Since Rejection was such a big problem for me I often reflected on why it should be such a serious issue for people. How could something as invisible and insidious as rejection be so devastating for so many people?
My reflections on the subject led me to a simple observation, which I can attest to from the Bible. So that’s the starting point in my pictorial series on the subject of Rejection.
Our Design
Mankind was made by God, for fellowship with God. And that’s a Bible truth. God made man, right back there on Day 6 of creation. And God is “Love”.
“He that loves not knows not God; for God is love.” 1John 4:8
“And we have known and believed the love that God has to us. God is love; and he that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him.” 1John 4:16
Putting those two Bible facts together enables us to recognise something about our design. Just as a radio is designed to tune in to radio signals and a television is designed to tune in to television signals, man is designed to tune in to God.
Love Receptor
If man is made to tune in to God, then man is designed as a “Love Receptor”. Somehow, among all our faculties, we have the capacity to tune in to and resonate with God. And, since God is love, that means we must be able to tune in to love.
We must have within us the capacity to fully interpret, receive and respond to the waves of God’s love which are broadcast from Him. If we could not sense love, then we could never have real fellowship with a God who is love.
You are I are ‘love receptors’. Apart from our sight, hearing, touch, taste and other senses, we have the innate ability to sense God’s most wonderful quality.
God and Man
As a love receptor we deeply desire to receive God’s love and the love and affection of our fellow man. We expect to find love from our parents, siblings and family. We expect people to be friendly to us and to be interested in us. We look for loving interaction from all we meet.
This is especially so when we are children and have not yet felt the amount of rejection and disinterest which we are likely to face in later years.
We are designed to live in the luxury of close fellowship with God and with family, friends and society. However, many people experience no sense of God’s love and also experience the feeling that they are rejected, neglected, abandoned and abused by fellow man.
Look at Life
Have you not noticed how powerful love is? People who sense love are keen to be near those who supply it. Children respond to the love shown them by others. We all love to be loved.
Some people spend their whole life looking for love. It fascinates us and impacts us like few other things do.
We celebrate our addiction to love in stories, song, poetry and lifestyle. People’s whole personalities can be transformed by the addition of a loving person into their life.
All this testifies to the fact that God has designed us as love receptors. Those who defy the need for love often do so out of their hurt. They are trying to shut down a faculty which has become a source of pain for them. But that only goes to prove the point. If they were not love receptors by design, then the absence of love, or pain through expectations of love, would not affect them.
Substitutes for Love
Craig Hill, in his Family Foundations course, points out that people who are not loved by their parents can go headlong into sexual relationships, in a quest for the love they sense they are missing. A girl who is denied her father’s love is more likely to end up in a cheap, sexual fling with a man, than a girl who is secure in the love of her dad. Similarly, a boy who feels rejected by his mum will tend to seek the affections of another woman, to fill what seems to be a void within him.
The lack of love never justifies sin. I am not suggesting that the parents are to blame for their children’s wrong choices. We must each give account for our sins. God doesn’t use psychologist couches. He has books with written records of our sins instead.
Other substitutes for love can include attention, notoriety (as with the trouble maker), fame, success, cheap popularity or sexual attraction. If people are not shown love they may well immerse themselves in a substitute, to at least get some compensation for how they feel.
Love Completes Us
Because we are love receptors, then love completes us. We are designed to be in intimate fellowship with our creator, the God of the entire universe. His love is meant to be “shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5).
We are meant to receive such a revelation of God’s love that God’s ‘perfect love’ casts out all the fear we are feeling, including the fear of rejection.
“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love.” 1John 4:18
As you follow through this series I will eventually have more to say about God’s awesome love. By the end I trust that you are experiencing and enjoying God’s perfect love in much richer dimension and that you are wonderfully set free.
Tags: god is love, inner healing, love of god, love receptors, rejection, relationship
Leave a Reply