What does it mean to be the only believer in their family? They live at home, they eat at the same table, they carry the same surname, and yet when it comes to the fear of God, they stand alone. It is not that they are unloved or unwanted — but the deepest thing about them, the thing that has actually changed their life, is a thing no one else at home shares. This is the struggle we deal with today: what does God have to say to the believer who feels cut off from their own people?
Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the LORD say, “The LORD will surely exclude me from his people.” And let no eunuch complain, “I am only a dry tree.”
Isaiah 56:3 (NIV)
Isaiah names two kinds of people who, in his day, had every reason to feel shut out — the foreigner, who had no birthright among Israel, and the eunuch, who by the law could not enter the assembly of the LORD (Deuteronomy 23:1) and would leave no descendants behind him. To be a eunuch was to be permanently marked as incomplete in the eyes of society, a dry tree that would never bear fruit. Even now, those who fall outside the ordinary categories of male and female carry that same stigma — pushed to the margins, spoken of with mockery, left to depend on the charity of strangers. While people see them differently, how does God actually see them? Isaiah says that God does not confirm the world’s verdict on the dry tree overturning it.
The society is most ready to write off — the outsider, the eunuch, the one everybody else has already labelled — are exactly the ones God singles out for a promise. Society’s view of such people has slowly begun to change in our own generation; opportunities that did not exist twenty or thirty years ago now do. But God was already ahead of that change three thousand years ago, because His verdict was never the world’s verdict to begin with. He takes what looks permanently dry and makes it green and fruit-bearing. That is the first thing a lone believer needs to hear: whatever your family, your community, or your own fears have named you, God has not signed off on that name.
The Family We Did Not Choose
The struggle of the lone believer is not new, and it is not really about family rejection at all — it is about ownership. We assume that if we had more say over our lives, we could arrange things so that faith would not cost us anything at home. But no one chooses the family they are born into, and no one, in truth, chooses the family they marry into either. We think of a spouse as our own decision, made at twenty-five or thirty, but the child our spouse will one day become a parent to was already known to God before that. What we call our choice was already God’s arrangement.
From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.
Acts 17:26 (NIV)
Paul is telling the people of Athens something a lone believer needs to hold onto: God has determined the family, the city, the country, and the era into which each of us was placed. Once that settles in us, a great deal of the fear about the future — will I ever have a family that understands me, will I always be the odd one out — begins to loosen its grip. We are not victims of a family God overlooked. We are placed exactly where He intended, and He is not finished His work in our lives yet.
A New Family at the Cross
There is a spiritual family that God builds — not by birth, but by the blood of Jesus. At the cross, Jesus looked at His mother and at the disciple He loved, and he gave them to each other as family. Mary already had other sons, yet it was John, not her other children, whom Jesus made her son that day. Why? Because Mary’s other sons knew God only through religion, while Mary and John had come to know God through the Holy Spirit. That is the difference the cross introduced — a family formed not around bloodline or ritual observance, but around a shared knowledge of God by His Spirit. This is what today’s message is really about: our biological family does not disappear when we believe. It remains exactly where God has kept it. But alongside it, a new family now exists, and it is this spiritual family that the lonely believer has stepped into.
Why do our families perceive our faith as a change of religion rather than a change of heart? Because that is the only language the religious leaders — “the converts” — have given them. When we accepted Jesus Christ, most of us also inherited a system alongside it: a catechism, certain rituals, a discipline, a particular manner of baptism. Our biological families observe these outward markers and conclude that we have merely swapped one religion for another, as one might switch allegiance from one group to a rival one. They are not wrong to notice a change; but the religious leaders are wrong about the kind of change they instilled in their new converts.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)
What has actually happened is not a change of religion but a change of mind — a transformation between us and our Father that no one else can see or verify, because it happens in the spirit. If we remain caught up in explaining ourselves through the vocabulary of religion, we will always look to our families like defectors. But when our lives show that it is not dependent on any religious system but a path available to everyone, the tension eases — they come to understand it was never about which group we now belong to, and they will be glad to walk the “way” Jesus paved to reach His Father. To access this path, God forgave their sins too, two thousand years ago.
