Rejected For Us

He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
Isaiah 53:3 NKJV

When I was a young girl in middle school, I felt very awkward and gawky, somewhat of an outcast of the "in-crowd" of girls and boys. I vividly remember a time at our baseball park in town. It was summer, and everybody was hanging out at the park watching the little league games. I spotted a group of my classmates on some bleachers and proceeded to make my way over to where they were. As soon as I got there, I timidly sat down on one of the benches. Within a minute, every classmate sitting on that bench got up in unison and left me all alone on the bench without every saying a word.

Well, as you can guess, inside I was crushed and heartbroken. Many of you reading this blog can relate with your own various stories of personal rejection. The school ground, in fact, can be a literal cesspool of this type of behavior. Yet, even today, as I was pondering rejection, I began to think of how utterly rejected our Lord Jesus Christ was while He was here on this earth. He was rejected far more than my piddly middle school experiences can ever comprehend. Yet, Jesus felt the pain of rejection just as we do. He experienced this very real sorrow and pain in His own body. And He experienced it all for us.

You see, He carried all our sorrows, rejections and sin so that we wouldn't have to. He chose to humble himself and experience it all in its fullness so that He could empathize with us perfectly. How I thank Him for this, and how it makes me want to fight even more for the rejected of our society, for those with no voice, for those who are overlooked and ignored, for those who face a world of rejection each and every day. May we walk with our eyes open, watching for the rejected ones, knowing that in their faces we will see Christ.