Healing the Wound of Rejection

Now I want to talk about one other thing, which is, I'll name it, it's the problem of rejection. And in my experience, this is just the way I find it, at least one in four persons in the United States today has a problem of rejection.

Talking again about parents, father and mother, the two persons we must have in our lives are father and mother. And every child that is born into the world with a deep inward desire for love and acceptance by father and mother. But in modern America, I would think 50% of the children born today are denied that in its full measure.

In many cases, you'll find, and this I've actually dealt with since I've been here in this seminar, I've actually dealt with a person in this category, that a mother resents the coming of a baby while it's still in her womb. There may be many reasons. She's not in love with her husband, she feels it's another tie to the marriage. There may be financial problems, that's another mouth to feed. The child may have been born out of wedlock and there's all the embarrassment and shame that's involved with that.

Or, and this is very common, the mother herself may have the problem of rejection, and she simply transfers it to her child, which is very common. At any rate, the baby in the womb, and let's not deceive ourselves, an infant in the womb is a person. All right. Not according to the Supreme Court's terrible decision.

John the Baptist was what, six months in his mother's womb? When he heard the voice of the Virgin Mary, he leaped with joy. He was a person. He could respond. He knew what was going on around him. Do you realize that? And a little unborn baby in its mother's womb is very well aware if its mother doesn't love it, rejects it, resents it, and doesn't want it. And when it comes out, it will come out with a spirit of rejection already in it.

Or it may be born without that, but it may be born in a home which becomes divided, father and mother separate. The father never shows the child the love that a child expects. And maybe the father actually loved the child but just didn't know how to show it. And the child grows up feeling lonely and unwanted and unloved. And the root of that is rejection.

And very, very briefly, I'll tell you how I find rejected people act. That will reject people with the spirit of rejection. There's basically two kinds of reaction. One is the passive. Well, nobody loves me. I'm on the outside looking in. And it goes basically like this, a little, I could write it out on a blackboard. Loneliness, misery, self-pity, depression, despair. You know the next one? Suicide. That's right. Or it may be simply the desire to die. I wish I were dead. Have you ever said that? Don't put your hand up, please, if you have. It's one of the most dangerous things you'll ever say. It's inviting the spirit of death.

Then there's the person who's aggressive, not passive, but active. And their reactions then usually are resentment, hatred, rebellion.

“Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.”

Rebellion leads to witchcraft. So the rebel goes into the occult. Many of you here, you don't need to raise your hands, you know that by personal experience. When you became a rebel, you began to reach out for the Ouija board, the horoscopes, drugs, which is a form of sorcery, and so on.

The schizophrenic is the one who reacts in both ways at the same time, both passive and active. And both lines of action are there, fighting each other continually, until that person doesn't know who he or she really is.

The person with this problem always feels left out. The attitude is, others can, I can't. I'm on the outside looking in. Other people are loved, I'm not. Other people are accepted, I'm not. And usually as a consequence, there is an inability to love. Because I think it's true scripturally and psychologically that we cannot love until we've been loved.

It says in the first epistle of John,

“We love him because he first loved us.”

If he had not first loved us, we wouldn't know how to love him. And that's true of every child. A parent has to love the child before the child can love. A child that's never experienced love doesn't know how to love.