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Spirit-Led Identity Change
<page 50>I find it difficult to tell others to act against what they feel is their authentic self. I know how painful it can be for them, and I am concerned that my words may cause a reaction that will make their problems worse. Still, I want what is best for them, so I do what I can to speak the truth in love.
One problem they may run into is called ‘rejection.’ If I encourage them to follow Jesus, and they believe they are unable to do so, it could stir within them a strong sense of failure – one which may have been birthed through many earlier times when they felt they didn’t measure up. My words, which are intended to help, could end up pulling them toward a fear that God will reject them as many others have.
Rejection is a powerful mindset that is difficult to battle. On the one hand, it can create defensiveness: a person may say, “Anyone who calls for me to change makes me feel like a failure, and this is such a cruel feeling that I need to push back against them.” On the other hand, it can also create a dark imitation of humility: a person may say, “I know I am a failure. I am too weak to follow Jesus, just like I have been too weak in so many other areas of my life. All I can do is admit my failure and try to survive the shame.”
Both of these responses show that rejection has wormed its way into a person’s identity. Their emotions have internalized its messages, and the two approaches are attempts to minimize the pain of its presence. In the first, they try to silence anyone who might stir up its accusations. In the second, they attempt to make peace with the accusations by surrendering to them.
The pain involved makes it difficult to hold rejection up to the light. It is easier to run from it. Still, we need to study it to find answers, so I will do my best in this chapter to do so.
In both of the above responses, the person has raised their identity and their experience above the word of God. Their motivation for doing so is understandable – years’ worth of disappointments have left them feeling that they are simply being honest – but if we can step back and look at the situation with the raw truth of the Bible, we see that their conclusions don’t match what it says. The Bible tells us that Christians are accepted and loved as they are. It also tells us that the Holy Spirit will lead and enable us to overcome sin. Through Jesus, we can grow to be more than conquerors in the middle of any trouble (Romans 8:31-39). If the pain of rejection makes this seem impossible, it is a deception.
In rejection people see themselves as being like prisoners who have God’s promises dangled in front of them but out of the reach of their jail cells. No matter how hard they push against the bars, they can’t seem to get through to the reward. Not only that, but the bars are electrically charged, sending painful shocks through their body any time they are touched. The person understandably recoils from this – yet this leaves some of God’s promises out of reach (which makes the person feel even more rejected).
In the introduction to this book, I mentioned my friend Nancy. God’s promise to produce self-control in her seemed to be dangled out of her reach. Her attempts to walk in that truth left her feeling like a failure. When people tried to help her, she didn’t angrily resist – and I greatly <page 51>respect her for that – but she couldn’t seem to benefit from their advice. She eventually settled on living with certain moral failures as if they were an unavoidable part of who she was.
To be fair, she also looked for the Holy Spirit to lead her out of her faults, but her past had shaped her in ways that limited the options she considered possible. She didn’t feel she could grow in the tough sort of wisdom her situation required, so she looked for an unconscious miracle (one that didn’t involve much discipline on her part).
Then when the unconscious miracle didn’t happen, the conflict between her Christian beliefs and who she found herself to be led to more feelings of rejection. So she clung to the love and acceptance of God – which was great – but she also needed to learn how to work through her difficulties to godly solutions.
Nancy’s example shows how incredibly difficult it can be to help someone trapped in rejection. She already felt horrible, and confronting her about her sins only made her feel worse. Those who did so weren’t being cruel, but the simple act of shining a light on her life felt cruel. It added embarrassment to her self-loathing, tempting her to flee or fight.
Rejection takes away the hope of gradual transformation through practical obedience. It removes the belief that we can slowly gain the wisdom to overcome. It turns the fact that we are dead to sin and alive to God (Romans 6), which should be an encouraging promise, into a painful accusation that we are failing to live up to what God expects from His children.
It also tends to isolate a person. Those who want to help may eventually feel that their attempts are fruitless …or that they are only making the problem worse. So they may back away and avoid the person …which gives the person more reason to feel rejected.
I don’t have any sure-fire answers to all of this, but I try to understand. I also do my best to stick with what the Bible teaches. Though I don’t want to cause pain, the Bible tells me that there are no good excuses for sin (1 Corinthians 10:13), so I do my best to speak this truth.
I am forced to ask, “What if at its heart, rejection is an incredibly convincing deception that distracts a person from God’s answers? What if it is an elaborate set of lies that work together to make the person feel so horrible that they spend their efforts trying to feel better rather than learning how to overcome sin? Then when they don’t feel better, what if rejection becomes an ever-reinforcing downward spiral of self-reproach that produces even greater rejection?”
We can think of rejection in terms of victimhood. If we are truly a victim of someone who has power over us, we are right to conclude that there is little we can do to end our victimization. For example, a young child who is being abused by parents has few, if any, good options on its own. Without some sort of outside intervention, there is no way the child can end its victimhood.
Rejection convinces a person that they are this sort of victim – someone who can do little to free themselves from a fate forced on them by events beyond their control. But in this case, they see themselves as victims of themselves. The feel that if they could just be better people, or had a different childhood, or would work harder… they would be OK. But they also feel that the ability to be that sort of person has been withheld from them, so they conclude they are helpless slaves to their own weaknesses and circumstances.
The Bible makes it clear that Jesus has answers, and many Christians suffering under rejection likely believe this promise (at least in theory). They just don’t believe the promise can work for them in the real world.
