Acceptance in Christ- Romans 15:7

Acceptance is widely recognized as a basic human need, all humans have a basic desire for love and acceptance. This need is given us by God, and He intends for that need to be met in Him, and a lack of love and acceptance will cause mental and emotional issues in any who do not get them. Psychologists have identified this in studies, in which they have observed that people who generally cope successfully with life have three characteristics in common. They all have a sense of worth, competence and belonging. A sense of worth in that they think that the world would be a bit worse for someone if they were not in it. A sense of competence in that they are able to do at least one thing well. A sense of belonging in that they belong to someone or something beyond themselves. These are the component parts of the need for love and acceptance which are “hard wired” into all human beings, and which drive us to do many different things in our quest to find love and acceptance somewhere and somehow. Many of the ways in which we go about obtaining these are unhealthy and destructive, and cause us to be prisoners of the ones we find these things through. God’s plan, however, is that we would find love and acceptance in Him, for He has placed this need in us to cause us to seek Him, for these can only be truly found in Christ. This verse in Romans tells us we have been accepted by God in Christ, that we have acceptance in Him and need look nowhere else to find it. Any other source of love and acceptance is building our acceptance on sanđ, for the acceptance we recieve from other people is basically always conditional, and can disappear in an instant based on the whims of others. Only the acceptance we have in Christ is building our acceptance on the rock, Jesus Christ, who accepts us once and for all and will never reject us. We can rest assured in the fact that our need for love and acceptance have been met once and for all in Christ, and no longer be prisoners of our compulsive search for love and acceptance from other people and in other things. We have all we need to be mentally healthy in Christ, and can cope sucessfully with life because we have satisfied our need for love and acceptance once for all in Christ. We read here that “Christ acccepted” us, here as an aorist indicative, a statement of fact about something which happened in the past. The fact of our acceptance in Christ is indisputable, and our continued awareness of this fact will cause us to rest in the acceptance we have in Hìm and abandon our frantic search to find it elsewhere. Our next post will exàmine the issues of worth, competence and belonging, and show how these are also met only in Christ, and that true, unshakable peace,rest and acceptance can only be found in Him.