Fear Factor: “Leah—The Fear of Rejection” (Genesis 29)
M. Cameron McDonald
February 15, 2004
Intro:
ILL: HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE MOVIE BACK TO THE FUTURE? IN THE MOVIE, MARTY McFLY GOES BACK IN TIME TO THE YEAR 1955, TO MAKE SURE THAT HIS MOM FALLS IN LOVE WITH HIS DAD. AND THERE IS A SCENE WHERE MARTY TRIES TO GET HIS DAD TO ASK HER OUT. AND HIS DAD SAYS, “YOU MEAN ON A DATE?” AND MARTY SAYS, “YEAH.” AND THE DAD SAYS, “GEE I DON’T KNOW, MARTY. I MEAN, WHAT IF SHE SAYS NO? WHAT IF SHE LAUGHS AT ME? I JUST DON’T THINK I CAN TAKE THAT KIND OF REJECTION. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?”
AND MARTY LOOKED DOWN AND SAID, “YES, YES I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN.”
A. Do you know what he means?
a. I think we can all resonate with that, I mean as humans we hate being rejected, in any form. Why? Because rejection hurts.
b. Whether it is on the playground at recess, at school growing up, asking a date to the prom, asking for a hand in marriage, or maybe it is on the job, or maybe it’s from your spouse or a child.
c. Wherever it comes from we can all agree it hurts, it damages, it bruises our ego, and I would be willing to bet that it is an emotion that we can all agree we would like to do without.
d. But in our sinful nature, we understand that hurts for us to be rejected, but it is not so bad when that rejection happens to somebody else. Because it makes us feel a little better, and it allows us to compare our situations and ourselves with someone else.
EX: I think that is why millions of Americans tune in every week to shows like “American Idol” or “The Bachelor or Bachelorette.” Yeah the show is entertaining, but for the most part we love the rejection part of it. The best part of the Bachelor is the last 10 minutes when they have the rose ceremony and the interviews of the contestants who got rejected, and just to see their humiliation and how they handle it.
Simon the British guy on American Idol has made millions of dollars and quite a name for himself simply by belittling and demoralizing potential candidates.
e. As human beings we seems to enjoy this rejection when viewing it safely from the comforts of our living rooms, but when we experience it first hand that is a whole different story.
f. It makes our stomach turns, it leaves us with feeling and emotions and thoughts that we never thought we were capable of having we say things we wouldn’t normally say, we think thoughts we would not normally think, all because we feel like we have been trashed inside and deemed worthless by another human being.
B. Well today I am continuing the series Fear Factor.
a. And we are going to take a look at an uncommon character in the Bible who felt this rejection on a daily basis.
b. I want us to draw some parallels with her situation and see how maybe we can gain strength from it.
c. If you have your Bibles get them out and turn to Genesis 29, and we are going to look at the story of Leah.
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I. Now this is a story that you are probably not aware that you know.
A. It is found nestled in the Genesis account about Jacob the son of Isaac.
a. Now remember Jacob is considered a trickster, when his father is old and nearly blind, Jacob dresses up as his older twin brother Esau, and get his father to bless him with the birthright
b. Well this of course infuriates Esau and so Jacob hits the road and is on the run from his older brother because of the swindling.
c. So Jacob begins to travel and he decides to go far away to his mom’s brother’s home, his uncle Laban. Let’s pick up the story there in verse 16.
SCRIP: Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. 17 Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was lovely in form, and beautiful.
d. Now what the text says right there is basically a polite way of saying Leah was ugly.
e. And this is not something that is news to her, she is fully aware, and was aware all the more because all her life people saw her with her younger sister, Rachel, who happened to be absolutely beautiful, and in contrast Leah looked all the more ugly.
