Many people walk through life carrying wounds that were never theirs to carry. A harsh comment, a cold reaction, a dismissive tone—these moments have a way of slipping past our defenses and settling deep inside us. Rabbi Kirt Schneider’s recent teaching on John 10 confronts this problem with unusual clarity. His message demands attention because it strikes at the root of emotional and spiritual exhaustion.
Schneider points to the moment when Jesus’ own words triggered intense backlash. After calling Himself the Good Shepherd, the crowd responded immediately and hostilely. “Many of them were saying, ‘He has a demon and is insane. Why do you listen to Him?’” Schneider doesn’t soften the impact. He uses it to establish a truth most people avoid: if even Jesus faced false accusation, no one should be surprised when it happens to them.
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This isn’t a call to toughness for toughness’s sake. It’s a call to discernment. “Sometimes you and I are going to be accused falsely,” Schneider says. “And when we do, we need to be careful not to let that get inside us.” That single sentence should be printed and taped to every bathroom mirror in the country. Too many people allow others’ unsteady emotions to define their own sense of worth.
And Schneider doesn’t pretend he is above the struggle. “When people don’t treat me with love or sensitivity… sometimes I don’t always have the barrier up that I need to have so that their behavior doesn’t affect my heart,” he admits. This admission strengthens his instruction, not weakens it. It reminds readers that emotional resilience is learned, not inherited.
The key argument of his teaching is straightforward: much of the negativity we face from others stems from their own brokenness. “Why did these people treat Jesus the way they treated Him?” he asks. He answers by quoting Jesus’ own explanation: “They were being led by the devil. They didn’t realize they were being led by the devil.” In other words, people can act with confidence and even outrage while being utterly unaware of the forces shaping their reactions.
Schneider then describes a reality countless people experience but rarely articulate. “We live in a broken world. People are messed up,” he says. He talks about individuals shaped by childhood rejection, unkind parents, constant comparison or a lifetime of feeling inferior. “Hurting people hurt people,” Schneider notes. This isn’t a slogan. It’s a diagnosis.
Once you understand this dynamic, your entire emotional framework changes. Mistreatment is no longer automatically interpreted as personal failure. You stop carrying the weight of other people’s wounds. “When someone treats us wrongly because they’re messed up, we shouldn’t let the evil that’s coming out of them towards us get in us,” Schneider says. It is one of the most liberating statements a believer can internalize.
To ground this idea in reality, Schneider shares his own encounter with a teacher who insulted him during a paid lesson. “He had no reason to be insulting me… But he was broken,” he says. The critical moment came not in the insult, but in Schneider’s response. “It was a matter of ascending up, realizing what I’m dealing with, that the issue wasn’t me, it was him.” That shift—recognizing the true source of the behavior—spared him unnecessary emotional injury.
Schneider’s lesson carries a clear takeaway: you must build a separation between your identity and the reactions of unstable people. “God, Jesus, does not want you and I to be hurting all the time because broken people have not treated us right,” he says. Emotional survival depends on spiritual clarity. Without it, every careless word becomes a wound and every damaged person becomes an emotional threat.
His closing prayer reinforces the heart of the message: “Help us, Lord, to begin to put a separation in our spiritual space so that when people are unkind… we don’t let that get in us.” That prayer is not a request for escape; it is a request for inner strength.
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And that is the point of Schneider’s teaching. You cannot control who speaks, how they speak or why they speak. But you can control what you let inside you. You can recognize brokenness for what it is. You can refuse to carry shame that never belonged to you. You can walk with dignity even when someone else is unraveling.
James Lasher, a seasoned writer and editor at Charisma Media, combines faith and storytelling with a background in journalism from Otterbein University and ministry experience in Guatemala and the LA Dream Center. A Marine Corps and Air Force veteran, he is the author of The Revelation of Jesus: A Common Man’s Commentary and a contributor to Charisma magazine.
