Have you ever been told you couldn’t be part of a group, or even a family? Some, if not many of us probably experienced something like this as children or teens, maybe even as adults. Being rejected because you were told you were weird, ugly or just not “one of us”. Maybe your family wasn’t as affluent as other kids’ families. That may describe your high school years, college days or job experience. For whatever reason, you found yourself on the outside looking in, until you started believing whatever horrible things people said about you.

You might have become a loner, thinking you would never be accepted or convincing yourself that you didn’t need them anyway. Maybe it led to something much worse, like losing yourself in addiction and slow self-destruction, ending in your believing that your life had no value, no worth, and that God could never love or accept you.

I thought of this while considering the Temple in Jerusalem in Old Testament times. Imagine being from a country other than Israel who had heard of the God of the Israelites and come to believe in Him because He was the true God. You go to Jerusalem, wanting to be part of His worship, and you arrive at the Temple. You enter the Court of the Gentiles (that was the term for non-Jewish people) and you come to a gate that tells you that’s as close as you can get, and to enter any closer would mean death. Worse yet, outside the temple you’re treated as an outcast, looked down upon by those who call themselves His chosen people.

Move forward in time to the first century AD (or CE as it’s now known). Centuries have now past since the establishment of the old law, during which time more and more rules that have nothing to do with the law have been attached to it. Now anyone who doesn’t follow the rules to the letter is considered a ‘sinner’ by those who are in charge and are insufferable in their self-righteousness. It’s become even harder to draw closer to God because of all the extra fences that have been built to keep people away from Him. It’s small wonder that most people had lost hope of ever being good enough, much less accepted by God.

There is good new for you, just as there was for those poor hopeless souls back then who had been told repeatedly that they weren’t good enough. God injected Himself into history in the person of His son, who announced His reason for being here: “And the scroll of Isaiah was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor. He has anointed Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

Look closely at how He announced Himself to the world. He didn’t say, “I came for the ones who do the best job of keeping all the rules, the ones who are the trend setters, the rich, the beautiful, the talented, the ones everyone else wants to be.” He said He came for you and me. The ones who aren’t valuable by the standards of the world. The ones who have lost hope. The ones who may hate the life they have. The ones who have given up.

Because you need to understand something. God’s standards of value doesn’t work the way the world does. He created each one of us, and He dearly loves all of His creation, not just the bright shiny parts. He loves the people who realize their lives are a mess but are willing to turn them over to Him anyway. Jesus came to earth for one purpose: to die as perfect payment for all our sins because we can never be good enough to do it ourselves.

Even more than that, He died to open the door to God. You don’t have to stand at a distance anymore. When you choose to give your old broken life to Jesus He’ll give you a new one, one where He will choose to live with you along with God the Father and the Spirit, and God will call you His child. His will be the only voice you need to hear, and the only opinion that matters. You will have brothers and sisters who will love you because you will be part of a family who are all loved-equally.

The Gospel is called the Good News, and so it is-Jesus died for our sins and gave us a new life and a new name. But if you ever felt the sting of rejection to the point of despairing over ever being acceptable to someone, it’s REALLY good news-God has always loved you to the point of paying an extravagant, horrible price to make you His.