ILL: ASHTON KUTCHER IS A YOUNG STAR IN HOLLYWOOD, WHO GAINED NOTIRIETY BY FIRST BEING A MODEL FOR ALL THE BIG NAMES. THE OTHER DAY I HAPPENED TO BE FLIPPING THROUGH THE CHANNLES WHEN I TURNED TO A DOCUMENTARY ON ASHTON KUTCHER’S LIFE, I LEARNED THAT HE HAS AN OLDER BROTHER WHO HAS SOME MAJOR DISABILITIES. NOW IT IS ONE THING FOR HIM TO BE HANDICAPPED, AND I AM SURE PEOPLE FELT SORRY FOR HIM, BUT TO HAVE THIS MEGA STAR FOR A LITTLE BROTHER, PEOPLE FEEL ALL THE MORE SORRY FOR HIM. THEY WONDER HOW DID SUCH OPPOSITES COME FROM THE SAME FAMILY.
f. And Leah was severely handicapped by her looks, and this stood out all the more when contrasted with her little sister. I use the word handicap to show you how drastic looks were in this time period.
NOTE: It is important for you to understand that historically for women back then a lot of their worth and self image came from the surface and not from within. Because when a woman was born no one paid too much attention, yes Leah was the oldest daughter, but all that birth order entitled her to was head servant in her father’s household. And since being born a woman was not necessarily a good thing she came out of the womb with one strike against her, all a woman could hope for was that she would grow up to be beautiful, this would alleviate some of the difficulty from an already hard life, well this turned out to be strike two for Leah, because as we have just understood, beautiful was about the farthest thing from the truth in Leah’s case. And because her worth was derived from appearance This just serves to illustrate what a loving God we have, because he makes it clear throughout Scripture that man looks out the outward appearance but God looks at the heart, he searches much deeper within. But because man looks and judges by the outward appearance this is not good news for Leah.
B. And we can assume that Leah has felt hurt, pain, and rejection all her life, so it should come to no surprise to us when we read on in verse 18 that:
SCRIP: 18 Jacob was in love with Rachel and said, "I’ll work for you seven years in return for your younger daughter Rachel."
a. Here was a man of prominence pledging his life away for seven years just to be able to marry her little sister.
i. This just intensified the hurt and made the pain go all the deeper, she knew that no man, would want to marry her let alone say that he would work 7 years of his life away just to have her hand in marriage.
ii. She thought the only way I will ever get married is if my father pays some poor man a handsome dowry to take me off his hands.
b. Now Leah at this point has got to be hurting all the more, after all this was the way she was made, it’s not like she chose the way she looked, and if given the choice she would have chosen to be beautiful any day over the way she looked, she would have even chosen to be just plain and mediocre in comparison to the way she looked.
c. And you know what it doesn’t seem like to much has changed in this day and age. A lot of women in Leah’s position today feel rejected and hurt, because they don’t look a certain way, or they don’t fit the scrupulous profile of the way a woman should look.
ILL: YESTERDAY WAS NOT A GOOD DAY FOR PEOPLE TO BE IN LEAH’S SHOES, BEING VALENTINES DAY, MY SISTER IN LAW CALLS IT “SINGLE’S AWARENESS DAY.” BUT EVERY WOMAN WANTS TO BE LOVED AND WANTED AND TOLD THAT SHE IS BEAUTIFUL.
EX: I read a survey asking women in America if they had the choice what would they prefer between being incredibly beautiful or being incredibly smart. And the overwhelming majority said they would prefer to be beautiful.
JK: A husband who was ticked off at his wife, and in his anger he lashed out and asked her, “How can you be so pretty, and yet so dumb?” His wife quickly replied, “I am pretty so that you will love me. I am dumb so that I can love you!”
QUOTE: The average woman would prefer to have beauty over brains because most men can see better than they can think.
d. One lesson we can take away from this is that as Christians we need to be sensitive to people’s pain and hurt, and we need to remind them that there is more to this life than simply the way one looks.
