Responding to Rejection

by Charles F. Stanley

How are you to respond when you experience times of rejection? Should you curl up in a dark corner and wallow in self-pity? Are you going to withdraw from life and decide that you are never going to have friends or people who love and accept you in Christ? No!

You are to do three specific things when you feel an intense need to belong.

1. Believe what God says about you.

Down through the years, a number of divorced or widowed people have said to me, “I feel like a nobody.” My response to them is, “That’s not what God says about you.”

God says you are a somebody. You are so special and valuable to Him that He sent His Son to die for your sins. And He made it possible for the Holy Spirit to come and dwell within you and to remind you on a daily basis that you are a somebody in His eyes. You are valuable beyond measure to God!

“But I feel so all alone in the world,” someone may say.

You aren’t really alone. God is with you. He has promised to stay right by your side regardless of what happens to you, and even if everybody you know has rejected you, God will not leave you. That’s a sure promise of God’s Word!

God has fashioned our relationship with Him so that we can know that we are forgiven of our sin nature and made a full member or God’s immediate family. We can know that we belong to God. We are His children, never to be denied, rejected, or turned away from His presence.

2. Seek God’s acceptance first.

Divorce is devastating because it destroys a person’s sense of belonging. It creates an even greater need to belong, a need that isn’t felt as keenly or as deeply when a person is happily married.

A woman whose husband had recently divorced her confessed to me, “I don’t feel as if I belong anyplace anymore. My life has been ripped apart. What can I do?”

“Go to Christ,” I said. “Trust the Lord to be the One who provides for you, who gives you your identity, and who comforts you in your loneliness. Trust Him to direct your paths and to give you the responsibilities and daily chores that He desires for you to do in service to Him. Trust God to be the One who shelters you from evil, who upholds you, who guides you daily. Trust Him with your whole life and surrender yourself completely to Him.”

Are you counting God’s acceptance of you as being far more important than the acceptance by any other person or group? Or are you still downgrading God’s acceptance?

You have been given the ability and prerogative to ignore God, continue on your own way, and rebel against His desire for your close presence. But why not look at Him fully and see the love He has for you? Why not give in and yield to His tender and compassionate embrace?

3. Recognize that God will never reject you.

Perhaps you are reluctant to believe God accepts you fully because you are afraid that you might one day lose His acceptance and love. Nothing, my friend—absolutely nothing—can destroy your acceptance by God or diminish His love for you. Not now, not ever.

When my grandson was very young, the first thing he would do when he came to my house was demand to sit on my lap. He had a sense—rightly so—that there was no other person I would rather have been with at that moment.

Friend, that’s the way God feels about you and me. He delights in being with us. He holds us tenderly. And there is no other person in the world He would rather be with. The amazing truth about our infinite God is that He is capable expressing to us all of His love and attention so that each of us is the sole object of His concern. In our finite minds we can not grasp that. But in God’s great and infinite love, He can meet all of my need to belong just as surely as He can meet all of your need to belong.

When you feel as if you don’t belong, come to God with a desire to just sit for a while in the Lord’s close presence. Come with a willingness to be held tenderly in His everlasting arms. Allow yourself to relax in His presence. You are 100 percent welcome there. You are desired there. He longs for you to be there.

As a child of God, a person who has received Jesus Christ as your Savior, you can always find a place of belonging in His presence.

Adapted from “Our Unmet Needs” by Charles F. Stanley, 1999, pp.197-203.