Last week Pastor Harris started a series of sermons in which he will examine four of the major lies that Satan uses to destroy the lives of far too many people. We looked at the first of these lies in the last episode which is this, “I must meet certain standards of behavior so I can feel good about myself.”
In this episode, Pastor Harris will deal with the next lie which is this, “I must be approved by certain others to feel good about myself.” This leads to a condition Pastor Harris refers to as Approval Addiction. This condition is totally linked to the fear of rejection that is one of our deepest human fears. We do not want to feel rejected. We seek approval from others and we do this because we are biologically wired with a longing to belong. We fear being cut off, demeaned or isolated. In other words we fear being alone and above all else we dread change.
The greater this fear becomes the more we experience a need for acceptance and it really can become an addiction. Our problem relates to the fact that we often seek approval from the wrong source. Those sources are often those around us, they can often ignore or reject us. So rather than turn to them, we should really be turning to someone who can love us unconditionally and that someone, as we all know, is our God.
Right now because of the condition of sin, a state in which we are born, we find ourselves alienated from God, the only one who really counts in our lives. And that is why we have such an oppressive fear of not belonging. That problem is sin, we begin to overcome these fears when we realize that we need God more than we need other people. When we call upon him he will never reject us and he will never forsake us. In theological terms we call this process reconciliation. And that will be Pastor Harris's remedy to Approval Addition that he will be teaching today.
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