II. Whatever the case, Jacob worked his seven years.
A. The Bible points out that those seven years seemed just like days because of the anticipation of getting his prize, the beautiful love of his life.
a. I am sure he counted down the days, seven years of waiting eventually turned into just 7 months and then two months and finally the day came.
ILL: MY WIFE AND I MOVED THE DATE OF OUR WEDDING UP FROM November to AUGUST BUT THE FIRST WEEK OF JUNE THE DATE WAS STILL SET FOR NOVEMBER AND I REMEMBER GOING ON VACATION WITH THEIR ENTIRE FAMILY. WHILE ON VACATION WE HAD ALREADY BEEN ENGAGED FOR CLOSE TO THREE MONTHS, AND WAITING ANOTHER 6 FELT LIKE TORTURE. I MEAN I WAS ABOUT A 150 DAYS OUT FROM OUR ORIGINAL WEDDING DATE, AND I COULD NOT TAKE IT. IMAGINE JACOB COUNTING DOWN THE DAYS, “OKAY, JUST 2,234 DAYS LEFT, I MEAN THAT HAD TO BE AGONY.
b. But Jacob kept a good spirit about it, he worked hard, and the Bible says the years went by like days. So the day comes and Jacob goes to Laban and says, all right I kept my end of the deal, now its time you held up yours now give me my wife.
SCRIP: 22 So Laban brought together all the people of the place and gave a feast. 23 But when evening came, he took his daughter Leah and gave her to Jacob, and Jacob lay with her. 25 When morning came, there was Leah! So Jacob said to Laban, "What is this you have done to me? I served you for Rachel, didn’t I? Why have you deceived me?" Laban replied, "It is not our custom here to give the younger daughter in marriage before the older one. 27 Finish this daughter’s bridal week; then we will give you the younger one also, in return for another seven years of work."
c. This is a tough passage for Leah. I picture her shaking as she goes to bed with Jacob knowing that the truth will be exposed in at dawn, and then I picture her back in the tent waking up with a churning feeling inside her stomach to the sounds of her new husbands screaming at her father for making him marry her.
d. This just reemphasized in her mind, her thoughts and feeling of worthlessness, because the only way she got married in the first place was in deceit and in one big scam.
NOTE: You must understand that in those days it was customary when a couple got married that the woman be veiled completely, from head to toe. And we aren’t sure but we can assume that when the feast and festivities were over and it was time for the couple to consummate their marriage it was well into the night, and so inside the tent it was probably very dark. So Jacob did not realize it was Leah, until the light of the early morning woke him and he rolled over to a big surprise.
a. It is interesting that Jacob the ultimate trickster had just been tricked in the worst way.
b. But while the arguing was ensuing, Leah had to feel worthless.
B. Her worth was derived now from what her husband thought of her.
a. And I just want to use this as an opportunity to speak to the ladies in this room for a second.
b. It is imperative for you to get to a place in your spiritual life where your self-image is not predicated by commercials, or models, movie stars, or fashion fads; but on what God thinks about you.
ILL: I was reading last week about a magazine where the actress, Michelle Pfeiffer, was on the cover and on the cover it said this, “What Michelle Pfeiffer needs” and at the bottom, “Absolutely nothing.” It turns out she did need something. A reporter got hold of the touch-up artist’s bill for the cover of this magazine and it was around fifteen hundred dollars.
Here’s the break down of the touch-up work that needed to be done to her photo.
Clean up complexion, soften eye lines, soften smile line, add color to lips, trim chin, remove neck lines, soften lines under ear lobes, add highlights to earrings, add blush to cheek, clean up neck line, remove stray hair, remove hair strands on dress, adjust color and add hair on top of head, add dress on side to create better line, add forehead, add dress on shoulders, soften neck muscle a bit, clean up and smooth dress folds under arm. Total cost, one thousand five hundred and twenty five dollars.
c. You know, that is not a realistic standard. Women, you are never to be content with how you look on the outside. If tomorrow morning every woman in America woke up and looked in the mirror and liked what she saw, our entire economy would collapse!
