Hint: It has to do with having friends and not being an outsider.

For most kids in school, the gnawing fear of being without friends tops the list of greatest catastrophes.

When I was 10 years old, my family moved from Cleveland to Glasgow, Scotland, for three years.

For me, everything was strange and intimidating — private school with uniforms, competitive culture, jealous schoolmates calling me “Yank,” advanced scholastics, etc.

My first thought was, “What do I have to do to be accepted here?” But I learned there was nothing I could do, despite my feeble efforts, I was outnumbered.

Either they came to me, which they eventually did, or I was in for a lonely school year.

God As My Friend

That fear of not being accepted has persisted my whole life. So, it should be no surprise that I took the business of being accepted by God very seriously.

Trouble was, I was raised in a denominational religious tradition that put the burden of getting “in” and staying “in” squarely upon my shoulders.

Yes, I wanted to belong to God, to know Him, and more important, for Him to know me. But I felt there was no way I could measure up to, what I thought were His standards.

I had a God in my head who was grumpy, uninterested and doing everything he could to keep me away from him. It has taken my whole life to disabuse myself of such blasphemous notions.

Later in life I learned that we were created to belong to others, including God. It’s in our DNA.

So, my desire to belong to God was perfectly natural. But I was going about it with flawed thinking. I thought it was all about me trying to be “right” with God, to become “worthy” of His acceptance.

Wrong!

Scripture is clear, that my acceptance by God was about His gracious provision, not my “worthiness, as explained in Ephesians 1:5-7:”

“He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, with which He favored us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our wrongdoings, according to the riches of His grace …”

Note who “does the doing” in the above passage. It’s not about what I must do to be accepted, it’s about what He has already done to accept me as I am.

I was viewing everything backward as to the basis for my being received.

Christian author Miles Stanford wrote in his book, The Complete Green Letters, “God’s basis must be our basis for acceptance. There is none other. We are accepted ‘in the beloved.’ Our Father is fully satisfied with His beloved Son on our behalf and there is no reason for us not to be. Our satisfaction can only spring from and rest in His satisfaction. It is from God to us, not from us to God. J.N. Darby was very clear on this: ‘When the Holy Spirit reasons with man, He does not reason from what man is for God, but from what God is to man. Souls reason from what they are in themselves as to whether God can accept them.

“He cannot accept you thus; you are looking for righteousness in yourself as a ground of acceptance with Him. You cannot get peace while reasoning in that way. The Holy Spirit always reasons down from what God is, and this produces a total change in the soul.”

Let that sink in. Don’t you just feel the weight coming off your shoulders?

Accomplishing Acceptance

So how did God accomplish our acceptance, considering our flawed, sinful condition? Vicariously, that’s how.

From Colossians 1:19-22:

“For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him (Christ), and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.

“And although you were previously alienated and hostile in attitude, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His body of flesh through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach …”

Again, note who “does the doing.” Christ acted for us before we were even born. Christ became the perfect spiritual “vehicle” in which to transport us home to Heaven IF we’ll let Him.

And it was all based solely on His work on the cross. Wow!

God accepts imperfect sinners because He sees us “packaged” in Christ and not in ourselves — we died when Christ died on the cross (see Romans 6:6).

Our daily walk my have all kinds of ups and downs but that is not what God is looking at, He’s looking at the “package” we are in — the righteousness of Christ.

Get it?

How About You?

Christian, if you are born again, you are positionally, “in Christ.” Does God the Father accept His Son, Jesus? Then He accepts you.

Outside of Christ, there is no acceptance and never will be.

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