The Mirror of the Word by C.E. White can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Word-Devotions-Reveal-Refine/dp/B0DFZS83C7  To learn more about this author and other words, visit https://cewhitebooks.com/

“He has no stately form or majesty that we would look at him, nor an appearance that we would take pleasure in him. He was despised and abandoned by men, a man of great pain and familiar with sickness; and like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised, and we had no regard for him.”

—Isaiah 53:2–3

Reading this prophetic passage about Jesus, we would not want to be this man.

We want to be attractive and look powerful. We want people to admire our appearance. We want to be loved and embraced by men; we don’t want to live with pain. We want to be considered important and to gain success in the eyes of others.

But the servant is not greater than his master. We must be willing to live like unappreciated servants (John 13:15–17) and to endure persecution (John 15:20).

And yet we’re surprised and offended when we, in all our brokenness and imperfection, are rejected or mistreated. Jesus is the human embodiment of everything that is good, true, perfect, holy, lovely, and loving, yet rejection and mistreatment is how we, in our humanity, received him.

Even if we’re walking perfectly according to the Lord’s plan, there will be those who hate and mistreat us. It’s our duty to make sure their only reason is our association with Christ, not because of any wrong we’ve done to them or others. “For what credit is there if, when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God” (1 Peter 2:20).

We can endure injustice as Christ did—for the eternal joy set before us (Hebrews 12:2).

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