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Topic: Acceptance (01/12/04)
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TITLE: Acceptance By Allan Wood 01/19/04 |
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by Allan Wood
January 18, 2004
One of the deepest needs of the human heart is the need to be loved and accepted. I want to focus primarily on ur need for acceptance.
Most of us do not feel as accepted -- or as acceptable -- as we would like. One thing that fuels this is the battle many of us have with our own feelings of inferiority and
insecurity. Another fueling agent is rejection and judgments we encounter much to frequently from others.
Our need for acceptance manifests itself in three primary relational arena -- our relationships with others, our relationship with ourselves, and our relationship with God (that is, if we believe in a personal God).
When it comes to others, we know how fickle and judgmental people can be, so we tend to put on masks in our efforts to be acceptable. A major problem with this is that it is deceptive, because we are living a lie and being unfaithful to who we really are. Not only this, but being this way tends to only intensify our feelings of insecurity and fear of rejection (that is, coming to the place in a given relationship where we are "found out" and, as a result, are no longer as accepted as we were).
Then there is our relationship with ourselves. Many of us don't like ourselves very much. We can well identify with what the apostle Paul said in Romans 7: "I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing. In fact, the story of my life is that I often both fail to do what I know I should do and then do what I don't want to do. Oh, wretched man that I am...."
So what do many of us do? We try to ignore or deny to ourselves (self-denial) what we find unacceptable about ourselves. We may engage to some degree in self-rejection. Commonly, we strive gain acceptance and affirmation from others so that we can feel good about ourselves, which tends to be like trying cure a gaping wound with a bandage.
Then for many of us there is also the issue of our relationship with God. We view God as One who is righteous, pure and holy. We view him as ne who has very high standards, which at our best we fall far short from living up to. Worse yet, this God (and I refer to the God who has revealed Himself in the bible) has said that we are to be perfect as he is perfect (Matt. 5:48). Not correctly understanding this statement in its biblical context has caused many to say, "Who can measure up? Who on earth can please God?" And feel defeated and we struggle in this relationship, too.
So what is the answer to this dilemma -- that is, the dilemma of our striving for acceptance?
The answer is that we desperately need to come to correctly understand the mercy and grace of God as it applies to our lives personally. Because of God's great love for us, He in His mercy does not render to us the punishment we justly deserve and He, in His grace lavishes on us that which we do not deserve, His love and acceptance. And all of this is ours for the asking, by simply receiving God's Son, Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose again from the dead, as our personal Savior and Lord. In doing so, we become recipients of God's love, His mercy, His grace, His forgiveness, and His acceptance. As Ephesians 1:6 puts it: "We have been made accepted in the beloved (Jesus Christ)" -- and note it is not that we earned it, but that we were made (by God) accepted, and He did this when we accepted Jesus Christ. (If you have not yet accepted Jesus Christ, I invite you to do so now.)
Those of us who have experienced God's mercy, grace, forgiveness, love and acceptance, are to demonstrate the same toward others. Maybe many of us would struggle a lot less with this issue of our own acceptance and acceptability if we would simply get the focus off ourselves and begin to focus on accepting God's acceptance of us and then learning to more and more fully demonstrate that God's acceptance by accepting others. In fact, we find in God's word that we are to love as He loved us and that we will be shown mercy and forgiveness as we show it to others.