SCRIP: The Bible says that beauty is fleeing and charm is deceptive but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. (Prov 31:30)
QUOTE: Ian Pitman Watson said, “There are something’s that are loved because they are valuable; there are other things that are valuable because they are loved.”
NOTE: And ladies it doesn’t matter if you are a beauty or not, you are valuable because who you are loved by. Not your husband’s love, your parent’s love, your children’s love, your grandchildren’s love, but because the God of the universe was so head over heels in love with you that He came Himself to tell you about it and then show you by dying on the cross for you, and he would have done that if you were the only person on this earth.
SCRIP: This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. (1 John 4:9)
ILL: Christian author Liz Curtis Higgs is a member of my home church and she has a very interesting testimony. Back in the early 80’s she moved to Louisville from Detroit as a radio personality, just as crude as they come, known as a shock jock, she said I was so bad that even Howard Stern, who she worked with in Detroit, once shook her head at her and said, “Liz you need to clean up your act. She said I was anything but a Christian, but when she came to Louisville to host a radio show, she met some people who had just started attending southeast, and they invited her to come. Well she reluctantly agreed. She said I was the epitomy of a Women’s Lib feminist, and on the day I decided reluctantly I would go to church with this couple the preacher was preaching on “Wives submitting to your husband.” This made her all the more sick in her stomach at the thought of going to church, but then Bob talked about the need for the husband to be like Christ and to be willing to lay down his life for his wife. This shook Lizz and she leaned over to the couple that had invited her and said, “If I ever met a man that would die for me, I’d marry him in a minute.” And Ev the woman who had invited her whispered back, “Liz, a man has already died for you.” From that time on a stirring was placed in her soul and she attended the next week and then the next week and she joined the choir, and today she has shaped the Christian movement in the entire US by her writings and teachings and you know what this all happened because she realized where her true worth came from.
d. Ladies please understand that God loves you so much that He came to this earth to die for you; and your beauty, worth and self-image should be found in Him and what He thinks of you.
e. And you must realize that your beauty and value and worth is not predicated on how you look on the outside, but who you are on the inside. It is not the $100 hair do or the French manicure, the designer labels you don on special occasions, the 30 hours a week you put in in the gym; but it is the hidden man in your heart who is adorned with a meek quiet spirit, which is so beautiful it is irresistible in God’s sight.
ILL: Tom Schmidt wrote about an unordinary friend he made in an unordinary place. He writes, “The state-run convalescent hospital is not a pleasant place. It is large, understaffed, and overfilled with senile and helpless people who are waiting to die. On the brightest of days it seems dark inside, and it smells of sickness and stale urine. I went there once or twice a week for 4 years, but I never wanted to go there, and I always left with a sense of relief, it is not the kind of place one gets used to.
On this particular day I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before, looking in vain for a few people who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases, strapped onto carts or wheelchairs and looking completely helpless.
“As I neared the end of this hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheel chair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence she drooled constantly. I was told later that when new nurses arrived, the supervisors would send them to feed this woman, thinking that if they could stand this sight, they could withstand anything in the building. I also learned later that this woman was 89 years old and that she had been there, bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone for 25 years. This was Mabel.
“I don’t know why I spoke to her, she looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, “Here is a flower for you, happy Mother’s day. She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, and then she spoke. And much to my surprise, her words, though somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, “Thank you. It’s lovely. But can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I am blind.’
I said, “Of course,” and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, “here, this is from Jesus.”
That was when it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being. Later I wheeled her back to her room and learned more about her history. She had grown up on a small farm that she managed with only her mother until her mother died. Then she ran the farm alone until 1950 were her blindness and sickness sent her to the convalescent hospital. For 25 years she got weaker and sicker, with constant headaches, backaches, and stomachaches, and then the cancer came too. Her 3 roommates were all human vegetables who screamed occasionally but never talked. They often soiled their bedclothes, and because the hospital was understaffed, especially on Sundays when I would usually visit, the stench was often over powering.
