From Reject To Hall Of Fame

From Reject to Hall of Famer

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Hebrews 11:32 And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets,

Hebrews 11:33 who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed [acts of] righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions...

How many of you have finished what you were doing on your computer, went to shut it down, and were greeted by a message from Microsoft, please don't shut your computer down, Microsoft is updating its files? Or had to wait while your computer was booting with a blue screen that said, update number 1 of 37?

No matter where you are or where you go they are hunting for you. They are everywhere, and they are always lurking. They search for the vulnerable, and even in the strongest of people they are looking for a way to get in and rob you of everything they can. Hackers, scammers, spammers. There are corporations whose sole purpose is to provide protection for us against those that would do us harm. There are hundreds of thousands of people employed in the never ending battle. In 2011 alone the US spent almost 79 billion dollars if the field of cyber security, and 1 man, 1 man - Edward Snowden, by himself, proved it was not enough.

The Chinese, the North Koreans, the Russians, are hacking into everything they can, and so are we. Our government is recording every phone call in some countries, and for all we know they are recording every call on the planet. The cold war was nothing compared to what is being played out all across the globe on a daily basis. World War III is already underway, not a war of bullets and guns but of hackers launching attacks at each other.

If Chinese soldiers came in person to the gates of one of our military complexes and tried to steal our equipment we would declare war on them, and that is exactly what is happening in the cyber realm, it is an undeclared, but very real war.

Google records and analyzes everything you do on their site as a tool to exploit that knowledge to sell it to advertisers, and who knows who else? Courts have ruled there is no fundamental right to privacy on Internet searches.

The same thing that is happening in the electronic world is also happening in the physical world. Virus's, pathogens, minuscule organisms are lurking everywhere and trying to get in your body and take over. When they see a wound they leap to action.

The same thing is also happening in the spiritual world. Wounds become access points for spiritual infection. There are beings who are hell bent on your destruction, and they also are looking for an opening, an access point, a way in, a place they can secretly multiply in the dark, with the hope of becoming dominant. Today I am going to talk about one area of attack but more importantly I am going to talk about its remedy.

I want to talk about rejection.

Hebrews 11 is called by many God's Hall of Fame, and it contains a partial list of God's heroes, I want to call your attention to one of them today, that you may have never heard of, and I want to preach on the topic of overcoming rejection.

Everybody faces rejection at some point in their life. It's influence on our behavior can be subtle or major. For example some people allow rejection to fester in them to the point that becomes the dominant aspect of their personality. Rejection will beat a person down, it will tell them no wants to hire them, no one cares about them, everyone thinks bad about them. That is one end of the spectrum of spiritual maladies rejection brings and just as dangerous as that is, so are the lengths people will go to, to avoid being rejected.

People will sometime compromise for acceptance, because of fear of rejection. They will abandon values and standards in order to gain or maintain acceptance in a group. Whether it is at school, work, or among friends. How many because of fear of rejection have compromised biblical sexual rules? How many have tried drugs or alcohol in order to be accepted. How many have become addicted to cigarettes and suffered a lifetime of consequences because they wanted to be accepted as a teen. Did anyone ever start smoking for a reason other than wanting to be cool, or act older, in other words to avoid rejection and increase acceptance?

Illus: Politician gets asked by a businessman, "can I count on your vote if I give you 1 million dollars?" Polotician says yes, busnessman than asks, "How about just 50 bucks?" Politician responds, "What kind of man do you think I am?" Businessman responds, "I already know what kind of man you are we are just haggling over the price." The fear of man brings a snare.