyndale, as quoted in Rev. R. Demaus, William Tyndale: A Biography, rev. ed. (London: 1886), 437–38.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.