“Mabel and I became friends over the next 3 years. Her first words to me were usually an offer of hard candy from a tissue box near her bed. Some days I would read to her from the Bible, and often when I would pause she would continue reciting the passage from memory, word for word. On other days I would take a book of hymns and sing with her, and she would know all the words of the old songs. For Mabel, these were not merely exercises in memory. She would often stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics she considered particularly relevant to her own situation. I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain except in the stress she placed on certain lines in certain hymns.
Then one day the question occurred to me, What does Mabel have to think about—hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know whether its day or night.? So I went to her and asked, “Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?”
And she said, “I think about my Jesus.”
I sat there and thought for a moment about the difficulty for me of thinking about Jesus for 5 minutes, and I asked, “What do you think about Jesus?” She replied slowly and deliberately:
“I think about how good He’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life you know…I am one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied….Lot’s of folks wouldn’t care much about what I think. Lot’s of folks would think I am kind of old fashioned. But I don’t care, I’d rather have Jesus. He is all the world to me.”
f. Friends no matter how ugly and disfigured Mabel was on the outside, in God’s eyes she is traffic stopping beautiful.
III. Jacob’s Reluctance
A. Well after hours of arguing Jacob reluctantly agreed to finish out the honeymoon week with Leah, and then he would get his prize, Rachel for a wife.
a. But it was going to cost him, but at this point, Jacob did not care, so he worked hard for another 7 years, but these 7 years came a little harder because he had already gotten what he wanted.
NOTE: It is kind of like credit card debt that we talked about a few weeks ago. It is whole lot easier and more fun to work for something for a long time and then pay for it in cash, than to buy it now on credit and work 7 years to pay off.
b. But Jacob wasn’t unwise he had just been cheated and as a result he was sort of paying off his wife by working another 7 years.
a. This had to rob him a little of the joy that should come with marriage.
b. He woke up every day probably resenting Rachel a little while just absolutely despising Leah.
c. In verse 30 we read that Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah, and I am sure that Leah felt that hostility and resentment every single day as the torment of her rejection set in even further, in her lifetime she never felt the love that Rachel felt.
d. A preacher friend of mine suggested that one of the reason’s why Jacob never loved Leah, was because she was a constant reminder of him being duped by his uncle, and then a reminder of his past and how he was a deceiver himself.
e. And we should be aware that sometimes when we face rejection it may not be personal against us, but it is being taken out on us because of unresolved problems in the life of the person doing the rejecting, and we should be sensitive to that as well.
f. But whatever the case with Jacob one thing we know for sure is that he simply did not love Leah.
SCRIP: vs 31 When the LORD saw that Leah was not loved, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. 32 Leah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Reuben, for she said, "It is because the LORD has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now."
g. I think that this is one of the saddest verses in this passage because it is so true human nature.
h. And we look around and see women all the time in this same situation, just desperate to be loved willing to do anything to give anything just to be loved in return.
ILL: SEVERAL MONTHS AGO A PREACHER FRIEND OF MINE AND MYSELF WENT DOWNTOWN TO SPEAK ONE NIGHT TO A GROUP OF SINGLE MOMS. WE DIDN’T QUITE KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT AND SO WE WERE A LITTLE SHOCKED TO FIND OUT THAT THE AVERAGE AGE OF THIS SINGLE MOTHER’S GROUP WAS ABOUT 17 YEARS OLD, SOME OLDER, SOME YOUNGER, AND SOME WITH MORE THAN JUST ONE CHILD. BUT WE WENT THEIR TO PREACH, BUT WE WALKED AWAY LEARNING MORE THAN WE COULD HAVE EVER IMPARTED.
