Pastors often struggle with the challenge of being kind and loving toward those who hate them and despise their teaching and message. It is easier to avoid them rather than to face their disapproval or outright animosity. We tend to avoid painful experiences. This is just the tendency of fallen human nature. This was not God's tendency. When Adam and Eve fell into enmity against God by disobeying His Word, God still sought them out, pursuing them in the Garden calling them by name. How easy it would have been for God to ignore those rebels and cut them off from His fellowship; a fellowship which they despised and severed. He will not act like us. He will not abandon His creatures. He puts His reputation on the line by seeking and saving those who had become lost.

Christ has not shown aversion to us. He has not despised or avoided our company, although He had every reason to do so. Even when He knew that that company would cause great suffering for Him, cause His death, even death on the cross, He still pursued those who despised and avoided Him. His call to us changes our relationship with those who hate us. We may not despise them any more than our Lord despised us when we hated Him. His relationship with us has been changed that our human relationships might also be changed. We are freed to give honor and regard to those whom the world neither honors nor regards. We cannot bear to despise those who despise us, because our Lord did not.

Our reputations are not on the line when we condescend to serve those who hate and despise us. In pursuing us with such passion, our Lord has freed us from the fear of losing our status. There is nothing to lose! For our status is not centered in ourselves, our works, our efforts, and actions. Our status is Christ's status in the sight of God: son, child, heir, and beloved. No despite or anger against us can change that. Who Christ is for us cannot be taken away by others. Who we are for them is established not by our works, but by Christ's. The loss of our status, then, is losing nothing at all. In the office of serving those in need much may be given up in sacrifice and acceptance of offense. This is Christ's way of treating us. He made Himself nothing, who had everything, that we who were nothing might do everything in Him. Church leaders then are able in Christ to give themselves up to the need of those who are weak. They suffer the animosity of others for the good of those others. Jesus did.