Acceptance: His ultimate gift of love

The shame, guilt, embarrassment, lack of acceptance and fear surrounding their “weakness,” often prevents Christians from asking for help, which maintains and strengthens the spiritual strongholds that keep such Christians bound.

Acceptance requires you to embrace your weakness as Paul did. You are not “defective,” and nothing is “wrong” with you. You are God’s child – and God fully accepts you for all that you are. When we become increasingly able to accept ourselves, we learn to embrace all that we are in the same manner that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ does. We ultimately learn to love ourselves because God first loved us. (Romans 5:8, 8:31-39)

Jesus died for us while we were still sinners. He performed the ultimate act of love on our behalf to show us that he loved us in spite of our weaknesses and failings. He didn’t die for us because of anything we achieved or did “right” – he died for us to prove that his love was not conditioned upon any imagined “righteousness” on our part. If we could attain “righteousness” on our own – Jesus never would have been crucified. The acceptance step requires us to cast off the facades and pretenses of being “good” or “strong” Christians, and shows us how to get “real” with ourselves, with God and with each other.

When we begin to grasp the significance of God’s acceptance of us, we will begin to understand the depths of his love for us. We will realize that his unconditional acceptance of all that we are is an expression of his unconditional love.