By Chris WittsTuesday 3 Oct 2023Morning Devotions with Chris WittsFaithReading Time: 1 minute
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Transcript:
Overcome the desire to be perfect. Admit to yourself that you’re not perfect. You can never be perfect, since you’re a fallible human being like everyone else. Stop trying to be perfect to please God or other people. Remind yourself that, even when others reject you, God will never reject you because he loves you completely and unconditionally.
Refuse to listen to unproductive negative words from other people. Instead, renew your mind by reading and meditating on Bible verses that describe God’s love for you and asking the Holy Spirit to bring those verses to mind whenever you need encouragement or need to replace a negative thought with a positive one.
Aim for Excellence—Not Perfection
Pray for the Holy Spirit’s help changing your internal dialogue throughout each day, so that you tell yourself positive messages rather than negative ones. Rather than getting upset about your weaknesses, focus on your strengths. Instead of aiming for perfection, aim for excellence and simply try to do your best each day. Develop achievable goals, relax, be flexible, and embrace change.
Overcome fears of abandonment. Ask God to show you how you can rely on him to help you thrive after other people have rejected you. Keep in mind when dealing with the uncertainty of human relationships that you can always count on God’s constant presence with you and steadfast love for you.
Let go of the past so you can move forward well. Don’t hold onto anything damaging or unproductive from your past. Seek God’s healing so you can discover healthy relationships, exchange pain for joy, experience freedom from past wounds, and develop and grow to your fullest potential.
Winning the Battle
So how can you win against the battle of rejection? The strategy to winning over rejection is to first know that you are never alone. Jesus can relate to you and he is always there for you, to strengthen you with his love. He too had to deal with rejection in a big way. His own family and hometown rejected him, the religious leaders of his day also rejected him. And of course, in the last hours of his life his best friends, the disciples, deserted him.
But the greatest rejection Jesus would face was when his Heavenly Father forsook him as he took our sins on himself at the cross (See Mark 15:34). Jesus faced this ultimate rejection so we would never have to. As we read in Hebrews 13:5, “…for God himself has said, I will never fail you or abandon you.”
God loves you, God really loves you! Your sense of self-worth is based on what you think the most important people in your life think about you. No-one is more important in your life than God, so as you meditate on what God thinks about you, it causes your sense of self-worth to rise and displaces that feeling of rejection. The reason why many of us are crippled by a fear of rejection is because we care more about what people think than about what God thinks.
The most beautiful thing God ever made was you! He said: I want to create a person who can contain My Spirit. Stop looking for more evidence that God loves you. You may have said, If God really loves me then why did this happen? or God if you really love me get me this job. God is asking, What is the most significant thing I could do for you to demonstrate that I have not rejected you but that I love you?
That, of course, was sending his own Son to die for all of us, to face the ultimate rejection for sin, so we would never have to. This is where the classic verse John 3:16 fits in, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
The antidote for rejection is this love of God. Therefore John writes in 1 John 4:18, “No fear exists where his love is. Rather, perfect love gets rid of fear.” Pondering how much God loves you gets rid of the fear of rejection. I like the way The Message Bible translates Jeremiah 29:11, “I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for.”