Being rejected hurts, but there is real acceptance that we can know:
Most people have known rejection in their life in one form or another. Whether on a more minor basis or a much more serious one, rejection can be a very painful experience. It might be a marriage proposal that is turned down, or a refused application for a job, or a book rejected by a publisher.
Of course some of the worse forms of rejection can occur when loved ones or family members do the rejecting. A doco I saw the other day about Eric Clapton spoke of how as a young boy he was rejected by his own mother. To overcome that grief and hurt he of course got into music big time, but then later on became enmeshed in heroin addiction and alcoholism, and also went through various relationships, even with the wife of George Harrison.
As with all negative things in life, how one deals with them is crucial. Turning to drugs or alcohol or womanising is one way to cope with something like rejection. That is what Eric did for quite some time. As one 2018 article looking at a then-released biography states:
At the age of nine, Eric Clapton was visited by his mother, Pat. She had given birth to him at 16, the illegitimate result of a one-night stand with a soldier. When he was two, she emigrated to Canada, leaving him with her own mother, Rose. The boy was encouraged to believe that Rose was actually his mother but, gradually, the truth dawned on him. Now Pat was back, with two further children from a new relationship. Young Eric had dreamed of this day. ‘Can I call you Mummy now?’ he asked. Pat refused, insisting that her son maintained the fiction she was his older sister. Her callousness shocked everyone present.
But that reckless and selfish behaviour finally was turned around when tragedy struck in 1991. His four-year-old son Conor fell out of a window that was left open in the 53rd-floor New York apartment of his mother. That seemed to be the wake-up call Eric needed to stop the selfishness and self-destruction and turn his life around. The 1992 hit song “Tears in Heaven” was one result of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoOp12ayIVg
Sadly not everyone manages to see their life get turned around so dramatically. Rejection can be so severe, especially if coupled with a long-standing poor self-image and low self-esteem that it can really be seemingly impossible to be overcome. And many people do not overcome it.
Ephesians 1:6
In my own small way, I have also known rejection and depression and the like. But of course what ended my self-destructive and suicidal way of life was an encounter with the living Christ when I was 18 years of age. And one key biblical passage speaks to this when it says that we are “accepted in the beloved.” As we read in Ephesians 1:3-6 (NKJ):
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.
That is a remarkable passage indeed. For all those who feel abandoned, rejected, unloved and looked down upon, God actually adopts us as sons into his family, because of the work of Christ. Let me offer two bits of commentary on this wonderful passage from two well-known preachers from the UK. In a sermon on being accepted in the beloved, Charles Spurgeon said this:
To be brief, and yet explicit, let me notice that I think the acceptance here meant, includes first of all, justification before God. We stand on our trial. When we stand in Christ we are acquitted; while standing in ourselves the only verdict must be condemnation. The term “acceptance,” in the Greek, means more than that. It signifies that we are the objects of divine complacency [in the older sense of the word, “marked by an inclination to please or oblige”]. When God looked upon the world of old, he said it was “very good:” and when the Lord looketh upon his people in Christ, he saith the same. But, methinks if there could be anything better than very good, he would say his people in Christ were better than the work of his own hands, since they wear not a created righteousness, but the righteousness of the Creator, Jesus Christ himself. They are, then, accepted by his justice, and they are viewed with complacency by his holiness. But this is not all. When it is written, “Accepted in the beloved,” it means that those accepted are the objects of the divine delight. Friends, whenever I get to this thought, (and many a time in this house of prayer I have got to it I always feel inclined to sit down and let you think it over, for it is such an extravaganza of divine grace that we, worms, mortals, sinners, should be the objects of divine love. When princes wed with beggars the world marvels; but when God sets his affections upon sinful men and women in Christ, oh, this is the wonder of wonders! Even the angels might desire to look into it. I do believe that when we have been in heaven ten thousand years, this will still be a subject of rapture and surprise, that ever He should have found anything in us in which he could take delight! To pity us, to show mercy to us, that I can understand; but to love us! https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/accepted-in-the-beloved/#flipbook/
God's ultimate purpose: An exposition of Ephesians 1, 1 to 23by D.M. Lloyd-Jones (Author)
And in his multivolume expository commentary on Ephesians Martyn Lloyd-Jones says this about Eph. 1:6:
How should we view ourselves in the light of all these truths? Here is the Apostle’s answer: We have been called. We know He has ‘made us accepted in the beloved ‘. Unfortunately the English Revised Version and the Revised Standard Version have gone completely astray in their translation here. They have, ‘to the praise of the glory of his grace (his glorious grace) which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved’. The Authorised Version translation says, ‘accepted in the beloved’. That comes nearer to what the Apostle wrote, but even that does not bring out the true meaning. The word the Apostle used here was the very word that is used in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 1, verse 28: ‘And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail , thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.’ The word means ‘highly favoured’. So we should translate it in exactly the same way in this Epistle, and read, ‘To the praise of the glory of his grace, we know that he has highly favoured us in the beloved’. Surely this is the meaning the Apostle was concerned to convey! He uses the same word with respect to us as the archangel used about the Virgin Mary, ‘Hail , thou that art highly favoured’. That meant that God had chosen Mary of all women in the world to bear His Son. She had been created for this, that the Son of God should enter her womb and be born of her.
