“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. | Matthew 5.11-12
This Sunday we talked about the virtue of rejection. Our rejection follows the lead of our Savior: Jesus was rejected and we will be as well. But rejection is not the goal. As we summarized 1 Peter 2.4-10:
Jesus was a reject, He invites you to be a reject with Him and other rejects, in order to create something that God will not reject: holy worship. In this worship God uses us to bless the world.
It is important to attach rejection to the end goal (God’s glory) because without it, rejection becomes a virtue in itself. Too many in the Christian community feel that they are doing the work of God based on the fact that everyone has hates them; truth is, they have simply offended everyone around them. You can be rejected for a lot of reasons, only some of them are attached to God. Many Christians are rejected because they are harsh, unloving, quick to speak, unwilling to listen, and live for themselves. In this, they are rejected as they should be. This rejection is the breaking of relationships that sin always brings.
The goal is to be unified with others to create a God-designed witness. As Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 3.9:
For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
If we focus on the goal than we can begin to see how rejection can bring God glory. He is not impressed by our ability to be disliked, He is instead interested in us building something entirely other. God’s purpose for His people in this world is to live unapologetically for Him in humility toward others. To minimize our own cares and concerns so that His can reign in our lives. As John so eloquently put it: I must decrease so that He may increase (John 3.30). One of the things we will find when we do this (put the concerns of others before ourselves) is that people are not so quick to reject us for us. As we become less focused on ourselves, we get ourselves out of the way so that people can confront Jesus (we place the stone of stumbling for others to find).
Many will still reject us because of Him, but this rejection is a virtue. It is a virtue because this rejection is the result of a life that has already been given to Jesus for the glory of God. It is a virtue because it is God using His rejected stones to build a spiritual house. It is a virtue because God says it is!