WHEN WE WERE FINISHED WE HAD A QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION AND IT WAS APPARENT THAT NONE OF THESE GIRLS HAD EVER KNOWN LOVE. THEY HAD BEEN REJECTED AT EVERY TURN IN LIFE, THEY ALL GREW UP WITHOUT A FATHER AND SO THAT WAS THE FIRST REJECTION OF THEIR LIFE RIGHT THERE, AND SADLY IT WAS ALL DOWN HILL FROM THERE. AND MORE THAN ANYTHING ALL THESE LADIES WANTED WAS JUST TO BE LOVED. WE HEARD TALE AFTER TALE OF THESE WOMEN’S LIVES AND HOW THEY GAVE THEMSELVES TO THIS GUY AND THEN THAT GUY ALL BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT THAT WOULD MAKE HIM LOVE HER, THEN THEY GOT PREGNANT AND HE WAS GONE OUT OF THEIR LIVES JUST AS FAST AS HE HAD ENTERED IT. AND SO ONCE AGAIN THESE GIRLS TASTED THE BITTER FRUIT OF REJECTION.
i. And so reading this verse I find it especially sad because it is just so relatable.
j. Leah thought here I gave him something that Rachel can never give him, a son, but we find that even that was not enough.
k. But like most women in this condition they are not done trying to get this love. So we read on.
SCRIP: 33 She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, "Because the LORD heard that I am not loved, he gave me this one too." So she named him Simeon.34 Again she conceived, and when she gave birth to a son she said, "Now at last my husband will become attached to me, because I have borne him three sons." So he was named Levi.35 She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, "This time I will praise the LORD." So she named him Judah. Then she stopped having children.
C. Leah was having a difficult time understanding that nothing she could do would ever win her the love of her husband.
a. This was all because she was after the love of the wrong man, she was so dead set and had such tunnel vision about how she could win the love of her husband that we can surmise that she forgot about to whom her first love should be.
b. And this is so true; we see this everywhere we turn today.
QUOTE: The French philosopher Blaze Pascal said that in every human being’s heart there is a hole that only Jesus Christ can fill.
c. And people today understand that they have this hole that is no mystery you hear this concept talked about all the time, they are just left clueless as to what is supposed to fill this hole.
d. So they try working 12-hour days thinking there might be fulfillment in the form of a perk or bonus or promotion or position, or they fill their hole with pills and anti-depressants or by drinking heavily every evening, or by relationships, or with drugs and sometimes with a lethal combination of everything.
SCRIP EX: Jesus encountered a woman like this, remember in John 4 when Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem and he cut through Samaria where he got tired and decided to stop and rest. Well while there He stopped at a well and as He was sitting there a woman came to draw water. So Jesus struck up a conversation with this woman, and He amazed her by telling her all about herself, and He said that she had been married five times and was now living with a man who was not her husband. And the conversation went on and Jesus said, you see you have tried all these different things to satisfy you, you have tried relationships and marriage, 5 times marriage and you are living with a man right now who is not even your husband, you see nothing is satisfying you because it is not meant to, you see I am the man you are looking for, I am what you have been searching for I am the only one who was ever meant to satisfy you.
e. And so many people wander through this life facing rejection on every front nearly every day, never realizing that they are the ones rejecting the one who can truly satisfy them.
f. Friends only Jesus Christ can fill that void in your life.
g. Everything on this earth that is said to be awesome and great can only being you pleasure and happiness for a short time, and pretty soon the new wears off and you toss it aside, only Christ can satisfy eternally.
IV. Leah Disappears
A. Well not much more happens to Leah.
a. Just this cycle of trying to please Jacob and facing rejection and giving him more things and children and being turned down at every turn.
b. This is really a sad story as she disappears from the pages not much can be said about her, other than she was dealt a bad hand in life, she tried her best to do and give as was expected of her, but in the end it proved not to be enough because she never gained the love she so desperately sought after.
ILL: Fred Craddock tells that he and his wife Nettie were vacationing in the Smoky Mountains years ago. While eating dinner at the Black Bear Inn in Cosby, outside of Gatlinburg an elderly man approached our table and said, “Good Evening.” I said, “Good evening.” He said, “are you on vacation?” I said, “Yes” but really under my breath I was saying, it’s really none of your business.
