Hold this reality in both hands: in your symbolic left hand hold the unfailing love of God to create a creation so implicit of love that there is a world order, and humans top that order, and humans are given choice over the living of their lives. What’s in the left hand, as a truth for humanity, is magnificently wondrous. Now take the right hand. Hold within that hand another unfailing truth: the world has rejected God; the world has always rejected God; the world will always reject God—yet, God will never reject the world.
This is perhaps what is communicated in the following few verses:
“Jesus was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”
~John 1:10-11 (NRSV)
The Power Of Acceptance And Rejection
When we take a moment to consider the power of acceptance and rejection, we know that the sting of rejection and the power of betrayal ends our hope, just as we live for even the faintest of acceptances.
Acceptance and rejection fill our lives with meaning in such dipolar ways.
There would hardly be a more dipolar concept with more significance. God seems to have wired humanity to strive for one and avoid the other like the plague. Being made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) we can connect this human phenomenon to that which must be close in nature to the character of God. Our Lord must crave our acceptance; the Holy Spirit must be grieved at our rejection.
Yet, God never gives up on a humanity that betrays the nature, character, and faithfulness of the Creator. No matter how close our relationship is to God, we are constantly prone to rejecting our Lord. Jesus was not crucified once; he is crucified every day, infinitely. Still, God never gives up.
‘Living The Capacity’ Of The Wonder In God’s Love
As we reflect over the above dichotomy—God’s fundamental acceptance of humanity and our fundamental rejection of God—we have the ability to find for a certain truth.
The Lord’s capacity to love in the midst of rejection, never giving up, is something we can live, too.
We can love beyond our rejections. Indeed, not only can we protect those rejecting us by many varieties of betrayal, we can protect ourselves in the power of God. Nothing can harm us if nothing can reject us; all this because of the power in God’s love, for his acceptance diminishes the power of any rejection. Such love crushes the evil and fear within betrayal.
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When we first understand that love fuels acceptance beyond any rejection, we have, at once, the ignition keys to life—this is evidence of the Spiritual rebirth: to love beyond disloyalty. No betrayal has power over us that God has not already anointed. These rejections and betrayals are given to us as opportunities to love, as Christ loved his entire creation on that bloody cross of Golgotha.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
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