Unconditional Acceptance
“We are made for acceptance. We come to life when we are accepted. As a fish thrives and flourishes in water, human beings thrive and flourish in acceptance. It is our native environment. We are not much good, and certainly not happy, without it.”
- C. Baxter Kruger
We live in a world where everyone is craving acceptance. Maybe we still have issues with being accepted because we’ve been taught that acceptance is conditional. Maybe we are just so afraid of rejection and the pain that is associated with it that we just attempt to achieve acceptance any way that we can get it. Maybe we’ve been taught that it’s based on how we live. That if we do right by God, only then, acceptance is fully ours.
On the contrary! We are accepted now.
Look at Paul’s declaration to the church of Ephesus:
“to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Ephesians 1:6 NKJV
This is Paul declaring to a group of people transitioning to life after the cross. “Listen up! There isn’t a soul in the entire cosmos that is not accepted.”
This may have been fresh news to them, but this is something that has always been true since before the foundation of the world. A couple of verses back Paul says that just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love. Ephesians 1:4-5 NKJV
What makes you and I accepted is not what we do. It’s not what, but who. No form of striving, or thing could make us anymore chosen than we are in this moment in time. Yahweh Himself makes us accepted. Friends, this is good news.
Francois du Toit said in regard to his study on Ephesians that God found us in Christ before he lost us in Adam.
This should tell us that we were never lost. Maybe we were only lost in our minds, thinking we were lost, but Yahweh embedded himself in us before the foundation of the universe. Yahweh didn’t introduce us to His Son, he simply disclosed what was already within us: the life of His Son, Jesus. That’s how Paul experienced it. That is how we will all experience it.
Once we know that he’s in us. Acceptance is no longer something we aim for. It’s a person we live with day in and day out. He is our acceptance.
If the enemy can convince us that we are unacceptable, or that God has rejected us, then this game called life is up for us.
If you need assurance of your acceptance in Abba, then look no further than the Holy Spirit. Take a look at these two verses in Romans 8:
“Now Christ lives his life in you! And even though your body may be dead because of the effects of sin, his life-giving Spirit imparts life to you because you are fully accepted by God.” Romans 8:10 The Passion Translation
“And you did not receive the “spirit of religious duty,” leading you back into the fear of never being good enough. But you have received the “Spirit of full acceptance,”enfolding you into the family of God.” Romans 8:15 The Passion Translation
Christ living his life inside of you is enough proof or convincing of your acceptance. There should be no cause for meddling through other fancies for some assurance of it. Period.
This spirit of acceptance is also translated as the spirit of adoption. Adoption has nothing to do with us being brought into God’s family. We have always been in the family. Remember Ephesians 1:4-5?
The word adoption here means “mature son” or “adult sonship.” We’ve mistaken adoption as something of a legal definition in our culture, but because we were preferred by God since the foundation of the world, we should no longer see adoption as being outside of a family. We are in.
So what we have received is the spirit of acceptance reinforcing the truth that we have been accepted all along and that we have always been sons. These two truths are what we must come into an understanding of.
The entire basis of our sonship and our acceptance in Jesus is based upon the Spirit of God residing within us. It is not a secondary consequence of what we have accomplished.
The Holy Spirit is the endorsement of what happened to us when Jesus died and was raised from the dead. And now, there is an echo in hearts as a result crying out, “Abba Father.”
Dare to live as one fully accepted in the Beloved.
