By Nancy Wheatley
I don’t remember the exact moment the door of rejection opened in my life. A few key early relationships contributed to my heart coming to believe the lie that “I will never be enough.” When I look back (I’m in my 50s now, so I have a bit to look back on!), the picture I get is of a little black cloud of rejection around my head, distorting the way I saw others, the way they saw me, and the way I saw myself.
Rejection. Such a harsh-feeling word. No wonder it bruises our souls, especially when our encounters with it begin early in life, when our hearts are most tender. As children, we look to the people around us to help us understand our value. Sometimes they do that well. Sometimes, because of their own brokenness, they don’t. Praise God that there is healing for all of us who have experienced the sting of rejection!
Our hearts were never meant to go through life rejected, so they tend to respond in unhealthy ways. For me, that looked like 1) trying really hard, hoping that my performance could earn the love I needed, 2) seeking any kind of “love” I could get through poorly-chosen relationships, and 3) creating a buffer zone of isolation around my heart. The buffer zone was a pretty effective wall of self-protection, but it didn’t just keep me from further rejection. It kept me from friendships, from having dreams for my life, from offering myself and my gifts to the world, and from experiencing the depth of love God designed us for.
My healing began when I first encountered Jesus in my late teens. His love was so real to me in those early days of my salvation; I began to glimpse myself the way He sees me. But I was still carrying a lot of rejection’s baggage around. Lies I believed, wounds that still festered, and my own unhealed responses kept that little black cloud in place. I would read the truth in the Scriptures, but the words didn’t bear much fruit because I read them through the filter of my beliefs. This went on, unchallenged, for too many years.
It wasn’t until I began to learn about inner healing that real breakthrough came. Ironically, I began to study inner healing because I saw so much brokenness in those around me and thought, “Jesus, I know You didn’t die so they would limp along in life, still captive to the enemy!” I couldn’t even see the chains that bound me. It makes me laugh now to see how God’s compassion was being extended to me when I thought I was going to help fix all those other people!
God met me so tenderly as I learned. Little by little, He would point out the things I believed, the people I needed to forgive, and the truth that had always been there, even if it had been obscured by the cloud. There was a lot of just-Jesus-and-me ministry time as He healed my heart. Then I had my own inner healing sessions and received breakthroughs I didn’t even know were possible.
As I began praying for others, I sensed God’s holy indignation against those things that keep His children bound (Luke 13:10-17). I began to share His righteous anger against the enemy and the way he bullies the people created in the image of God. It was easy for me to sense God’s compassion for others; every time I prayed with someone, it was holy ground as God’s pursuing love met them. And little by little, my heart was healed to believe that God loved me that way, too. The cloud dispersed; the buffer zone melted away. I could see myself and others with compassion, and I learned to trust the Father to keep my heart safe.
For me, deliverance from rejection has been a winding journey, punctuated by periods of accelerated growth. I am so grateful for ALL the means by which God has broken off the works of the enemy and brought me into a place of resting in truth. He keeps drawing me onward, not content until He sees His image looking back at Him. Below is an excerpt from my journal just a few weeks ago. I now release this as a declaration to you.
If you still feel any possibility of rejection from God, any sense of being an orphan or an outsider, you have not understood the gospel. God has put you in Christ. The Scriptures say you are a part of His body, and this is not entirely metaphorical. You are spiritually, in a very real way, in Christ. He would no more reject you than He would reject His own lungs, or His own hand. You are part of Him. Any accepting or rejecting of you that was going to be done was done “in the beginning” when the Trinity had Their divine council and chose to save humankind.
When Jesus was formed as an embryo in Mary’s womb, it was evidence that God had decided to accept you, and the great rescue mission had begun. When Jesus turned His face toward Jerusalem on that fateful day, it was because you were accepted by God and He had work to finish to get you there. When Jesus took the weight of your sin and felt His life ebbing away, nailed to a rough Roman cross, it was proof that you were accepted. He had deemed you worthy of the greatest act of costly love that will ever be. When Jesus rose again in explosive resurrection life, the Father had placed you in Him. Anything that was worthy of rejection about you was left in the grave. He made you one spirit with Himself. A closer union could not exist. You are in union with the eternal I AM. Rejection is a lie; it is not your story. Your story is one of being pursued and rescued from certain destruction by the noblest love that will ever be.
What a demonic deception to believe that His pursuing love, which flows to all His creation, stops at you – that there is something uniquely rejectable about you that sets you apart from all the other fallen children He died to save. Stop believing it. None of us is worthy of this great salvation. We’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Yet here we are, splashing around in the fountain of lavish, inexplicable grace. This is the God who is. He is Love, and you are loved. Get used to it; we will be spending eternity as sons and daughters in His house. Not because we deserve it, but because “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved” (Eph 1:4-6 NKJV).
