You were created to be loved and accepted…

What's amazing about this, is that you already are…the sadness is that few of us grasp this…

Went to see Hillsong this weekend and there was a really powerful moment for me where they stopped to speak for a second and this has stuck with me since. But it’s the idea that when Christ hung on the cross, God took the most vile, most wretched, the dirtiest representation of chastisement, of evil, of sin—the cross, and made it, for all eternity, the one representation of love overcoming sin, love overcoming separation, love overcoming evil, love overcoming all. See, God hanging on the cross was no accident, it was no after-thought. It wasn’t His impulsive correction to our ‘oops’ of sin. The Bible says that He planned this from the beginning. God knew the moment He made man that man would let Him down. That man would separate himself from God and that God would have to fix it. Yet, He still created us. He still breathed into us; He still formed us in His image. Think about that for a second. How many times are we disappointed to find out that the people in our lives aren’t quite as awesome as we wanted them to be? How many times do we ‘cut people’ out of our lives for the sake of avoiding pain? And not that that’s bad; in fact, I’m a huge proponent that it’s healthy to prune your social circle from time to time. But we don’t have the foresight that God has. We don’t have the omniscience to know who will let us down and who will hold true. But God did. God does. Yet, He still chose to form us and more than that, He chose to love us. LOVE. The Creator of the universe, the very same One that holds the universe in the breadth of His hand loves us. He madly, deeply, passionately, insanely loves us. With an intensity and furor that we can’t begin to comprehend. Paul said –I wish you could know how high, how deep, how far and how wide His love is for you… unfathomable. 

So what? What’s gorgeous about the cross is that God took an ephemeral, perceived failure and made it an eternal victory. He did that. He does that. He takes your greatest failures, your biggest hang-ups and your biggest mistakes and makes them the source of your biggest strength. He takes what the enemy put in your life, or many times, what we allowed in our lives and boldly, loudly, vehemently and lovingly declares –you are not a failure! This is not your failing mark! You are not this mistake. Yes, you made a mistake, but you are not a mistake. You may have lost at this, but you are not a loser. I think, unfortunately, many times as Christ-followers we’re really good at accepting forgiveness and accepting the basic tenets of Christianity and we stop there. We think that because God gave us our ticket to heaven we’re set. But no, Jesus came to give us life. Life here, life now. Life beyond abundance. My favorite scripture in Ephesians says that God will take your biggest, baddest, wildest dreams and use that as his starting point for your life. He’ll take what you can’t even begin to imagine and that’s His floor. That’s His starting point. But many times, I think we don’t even to realize how real this love is. This love that saved us, this love that rescued us. He takes the very thing that made us feel like a failure and uses that as a catalyst to make us victors, conquerors, over-comers and all those other cute-sy scriptures we like to quote but never fully understand. 

I think if God would have us understand one thing as His people, it would be this: I love you. I accept you. I love you and I accept you. I know all, I see all, I know where you’ve failed and I know where you’ll fail. Yet I still love you. I still love you and I still accept you. Just how you are. If you never changed anything about you, I would still love you and still accept you…Yes God wants us to grow, yes, He wants us to progress, but if He didn’t love us until we made progress, then it wouldn’t be real love would it? 

I've been thinking a lot about this, and if you can punch a hole in the theory, please do. But I’m starting to believe, that most of our problems, most of our issues stem from our misunderstanding of God’s love for us. And I don’t mean logical understanding, I think a lot of us ‘get’ it. But I mean, intrinsic, deep-rooted, unshakable, understanding of His love for us. It’s a simple theory, but entertain me…if the most powerful, loving, amazing, wonderful Being in all creation—in fact, the Creator of creation, loves us and accepts us, then why do we look for it somewhere else? Because we don’t fully ‘get’ it. But we all do don’t we? We date that girl or that boy for a bit too long because somewhere, on some level we’re waiting for their approval, for their acceptance, their love, when all along our gut is screaming -RUN! She’s crazy! Why do girls have ‘daddy issues’? Because there was a man that was supposed to love and accept them, but failed at it. Why do we, as men, do stupid things to show off our moxie and our bravado in our younger years? Because we want our friends to think we’re cool right? We want to be accepted. I feel like I could write a never-ending list of these things. But it’s true. If we never learn to accept that our God, our Creator, our Redeemer loves us and accepts us, we’ll continue to look for it everywhere else. In our careers, in our cars, in our clothes, in our relationships, in our goals. Can you imagine the power, the freedom, the life we would have if we learned to walk with the understanding that the Father loves us and accepts us? What if you understood this from the beginning? Personally, I can think of a pile of mistakes I would have never chased down if I had. 

I learned that this weekend. I am not my failures. I am not my mistakes. I don’t have to redeem myself, I don’t have to prove myself and I don’t have to barter, plead or beg for love or acceptance. My Father loves me and accepts me for who I am and for what I am. Yeah, maybe it’s a bit campy and maybe even a bit of arrested personal growth. But I’m learning. I’m learning and I’m growing. And for that, I’m grateful. I’m grateful that He loves me and accepts me. I’m grateful I don’t have to seek it out, pursue it, wait for it, ask for it, or otherwise earn it. People won’t always treat you like this, but your Father does. And if you can understand that, it won’t much matter how people treat you.