Like everything in the Kingdom of God, this book was born in its appointed time. It was poured through me, a most imperfect and struggling vessel, into a ministry of discernment, deliverance, and healing that God gave me long before I was ready or able to walk in it. Through circumstances of great testing, God rewarded my faith with revelation time after time. In disclosing to me the nature and working of rejection in the human condition, the curse of which is born by so much of mankind, He enabled me also to prove the vision for the ministry of total healing in the most broken of lives - beginning with my own.
Jesus said, With God all things are possible (Matthew 19:26). The secret to the working of this promise is simple: you must believe in it. To that belief I clung when common sense, as well as many good friends, said my situation was impossible. While doubt casts deep shadows, the reward of such faith is the moving of mountains. But a measure of faith is available to all. If you can believe, He can turn any situation around, heal any wounded heart.
Concerning Jesus, Isaiah witnessed:
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. (Isaiah 61:1 RSV)
And Peter tells us: By His wounds you have been healed (1 Peter 2:24).
And yet, it's amazing how the human mind, that rational, equivocal functionary of the soul, can nullify that statement. The wounded - and, in particular, those of the wounded who have emerged from the darkness into Recovery - assume that liberty means liberty to go on, not backward, without pain. They assume, as they have been told, that some wounds can never heal.
But God does not say Almost healed, nor does He say Liberty, to some extent. Jesus' earthly ministry was essentially one of healing: He Whose Name is Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). The more I say it, the more I realize it is true. Jesus can heal anything, anyone, anytime, and anywhere. And the more I see His healing realized in the lives of His people - people broken by life, upon whom the world and its secular psychology have given up - the more I am aware that it is His greatest delight still to touch His brokenhearted children, to mend them and set them free.
To be honest, I became a Christian due to my husband. I was always a strong person. When I went astray, it was by my will that I sinned. When I chose to stop destroying myself, I willed myself to stop. Or so I thought. But the truth was that God wanted me. And in His mercy, He sent me my husband, to finally bring me to a depth from which I could not escape by my own will. I cried out to Him; He saved me.
But what did He save me for? Still laboring under the curse of rejection, I became convinced that God had sent me solely to be an instrument of my husband's deliverance because He knew that there was no one else anywhere in the world with the tenacity to stay with such a person to see the job done. I believed I had to suffer as a punishment for the sins of my past life.
But I underestimated God. Like many who catch a glimpse of His divine possibilities, I began devouring the Word, spending all my spare time reading, getting up early to listen to tapes, dragging the babies off to church every time the doors were opened. As I searched everywhere for the nature of my husband's prison, for the pathway to his deliverance, for the key to his healing, I discovered that God had His own more inclusive plans. And I found instead that I was delivered, I was healed, and I was free. And whom the Son sets free is free indeed (John 8:36).
But then, that's the way God does things.
As my friend Freddy once observed, when you go to the Word seeking something, you read and read, It gets better and better until, forgetting what you came for, you sit in awe, amazed at His promises, overwhelmed by the revelation that He is working this Word in reordering your life. And when you suddenly stumble upon the answer you were looking for, somehow it doesn't matter anymore. God has taken you past your own desires into His own heart. He has given you Rhema Word, Truth beyond the wildest dreams of man for the contentment of his human soul.
And even then, as you glory in His Presence, as your heart beats at one with His, you feel His tugging. What is He doing in conforming you to the image of Christ if He is not creating in you this same servant's heart? Go into all the world, He continues to insist, and preach the good news to all creation (Mark 16:15 NIV).
God works in you so that He can work through you. How can He use a prisoner to set a captive free or use someone in chains to proclaim His liberty? We are called to this one great union in Christ, even as He prayed to His Father in the Garden:
The glory which Thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and Thou in Me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me and hast loved them even as Thou has loved Me. (John 17:22-23 RSV)
We are called, you and I, to be witnesses to, participants in, and carriers of the Light. My prayer to you would be that of Paul, in his great luminous epistle to the Ephesians, that you might have
The eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which He has called you, what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power in us who believe, according to the working of His great might which He accomplished in Christ when He raised Him from the dead. (Ephesians 1:19-20 RSV)
THE LIVING CHURCH
There are some churches God most definitely attends. If you have been there, you know. You have sensed His Presence, His unmistakable Glory. There, His peace overwhelms you, a living water flowing through your soul. Many of these are Rhema churches, neither black nor white, but multi-colored. The pastors look white, the music sounds black, and the message is a strong Word-based call for salvation, holiness, and victory. These churches seem to defy the laws of church growth, which maintain that no church can survive half white, half black. But as Lester Sumrall told one such church I attended, in Jacksonville, Florida: "You're a church of derelicts."