<page 52>The reality of life for all of us is that, even with Jesus, growth sometimes involves a monumental effort – and this is a reality that makes those dealing with rejection feel hopeless. If they want to rise above their problems, they may need to persevere as they face difficulties, fall short, humble themselves, seek wisdom, and make incremental improvements. They may need to cry out to experience God’s help over long periods of time.
In the face of that, rejection cripples their resolve by haunting them with the fear that any attempt to walk through this process will only prove that they do not have what it takes. And this will lead to those dreaded moments of failure, the ones where they once again see their efforts fall short, where they feel the sting of rejection’s overwhelming disapproval. In order to avoid those moments, they give up before they have a chance to fail.
They look at their past sins and foolishness, and they conclude that these have set an unalterable negative course for their life. They look at their present weaknesses and conclude that these make obeying God similar to someone trying to scale an impossible mountain. It is too much to believe Jesus’ promise that His strength is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Their experience seems to have demonstrated just the opposite – though God may be up to the task, they aren’t.
But as I said before, what if all of this is just a clever lie? What if they are being fed an amazingly convincing excuse to compromise with sin? What if the Spirit of God is able to untangle the web of misled beliefs and habits that fuel rejection? And what if He is able to give them the courage to face and work through the dread they feel at the core of their being?
I will share my approach to rejection in the hope that it will help those who struggle with it. I basically reject rejection. I identify the lies, counter them with truth, and rely on Jesus to somehow guide me through the storm that doing this creates.
Rejection is based on a distorted view of what success and failure should mean to us. Under rejection, success becomes the experience that makes us feel worthwhile, and failure becomes the experience that makes us feel worthless. This distorts the way we approach life.
When we attempt to obey Jesus, rejection weakens this choice by turning it into an attempt to prove ourselves. We want to show everyone we are not the losers rejection tells us we are. Rather than obeying to please the Lord, we obey to silence an inner voice of disapproval.
In a sense, this makes success our judge. Until we accomplish something that makes us feel successful, we don’t measure up. The thought of being content as a child of God who moves forward with a sincere heart but mixed results seems out of place. We need the support of significant outward proof of our worth.
I heard an interesting example of this. Someone said it was easy for another person to work hard because the other person was successful. This statement shows that the person who said it believes that hard work can only be done if there is good reason to believe that success will fairly quickly follow. Without that, hard work might expose him or her to the increased self-reproach that can come from failing after really trying.
I believe that this approach to success makes it a false god …and we were never designed to answer to such an unreasonable taskmaster. Among other problems, we can’t really control the factors that lead to success (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12), so we have made our sense of worth dependent on something that is out of our control. Another problem is that we often misunderstand the true measures of success, so we misjudge what is happening. And even when <page 53>success comes, it often appears after endurance through many failures (which requires us to make peace with at least temporary failure).
If we clearly see Jesus as our judge, we realize He doesn’t reject us when we fail – even when we are unsuccessful at accomplishing something He deeply cares about – like overcoming sin. He forgives us and stands with us. He offers help and comfort in our lowest moments. He gives us the strength to keep trusting Him and working hard. He is our reward, and failures can’t keep us from Him.
Jesus helps us escape from the pressure to look good. He frees us to try approaches that are foreign to us – approaches that appear risky because they might make us look bad for a time. In His arms of love, there is room to try, fail, and grow.
We can open our hearts to those who can teach us approaches that are new to us. We try out what they say and gradually see what helps and what doesn’t. We slowly piece together an understanding of how the Holy Spirit is leading us.
But none of this can happen if we are paralyzed by a fear of rejection. It causes us to interpret every setback as an accusation that we are so hopeless that we might as well give up. It presses us to provide undeniable proof that we are succeeding. Rather than focusing on our character – our willingness to humbly try, fail, and learn – it tells us that we are accomplishing so little that we are just embarrassing ourselves.
We are eternally OK through the blood of Jesus.[25] Our worth comes from the fact that He has bought us and made us a part of His family. We don’t need to succeed to earn our place with Him. And though we are full of sinful weaknesses that we need to address, we can do this from a place of security rather than through anxious attempts to prove ourselves. This inspires us to grow rather than overburdening us with the need to live up to a standard.
Grace (God’s favor toward us through Christ) helps us find the emotional freedom to rise and try again. We trust God to help us deal with the disappointments along the way. Our success isn’t the point – His glory is – and we are far better off failing while trying to glorify Him than succeeding while trying to make something of ourselves.
This is not just theory for me – disappointments and failures have shown up – and they have not been easy for me to deal with. I have spent years coming to grips with them, and doing so has required me to painfully rework how I think about life.
The word of God told me to just follow Jesus whether I felt successful or not, and this forced me to let go of the way I tended to judge myself. My accomplishments or lack thereof weren’t the point; God and His plan were. He would take my sincere yet stumbling attempts to serve Him and turn them into something more beautiful than outward success could ever produce. The world doesn’t need more of me; it needs more of Him.
I press into this approach. Unfortunately, I know that those who suffer with rejection may find my example unconvincing. In fact, it may even make them feel more rejected (because I have found answers they haven’t). …Yet I see their feelings as an example of sin being terribly clever. So I seek to dispel sin’s illusion and share my belief that Jesus’ strength can be made perfect in any person’s weakness – even if that weakness is rejection.
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