The Apostle speaks similarly about us. He has already told us that we have been predestinated unto the adoption of sons. But it is greater even than that! Not only are we made sons of God, but Christ comes into us – ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Colossians 1:27). As He had physically entered into Mary so spiritually, He enters into everyone of us who are His children. ‘That holy thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God’ (Luke 1:35). Yes, and because we are partakers of the divine nature Christ is, as it were, born in us, and so with Mary we are ‘highly favoured’. God has chosen us, we do not know why, but we do know that this means that we are ‘highly favoured’. God in His infinite wisdom and in infinite love and grace and mercy, before the foundation of the world, decided that you and I were to be ‘highly favoured ‘, and that by His grace we should not only be redeemed from the ravages and the consequences of sin, and be adopted into His family, but that in us His very son should come to dwell, and our bodies should become ‘the temple of the Holy Ghost’. This is the Apostle’s conception of the Christian; and this is how we should habitually think of ourselves as we walk through life in this world.
Why am I what I am as a Christian? There is only one answer, I have been ‘highly favoured’ by the grace of God. I give Him all the glory – ‘He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 1:31). Is this your view of salvation? Are you giving the entire glory to God, or are you reserving a little for yourself? Are you saying that it is your belief that saves you? If so you are detracting from the glory of God. The glory is entirely His – ‘to the praise of the glory of his grace in which he has highly favoured us in the beloved’.
Wow, talk about amazing acceptance. Talk about the ultimate answer to rejection.
As already mentioned, in mid-1971, after 3 or 4 years of rebellion and hardcore drug use, I became a Christian. Clapton was born eight years before I was, and by the time of my conversion he had become an international superstar. Two supergroups, Cream and Blind Faith had already come and gone.
In late 1970 Eric Clapton joined Geroge Harrison in recording “My Sweet Lord.” It was more about eastern religions than biblical Christianity, however. And in August 1971 George had Eric play with him at Madison Square Garden in New York City for the benefit Concert for Bangladesh.
For the next two decades Eric’s life would head downhill until Conor’s death helped to snap him out of his dead-end path. Whether he has ever truly made a firm commitment to Jesus Christ is unclear. But he is just one of so many people who has had to deal with rejection. We can all pray that he knows what it means to be accepted in the beloved.
As to George Harrison, he died rather young in 2001, aged 58. And concerning his salvation, two years ago evangelist Ray Comfort put out this video saying that he may well have come to Christ in his final days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMl5dfl3fEI
But rockstars, just like everyone else, have to deal with rejection, pain and suffering, and they need the one true answer to these problems. Parents might reject us. Spouses might reject us. Our own children might reject us. Friends might reject us. Colleagues might reject us. But the overwhelming acceptance we have in Christ is something that compensates for all such rejection.
What a joy and honour to be accepted in the beloved. What a joy and honour to be highly favoured in the beloved. May all my readers come to know this glorious reality.