And, of course, he meant former derelicts, and, of course, they weren't all literally derelicts. But yes, they (I mean "we") had spent all too many years walking in the darkness, deceived by the darkness into thinking that darkness was all that there was. Isaiah proclaims the transformation:
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness
on them has light shined. . .
they rejoice before Thee. (Isaiah 9: 2,3)
That's why in these churches you can see Him, shining on the faces of the people lifting their hearts in praise. You can see Him working in the lives of all, old and young, men and women, black and white and in between, God's children. Whether clothed in finery or wearing blue jeans, it's wedding raiment. They rejoice. You see peace. You can see His Presence illuminating the countenances of the people - grown men cry, and the hard faces of beaten down women melt into serenity. These are people who had lived on the streets or had crawled from the gutters. Their lives were hard, violent, desensitized from the constant emersion in pain or pleasure. Many have suffered great loss, had never known, except in fleeting instances, love or peace. And maybe you know that you belong there too, praising God among these His people.
You belong there, even if you were not a genuine derelict. There are many there who did nothing worse than go wearily to work every day - living lives that were futile and meaningless, with marriages in shambles, at the frazzled ends of their ropes: until they came here and ran smack into the Presence of God. Look at them now, united with those lately redeemed from the pit, brothers and sisters praising the Living God. Hands raised to Heaven, eyes closed, faces radiant with His joy, they are so glad to be where they are, so glad to be in church, so glad to not be where they used to be, running around in the world, beating themselves up doing and desiring profitless things, seeking the corruption of the flesh. Old things are passed away. All things have become new (2 Corinthians 5:17).
And yet we recognize that bondages still exist. Those who served the god of this world, who flaunted with their lusts the Living God, whose lives personified rebellion, who wallowed in a mire often not of their own choosing but still the product of their own bad choices - these people come to God laden with excess baggage. The message God gave me is freedom for the people of the Light, His children.
If you have spent your life under rejection, you know who you are. Chances are you have become a Christian--as this is a book written for Christians. You may even have found Christ coming out of bondage. You may have been a drunk, a druggie, or a prostitute. You may have suffered from any of this post-modern life's assortment of disorders: an eating disorder, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, multiple personality disorder. You may have been in trouble all your life and found the Lord in prison. You may have lost your innocence and your conscience in the jungles of Vietnam; or been baptized in the creeping numbness of the youth-consuming jungles of the inner city. You may be a wreck that people gave up on years ago. Or you may be sitting at a desk every day doing time in normalcy, consumed by a hidden pain behind your eyes. Whatever your story, this book was written for you.
In these pages you can find freedom from rejection. You can be set free from a life time of pain, from the shame-based behaviors that form the mindset of codependency, the emptiness that has driven you, for all your life, to depend on some person, activity, thing, or substance to complete your being. The spiritual force behind codependency is rejection, a spirit which used--and still uses--the actual people and events of your life to bring pain to the most vulnerable part of you. By replaying over and over again the spiritual wounds you received as a child, rejection has too long run your life.
When your spirit is healed, rejection loses its power. The freedom that makes possible wholeness comes only through surrendering all emptiness to Jesus, to lean in total dependence, not on an imperfection born of compulsion, but on the Rock that doesn't roll.
Make no mistake: freedom from rejection will not come easily. You cannot be healed of what you cannot face and cannot surrender. You might turn back. You have doors that you might refuse to open, though the monsters behind them strain and bellow. The mire of your present existence is comfortable compared to your fear of the pain of surrender. That fear is what made you an addict. Fear is an instrument of rejection, the spirit that's out to get you.
Healing is a process you must look ahead to, a process that you must commit yourself to, with absolute trust in God. Because God cannot work here if faith is lacking, you must move forward without fear of what you might uncover. How can you be delivered of what you do not know or will not admit exists? How can you walk in freedom if you will not admit you do not know how to walk? But God has promised us healing, and He has promised us liberty. Your commitment is nothing more than a promise to God to be all that He can make you.
Wholeness is not a feature of existence in our time. We live in a fractured age. Society is fractured, but even more so, individual identities are fractured. In our haste to get done what we must do, to work and play so hard that we can lose ourselves in the moment's demands, we scarcely seem to know who we are. Sometimes, when who we are catches up with us, we are angry. We don't know why we should have to be in such pain. And small comfort it is to realize we are not alone--that our only friends are people just like us. Rejection is all around us.
