Are You Striving for Acceptance?
Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God. Romans 15:7
Rejection is one of the most painful experience known to humanity. Years ago, I was having a devotional time with my children when I raised the question, “What is rejection?” My daughter, Heidi, gave a nice answer, buy my son, Karl followed by nailing the issue right on the heart. He said, “I know, rejection is when Johnny won’t play with me anymore and I have to play with Heidi.” Unconditional love and acceptance is one the most basic needs of all humanity.
Striving for Acceptance
Notice the children around you. From earliest childhood, you can see them striving for acceptance and the approval of “significant others” in their lives. “Do you like my picture, Mommy?” “Did I play well, Daddy?” The social system in which most of us were raised gave us the impression that if we appeared good, performed well or had a certain amount of social status, we would finally be somebody. But try as we might to gain approval, we always come up short. Whatever pinnacle of self identify we are able to achieve eventually crumbles under the pressure of rejection or the criticism of self-condemnation.
We cannot do anything to qualify for unconditional and voluntary love. We labor under the false assumption that if we live perfectly everybody will accept us, while there was Once who lived His life perfectly, and everybody rejected Him.
Relating to Others
Understanding and receiving God’s unconditional love is foundational for all future growth. We don’t have to do things so God will someday accept us. We are accepted by God completely as we are. Our actions and works should be in response to God’s love for us, not an attempt to earn His favor.
Finding our acceptance in Christ serves a s a basis for our relationship with other people was well. Paul writes in Romans 15:7, “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.”
Our need for acceptance and belonging are legitimate needs; they are God-given. But if we attempt to meet them independent of God, we are doomed to reap the dissatisfaction the self-life brings.
Peter admonishes us to lay aside the relentless purist of the approval of man. “Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, grace pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good” (1 Peter 2:1–3). Malice is wicked behavior that is often born out of our own sense of inadequacy when we look to others who have something we desperately need in order to be fulfilled.
Peer pressure is so powerful and the pursuit of man’s approval so prevalent that people will compromise even their most basic moral principles to gain the acceptance of others. Lacking this, they begin to scheme and manipulate people or present a false image to gain approval. When this fails, they envy those who seem to have what they don’t have, and then the natural consequence is to slander them to bring them down to their own level. So strong and devious is man’s inner craving for significance apart from Christ!
No Need to Compete
But when you know who you are in Christ, you no longer need to be threatened by people or compete with them, because you are already secure and loved.
The Christian is to be like a newborn baby who knows nothing about guile, hypocrisy, and envy. In reality we are like babies; we are newborn in Christ, and we are to long for the pure milk of the Word, because it is there we discover our true identity. Sure, we will sometimes experience the rejection of man, but we will never be cast away by our heavenly Father. He has promised to never leave us nor forsake us.
Let me encourage you as a newborn babe in Christ to long for the pure milk of the Word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, tasting the kindness, love, and acceptance of the Lord.
Dear Heavenly Father, I pray that You would open my eyes so I may know and personally receive Your unconditional love and acceptance. I renounce the lies of Satan that question Your love and insist I must earn Your love and approval. I choose to believe that I am accepted in Christ. I ask for Your grace to sustain me as I face the rejection of mankind, and may You enable me to stand against the peer pressure that tempts me to compromise. In Jesus’ precious name I pray. Amen.
Note: This post is a segment from Dr. Neil T. Anderson’s devotional, Who I Am in Christ.
Neil T. Anderson is the founder of Freedom in Christ Ministries. He began the ministry in 1989 and continues to spread the message of freedom to this day.