REVISION
Overcoming Rejection through the Unconditional Love of God
Keywords: overcoming rejection, overcome rejection
Overcoming rejection comes through the healing power of trusting in the love of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ’s love for us is endless and unconditional. So is The Father’s. So is the Holy Spirit’s. Learning how to believe in the REALITY of this never-rejecting love empowers us for overcoming the rejection that we experience at times by people. And here is a stunning truth: if our heart has become stuck on feeling beat down by the rejection of people, rather than feeling uplifted by knowing God’s acceptance of us, we need something to shock us out of captivity to other people’s opinion. That something is PAIN.
Pain is what God has placed in the world to let us know when we are doing something wrong, right? Like touching a hot stove. Or sticking your finger in a blender. These aren’t things we do twice! Why? Because we quickly learn to protect our hands from pain. Here is another principle: minor pains go with minor errors. You might be careless stepping off a curb and twist an ankle, but you would be much more careful on a mountain top. God isn’t being mean spirited. He has created a real world. The same world that hurts you if you touch a stove wrong or fall off a cliff, let’s you use the hot burner to cook bacon and climb a mountain to enjoy the view.
So the intensity of pain that comes with rejection should make us ask: What is it I am doing wrong? The problem here is we are usually emotionally consumed by what they did wrong—they rejected me! And the pain is killing me! So we don’t even pause to consider that the problem could be on our side. But it is. Sure they hurt you and there is real pain in that. But why are you still holding on to the pain? Why not drop it like a hot potato? The truth is you have learned to drop hot potatoes and you can learn to “drop” the pain of rejection, too!
Here is the issue in a nutshell: people can and will reject and forsake you, but your Father never will. You have been forever accepted in the Beloved (Eph 1:3-6). Rejection by others is only painful to experience if our hearts are secretly looking to other people to declare our worth to us. If our hearts have become established in the knowledge of God’s love for us, as Jesus was, we can handle the pain of rejection as He did. Fortunately, it is never too late to learn. We have a whole chapter devoted to overcoming rejection in our Workbook and CD/DVD series (see Lesson 17: “Accepted in the Beloved”) that you could study or you might consider coming to Savannah for one of our week long seminars.
There really is a proven way out of this painful snare. Let the pain of rejection that you have experienced drive you to fastening your heart on what The Father says about you—not people! God’s view of you is the Truth that will overcome rejection and set you free (Jn 8:32). Those who have overcome rejection in this way will tell you that the pain of the passage was well worth the price of entry into a far deeper, closer relationship with their God.