Rejection is rampant, a curse upon the land, a wound upon the heart. The fruit of rejection has shattered our time--substance abuse, violence toward self and others, unhealthy codependent relationships, compulsive self-destructing sexual behaviors, and every day new horrors and new depravities. These sensory inputs from the world present avenues for losing instead of finding the self.
Often people are relieved to find that they can use their bondages to define who they are. To be able to openly say: "I am an alcoholic," "I have low self esteem," "I am an incest survivor," "I am gay," brings a sense of community. But this false identity does not make the pain go away, and hope for the future is obscured by the burden of life in the present.
Yes, we know it is all right to be a victim, but we know also that people are sick of it. We are sick of it ourselves. We want to feel peace, to know that we are OK. We ought to feel at ease among others like ourselves. Instead, they bring out our worst: we compete, we fight, we overdo, we debase. When morning comes, we are beating back the guilt again. And rejection is still slapping its wings against the windows of our soul.
The Bible is a chronicle of the rejected, as well as the promise of the Redeemed. In the old covenant, Israel, the original rejected people, is a "type," a shadow of all the rejected who have come after. And the rejected will always suffer the same torments for the same reasons. The curses Israel has felt are curses we have suffered also, for we have worshiped many false gods. We too have know years of rebellion. We too have been slapped up time and again for not obeying laws we could not obey. Like Israel we have spent too many years wailing at the wall. Like Israel, we have learned to strike back, to take what's ours without much thought of whom we are hurting, because we know we have it coming. It has been a long, difficult life. But the good news is that the redemption God promised for the children of Abraham is our promise also.
Today (along with increasing numbers of the lost sheep of Israel), we may be counted among the Redeemed. We recognize that we are justified by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ--the same faith by which Abraham trusted God. God's plan for our redemption is a new covenant, promised and prophesied, forged upon the old. We are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. And our progress has been undeniable. Because our lives have hovered between life and death for so long, we have leaned on His promises and begun to work out with fear and trembling the salvation promised all who would believe. But unfortunately, like the Jewish believers of Paul's day, we keep trying to live in our old flesh, struggling still with laws we can't seem to obey.
Why is this working out of our salvation on earth such a burden? Although we know that we are children of the promise, how can we cast off rejection, with all the inadequacies it imposes upon our sense of who we are? I struggled for many years with this isolation of spirit. Fear imposes upon us an ingrained reluctance to show our true selves, for we have accepted in our hearts we are just not good enough. For many years this fear manifested itself: in compulsive habits, in aggressive apathy, or maybe in sex, that one behavior that could create for us a feeling of intimacy as close to love as we could well believe we were ever going to get.
No person more represents this shattered identity than the man or woman caught in homosexuality. Half of who you are has always seemed to be missing. Through fear, through conscious choices, or through lack of choices, you never were able to allow your masculine or feminine side to develop--so you rejected it. False intimacy seemed a solution to your alienation from self and society. You might even have bought the lie that you were born that way. However, the belief that a person was created homosexual is a lie of satan, for God does not create to destroy.
Although you may have rejected God, He never rejected you. God has not created a species of human incapable of obeying His will. Nor did He curse you with AIDs to give you a tool for self-destruction, which is the inevitable end of the self that rejects the self. Instead, He has given you the choice to believe in your heart and to be healed in your spirit, where true healing starts. Though we have been beaten down and lied to, we are all capable of choices: of good or of evil. Free will, the cause of all our problems, is also our way out.
The rejected always feel alone. Perhaps you are wondering, in contempt, how I, never having been there, could possibly know what you are going through--as though I have never fought temptation or the will to self-destruct. But the Lord would bring you out of the dark world of shame-based pleasures you have been stumbling through. In Isaiah the promise is repeated:
And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them (Isaiah 42:16 KJV)
Intellectually you may doubt. Common sense resists it. But if your spirit hears and flickers, if your heart leaps with the promise of wholeness, though you cannot in your mind believe it, you will want to read this book. Wholeness is promised for you. Listen for a little while. Surely, for a moment you can walk by faith and not by sight. God has made some mighty promises, and they were intended for you, that neither the mountains nor the valleys shall ever again consume you:
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it. (Isaiah 40:4-5 KJV)
You have been promised victory. As you read this book, you can claim the promises. As you resist the temptation to wallow in the bondage that would destroy you, you will grow to the point where you can surrender your pain. Of course, any addict knows that there is no such thing as an uncomplicated bondage, tied up with legitimate needs and illicit satisfaction. "My cure is also my disease," as a memorable drunk once said. For the homosexual this is particularly true. If this is sin, then why does lust go through and beyond the physical. Just like getting drunk on wine in the afternoon, bondage paints an irresistable picture of intimacy. Something within it reaches to the depths of our longing, to a place shared with others, a place so sweet, so high, so not the self that we despise, that it is an expression of our very self. We embrace its hoarded pleasure, made sweeter by the fragrance of death. And even though the rational mind cries out "This is insane!" we are at a place where rationality is meaningless. But it is time to crawl out of that hole. Let peace come to you, oh child of rejection. The promises are for you. My friend and brother, Dave Conklin, of H.I.V. Ministries in Grand Rapids is one witness to this miracle. " Thank you for showing me it was not me," he wrote."This is a book God truely intended to be read by everybody who suffers from rejection. Every homosexual struggler should read it."
