The acceptance I’m looking for

God gave Jesus to die for our sins, and raised him to life, so that we would be made acceptable to God. (Romans 4:25 CEV)

Somewhere a long time ago, in my teen years, I learned a sad and silly little poem;

There was a period, starting in my early teens when I developed a worldview of being unacceptable to anyone. My friends really weren’t friends. They just felt sorry for me. Now at age seventy-six, the shadow of those misconceptions, i.e., “emotional” facts, still lingers around the edges of my daily living.

When people become convinced that they are totally and irrevocably worthless, their thinking becomes contaminated with a deadly virus. That virus is the fatal foreshadowing of realizing I am finite and fatally flawed. One of the byproducts of being independent is the realization of being independent. On every level, every human is dependent on other humans to survive. I may have wanted to be distinct from others but worried that I would not be accepted as a part of a group of others. No wonder I was bewilderingly confused.

This innate longing to be “apart from” and “a part of” is one of our inherited consequences of Adam’s and Eve’s choice to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The demonstrative evidence shows that I emotionally flounder because I am isolated from Yahweh, my Creator. At the core of my individuality is the experience of being separated from the source of Life. I am independent of God, and it’s not what I really want; I want to be accepted by Him.

And at the same time, bless our hearts; we demand to be free from having our daily living accountable to His authority. Each of us long to be accepted by Him but refuse to be subject to Him. We reason that If I accept His authority, I will lose my unique independence, my autonomy.

It is true that to accept Yahweh is to reject self! But, to be acceptable to one’s self is to reject Yahweh. Therefore, I cannot be an accepted part of Yahweh’s Life and, at the same time, be self-governed. I have tried to make that arrangement work my whole life, but it never has, and it never will.

Such wisdom does not come down from above but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there is disorder and every evil practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peace-loving, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without pretense.  (James 3:15-17, CSB)

You can spend every day of your life chasing after the confirmation that you are an acceptable part of the human race or at least a part of your tribal portion of humanity. But, knowing how fickle human acceptance is, we can set up our residence in Yahweh through the acceptance of the Life Jesus Christ has offered us. When we establish such a residence, we will discover that being acceptable to Yahweh supersedes approval in any other form.

The first Bible I ever actually studied was given to me by my mother while I was in the army, a Living Bible. Consider a pondering of Hebrew but in particular, think about this verse. The first sentence refers back to how the old way of finding acceptance by God was to offer sacrifices and do good works.

It never made anyone really right with God. But now we have a far better hope, for Christ makes us acceptable to God, and now we may draw near to him. (Hebrews 7:19, Living Bible)

Photo – Nashville Farmers Market.