Where are you from he asked?
“We’re from Oklahoma.”
What do you do in Oklahoma?
Under my breath but almost audible I was saying, “Leave us alone.” We’re on vacation, and we don’t know who you are. But I said, “I am a Christian Minister.”
He said, What church?
I said, “The Christian Church.”
He paused for a moment and said, “I owe a great deal to a minister of the Christian Church,” and he pulled out a chair and sat down.
I said, “Yes, have a seat.” I tried to make it seem like I sincerely meant it, but I didn’t, who is this person, I thought to myself.
He said, “I grew up in these mountains. My mother was not married, and the whole community knew it. I was an illegitimate child. In those days that was a shame, and I was ashamed. The reproach that fell on her, of course fell also on me. When I went into town with her, I could see people staring at me, making guesses as to who my Father was. At school the children said ugly things to me, and so I stayed to myself during recess, and I ate my lunch alone. In my early teens I began to attend a little church back in the mountains called Laurel Springs Christian Church. It had a minister who was both attractive and frightening. He had a chiseled face and a heavy beard and a deep voice. I went to hear him preach. I don’t know exactly why, but it did something for me. However, I was afraid I was not welcome since I was illegitimate. So I would go just in time for the sermon, and when it was over I would move out because I was afraid that someone would say, “What’s a boy like you doing in church?” One Sunday some people lined up in the aisle before I could get out, and I was stopped. Before I could make my way through the group, I felt a hand on my shoulder, a heavy hand. I cut my eyes around and caught a glimpse of his beard and his chin, and I knew who it was, I trembled in fear. He turned his face around so that he could see mine and seemed to be staring at it for a while. I knew what he was doing. He was going to make a guess at who my father was. A moment later he said, “Well boy, you’re a child of…” he paused there. And I knew it was coming. I knew I would have my feelings hurt. I knew I would not go back again. He said, “Boy you are a child of God.” I see a striking resemblance boy. Then he swatted me on the bottom and said, “now you go and claim your inheritance. I left the building a different person. In fact, that was really the beginning of my life.”
I was so moved by the story I had to ask him, “What is your name?”
He said, “Ben Hooper.”
I recalled, though vaguely, my own father talking what I was just a child about how the people of Tennessee had twice elected as governor an illegitimate child—Ben Hooper.
c. You see what the world deems as worthless God can use in incredible ways.
Conclusion:
A. Some lessons I hope we have learned from today are:
i. As Christians we need to be sensitive to the pain of others and we should be instruments that God uses to let others know that they have eternal worth in the eyes of God.
ii. That when people reject us a lot of times it stems from personal pain they have experienced in their life
iii. We should expect rejection in life, but we should look at it as a test that God gives us to see how well we handle the rejection of people in light of our acceptance we get unconditionally from Him.
B. Well I said Leah disappeared from the pages of the Bible with nothing but a sad pitiful story of rejection.
a. But that is not entirely true because there is one more mention of Leah found in Chapter 35:23
SCRIP: The sons of Leah: Reuben the firstborn of Jacob, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and Zebulun.
b. It just a genealogy it doesn’t sound like much, but notice one of her sons is named Judah, and I mentioned that her sons went on to become the tribes in Israel.
c. Well the tribe of Judah was the kingly line, David was in this line and later on Jesus Christ.
d. You see though Leah’s life was filled with rejection but little did she understand that in God’s eternal plan He had much more in mind, and that through her, and her pain and suffering, would come the man of pain and suffering the man of sorrows Jesus Christ, the hope and the redeemer of the world.
e. Which is the final lesson I hope you take home today and that is despite your pain, imperfection and rejection God still has an incredible plan for your life.
SCRIP: The Bible says weeping may last for a night but Joy comes in the morning.