A Name That Will Not Be Cut Off
Isaiah continues with a promise made directly to the eunuch — the very person the law seemed to shut out.
To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant — to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.
Isaiah 56:4-5 (NIV)
The eunuch could father no children and so, by the standards of his day, had no future and no name that would outlast him. God answers that exact fear — not by removing the eunuch’s condition, but by giving something greater than descendants: a name that will never be erased. This is what God does for every lone believer who has left the laws of religion behind and taken up the path of the Spirit instead. We are often the ones who draw the lines between who belongs and who does not; God does not see people that way.
And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD and to be his servants… these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer… for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.
Isaiah 56:6-7 (NIV)
This house of prayer was, in Isaiah’s day, a building. But when Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days,” He was speaking of His own body. The house of prayer for all nations is no longer a structure — it is His body, and every believer who joins Him becomes part of that dwelling.
The Sovereign LORD declares — he who gathers the exiles of Israel: “I will gather still others to them besides those already gathered.”
Isaiah 56:8 (NIV)
God’s work of gathering scattered people into one family did not stop with Israel, and it has not stopped now — it is still going on. If we truly love Him, we will join Him in this venture, and we will not worry about the family we left behind, believing instead that they too will be gathered, because we have come to a God who abandons no one, but includes everyone in the forgiveness of sin He has already provided for them.
Abraham’s Simple Obedience
The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.”
Genesis 12:1-3 (NIV)
Abraham’s call looks like the hardest version of what the lone believer is asked to do — leave family, leave your father’s household. Yet in an important sense, it was simpler for Abraham than it is for us. There was no religion, in the organised sense we know today, standing between him and the voice of God. His father made idols for a living, carved out of stone and wood, and had wealth, land, and livestock to show for it. But Abraham understood something his father’s sculptures could never capture — that the true God has no form, cannot be shaped by our imagination, and cannot be kept inside anything we build with our hands. So when he heard God’s voice, there was no institution to argue him out of it. He simply went.
We are Abraham’s children now, not by blood but by the same kind of faith — heirs of a promise given to a man who left everything on the strength of a voice alone. What made his obedience possible is worth noticing: no religious structure existed yet to complicate it. Ours does, and that is precisely what makes today’s lone believer feel the isolation Abraham never had to feel. But the path itself has not changed. We are called to walk the same road, and what God gave Abraham is still our inheritance too.
This same Book of Isaiah, read centuries later, became the turning point for another outsider — an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official, reading this very scroll on the road but unable to make sense of it. God accomplished His purpose in the eunuch’s life, just as He had explained in Isaiah 56:4–5.
The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.” Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.
Acts 8:29-30 (NIV)
The eunuch had truth in his hands but no one to explain it to him, until God sent Philip to run after his chariot. God is willing to give the light of His gospel to those who are searching, but He has chosen to do it through people — through us being willing to run when prompted. How many times has the Spirit nudged us toward someone, and we hesitated, or simply did not listen? We do not always know, but God does, and He keeps sending us out all the same, because His purpose is to open eyes that the god of this world has blinded — so that people no longer have to feel what the eunuch on that road felt: truth in hand, with no one to explain it.
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
John 14:6 (NIV)
Jesus did not establish a religion called Christianity; He came as a person to lead us in His footsteps to the Father. Today, religion has become a barrier keeping our family members from coming to God the Father when we choose to walk in the Way that Jesus leads us. The more we voluntarily attach ourselves to a religious system, the further our kith and kin will drift from us — yet God never forsakes them, and He will surely bring them to His truth, even while we remain caught up in religion.
So the last will be first, and the first will be the last.”
Matthew 20:16 (NIV)
The Jordan Valley 
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