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Leah—The
Fear of Rejection Introduction: A. Do you know what he means? 1.
Back to the Future a)
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.” 2.
We can all relate to that - as humans we hate being rejected,
in any form, because rejection hurts. a)
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. b)
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. B. A Little Known Character 1.
We are going to look at an uncommon character in the Bible
who felt this rejection on a daily basis. 2.
We will draw some parallels with her situation and see how we
can gain strength from it. 3.
Turn to I.
Leah’s Story – A. Leah’s Problem – 1.
Now this is a story that you are probably not aware that you
know. 2.
It is found in the Genesis account about Jacob the son of
Isaac. a)
Remember Jacob is considered a deceiver - 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 Esau’s birthright. b)
This infuriates Esau and so Jacob runs away from his older
brother. c)
Jacob begins to travel and he has an encounter with at 16Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the
older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. 17And
Leah’s eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful of form and face. 16Now Laban had two daughters: Leah, who was the
oldest, and her younger sister, Rachel. 17Leah had pretty eyes,
but Rachel was beautiful in every way, with a lovely face and shapely figure. 3.
What the text says here is basically a polite way of saying
Leah was not attractive! a)
And this is not news to her. b)
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 unattractive. 4.
It is important to understand that women in that day received
a lot of their worth and self image from the surface and not from within. a)
When a woman was born no one paid much attention. b)
Leah was the oldest daughter, but all that entitled her to was head servant in her father’s household. c)
The best a woman could hope for was that she would grow up to
be beautiful and this would alleviate some of the difficulty from an already
hard life because her worth was derived from appearance d)
This illustrates 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. e)
But because man looks and judges by the outward appearance
this is not good news for Leah. B. Leah’s Pain – 1.
Leah has probably felt hurt, pain, and rejection all her
life, so it was no surprise to her when she heard verse 18: 18 Jacob was in love with Rachel and said,
"I’ll work for you seven years in return for your younger daughter
Rachel." 2.
Here was a man of prominence pledging his life away for seven
years just to be able to marry her little sister. a)
This made the pain go all the deeper. b)
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. 3.
Leah 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 4.
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. a)
Illustration: Valentine’s Day is not a good day for people to
be in Leah’s shoes. I have read that it is called “single’s awareness day.” Every
woman wants to be loved and wanted and told that she is beautiful. b)
Example: There was a survey asking women in c)
Joke: 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!” d)
Quote: The average woman would prefer to have beauty over
brains because most men can see better than they can
think. 5.
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. Jacob’s Wages - A. Jacob’s Marriages – 1.
Jacob worked his seven years. 2.
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)
Imagine Jacob counting down the days, “Okay, just 2,234 days
left.” 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. c)
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. 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." d)
This is a tough passage for Leah. (1)She goes to bed with
Jacob knowing that the truth will be exposed the next morning. (2)This just reemphasized
her thoughts and feeling of worthlessness, because the only way she got
married in the first place was in deceit. 3.
It is interesting that Jacob the ultimate trickster had just
been tricked in the worst way. B. Leah’s Self Worth – 1.
Her worth was derived now from what her husband thought of
her. 2.
And I just want to use this as an opportunity to speak to the
ladies in this room for a second. 3.
It is imperative for you to get to a place in your spiritual
life where your self-image is not established by commercials, or models,
movie stars, or fashion ads; but on what God thinks about you. 4.
The world does not set a realistic standard. 5.
Never look for your self worth by how you look on the
outside. The Bible says: 30
Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, But a woman who fears the LORD,
she shall be praised.. 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.” 6.
Ladies, you are valuable because of Who you are loved by. a)
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. SCRIPTURE: 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. - b)
ILLUSTRATION: Christian author Liz Curtis Higgs (Parable
Series, Bad Girls of the Bible, historical fiction and contemporary fiction) has
a very interesting testimony. In 1981 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 7.
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. 8.
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. a)
It is not the $100 hair do or the French manicure, the
designer labels, the 30 hours a week you put in at the gym; but it is the
hidden person in your heart which is so beautiful and irresistible in God’s
sight. ILLUSTRATION: 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. 9.
