Love and Acceptance

Luke 6:22-23, 26, Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets... Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.

An important and easily forgotten principle here. We humans so crave acceptance. To be cast out is for many of us worse than death. This is natural because in the perfect world, we were made for intimate communion with each other and God, so that’s just the way our bodies are wired. But in a fallen world, such deep heart-connections are hard to find and often must endure the roughest of sin-storms that sunder fellowship. It is almost a law in the relationship game–the closer you are to someone, the more their sin jabs its painful spines under your skin, the more you must learn forgiveness and the greater your selfless love must grow if your friendship is to survive.

But what to do with a world that spurns us, for as a slave to the devil it cannot accept a friend of God? How does Jesus expect us to “rejoice and leap for joy” when rejection is incredibly painful? Those shunned on this earth for proclaiming the unpopular truth will find their acceptance in heaven, while those accepted on earth (like the false prophets) have failed to live as witnesses to an offensive gospel but have tried to present others with a word that pleased them in order to remain accepted and even popular.

May our love of God be such that we crave His smile more than the embrace of the world. May we strive to "present ourselves to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed" (II Timothy 2:15) though those around us ridicule our devotion to "fantasies" and passé morals.