This book is a study of rejection, what it is, where it comes from, and how Jesus heals it. How you read this book depends on your purposes for reading it. If you are coming out of bondage, this book is for you. And if this book is for you, you need to start reading it by confessing its promises. I want you to stop right here. Say this prayer out loud to yourself:
Father God, you have not given me a spirit of fear. You have given me a Spirit of power, love, and a sound mind. I will study my enemy, which is rejection, but I will not believe what my enemy tells me. I will defeat my enemy because you, Jesus, are my sword and shield. You, Jesus, are my healer. The promises in this book are the promises of your Word. They are for me. Amen.
Then read, but don't read any further than it takes to recognize yourself. When you feel you can't take it anymore, rejection is knocking at your door. Stop reading, and turn immediately to Part III, Breaking the Curse of Rejection. Read and do what is outlined there in the three chapters on Forgiveness, Deliverance, and Healing. (If you find that you reach a place where you can't go on without help, find a friend or a pastor to pray with you, who can guide you through the rough spots.) You will find a tremendous release from the pain of your past, right from the start.
Then go back to where you left off and read on. When the pain builds up, repeat the process. Healing is a purging: the dirt is cast up, like the sea throws up its mire, in waves. Each time a healing takes place, rejection loses more and more of its hold over you. In the end, you will be free; the pain will be gone. Rejection will no longer drive your life. The process of healing is rarely instantaneous. Until rejection loses its power to capsize your ship, the hurt will always remain. Let's go after rejection, then, the enemy of your soul. When it loses its power to destroy, then you can become, as God intended, "a splendid person!"
If you have a healing ministry, it is imperative that you read the whole book. But you need to know that you will not be unaffected by what you read - as virtually no one is a total stranger to rejection. It used to surprise me, when I delivered this message, to see how universally faces changed - to reveal the crushing weight of life in this world - when I spoke the word: Rejection. I have tried to deliver, in its totality, the problem of, and the solution to, rejection - just as it was revealed to me. This book contains a revelation that did not come easily, that I paid for with no little suffering, but which came as a sign that faith amid tribulation is honored.
For this reason, I believe that God put something in it that will speak directly to everyone who is seeking freedom, to honor your belief that He will do in you and through what only He can do. I believe that it is God's purpose that you might not only see and make sense of the things that secular psychologists are capable merely of defining, but also that you might put into practice the simple yet miraculous healing gifts that the Lord desires so much to give all those who minister to the hurting.
This book is not my ministry, but God's. After all, I was busily going about my little ministry of prayer to the rejected when Jesus interrupted me. Using His servant, Pastor Dave Williams, of Mt. Hope Church in Lansing, Michigan, He told me: "You must write it." He knew that when Pastor Dave tells you to do something, it's not like you can go home to think about it. I began to write, and my ministry became His ministry, which was being defined even as I committed His words to these pages. And, while I was in the process of writing, my husband's deliverance came, as a sign that God honors His promises, no matter how impossible they seem.
In addition, I owe a great deal to my friend Freddy Burtley, who accepted what God was giving me and used it in his healing. Through his willingness to do what God told me and to meditate upon what I was receiving, he helped me to clarify and commit this message to you for God's glory.
I promise you that everything in this book is true. Jesus healed me, and with the healing came the burden of my ministry. As days grow darker, the burden intensifies. Whenever I am among the people who need this message the most, these my people, I feel with Him their suffering and the intensity of His desire to make them whole. It is a burden you will share, as the light of His love becomes a reality.
Because this book is for you, He wants you to know that this is the
guarantee that goes with it, that if you are willing to let Him, He's going
to heal you too. I came, He promised, to set the captive free.