Friends no matter how ugly and disfigured Mabel was on the
outside, in God’s eyes she is traffic stopping beautiful. III. Leah’s Misery – A. No Love from Her Husband – 1.
After hours of arguing Jacob reluctantly agreed to finish out
the honeymoon week with Leah, and then he would get Rachel for a wife, too. 2.
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. 3.
This had to rob him a little of the joy that should come with
marriage. a)
In verse 30 we read, “Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah”. b)
Leah must have felt that resentment every single day. c)
In her lifetime she never felt the love that Rachel felt. d)
A preacher suggested that one of the reasons why Jacob never
loved Leah, was because she was a constant reminder
of him being tricked by his uncle, and then a reminder of his past and how he
was a deceiver himself. e)
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. 4.
But whatever the case with Jacob one thing we know for sure
is that he simply did not love Leah. 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." 5.
This is one of the saddest verses in this passage because it
is so true human nature. a)
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. b)
Illustration: I read about two preachers who went downtown in
a larger city to speak to a group of single moms. They didn’t quite know what
to expect and were a little shocked to find out that the average age of this
single mother’s group was 17 years old, some older, some younger, and some
with more than just one child. They went there to preach and walked away
learning more than they could have ever imparted. (1)When they finished they
had a question and answer session and it was apparent that none of these
girls had ever known love. (2)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. (3)More than anything all
these girls just wanted to be loved. (4)Those preachers heard
tale after tale of these girl’s lives and how they gave themselves to this
guy and then that guy all because they thought that would make him love her. (5)Then they got pregnant
and he was gone out of their lives just as fast as he had entered it. (6)So once again these girls
tasted the bitter fruit of rejection. c)
This verse is especially sad because so many relate to it. d)
Leah thought that if she gave him something that Rachel could
never give him, a son, that Jacob would love her, but
even that was not enough. e)
But like most women in this condition they are not done
trying to get this love. So we read on. B. Leah Turns to God – 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. 1.
Leah was having a difficult time understanding that nothing
she could do would ever win her the love of her husband. 2.
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. 3.
And this is so true; we see this everywhere we turn today. a)
Quote: The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said that in
every human being’s heart there is a hole that only Jesus Christ can fill. b)
People today understand that they have this empty place in
their life and it is discussed all the time. c)
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 unwise relationships. d)
Scripture example: Jesus encountered a woman like this,
remember in e)
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)
Only Jesus Christ can fill that void in your life. C. God’s Grace in Breaking the Cycle of Leah’s Life – 1.
We do no know much more about what happened to Leah. 2.
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. 3.
Leah’s story is a really sad story if she just disappears
from the pages without knowing the rest of the story! a)
She was dealt a bad hand in life b)
She tried her best to do and give as was expected of her c)
But in the end it proved not to be enough because she never
gained the love she so desperately sought. Illustration: Fred Craddock tells that he and his
wife Nettie were vacationing in the “Where are you from?” he asked. “We’re from 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.” Then I recalled, though vaguely, my own father
talking when I was just a child about how the people of 4.
You see what the world deems as worthless God can use in
incredible ways. D. Some lessons 1.
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. 2.
When people reject us a lot of times it stems from personal
pain they have experienced in their life 3.
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. 4.
Leah does not just disappear from the pages of the Bible with
nothing but a sad story of rejection. a)
There is one more mention of Leah found in Chapter 35:23 The sons of Leah: Reuben the firstborn of Jacob,
Simeon, b)
It’s just a genealogy and it doesn’t sound like much, but
notice that her six sons become tribes of c)
The tribe of 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)
Despite your pain, imperfection and rejection,
turn to God’s love and God’s plan for your life. You will find that God still
has an incredible plan for your life! 5.
Scripture: The Bible says in Psalm 5:11-12 11 But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them sing
joyful praises forever. Protect them, so all who love your name may be filled
with joy. 12 For you bless the godly, O LORD, surrounding them
with your shield of love. |
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