IF THERE ARE THINGS EVEN
WE DON'T ACCEPT ABOUT OURSELVES, HOW CAN GOD ACCEPT US?
One of the difficulties we have believing that God loves us is that we know our own weaknesses, foibles, and sins. There are things that even
we don't love about ourselves, so how could
God love us?
And to kick that idea up a notch, how can a
holy God love something that is
sinful?
Fortunately, the Bible gives us reassuring answers to this question. There are three reasons why God knows everything about us and still loves us.
- Because we are created in His image
God did not happen across us by accident, pick us up like a stray cat, and then realize He'd gotten something less than He'd bargained for. Quite the contrary! He created us!
He created us as we are, placed us in our time in history, our country, our culture, our family - gave us our DNA determining our physical imperfections, our intellectual limitations, and our talent pool. He knew exactly what he was getting.
In fact, He created us for a reason and wants to use us for that purpose. Ephesians 2:10 says, "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them."
This passage tells us that before we were ever born, God conceived of a collection of good works that He wanted us to do, and He created us as He did so that we could do them.
We are no accident. We are just what He wanted. If God is okay with us, we can be okay with ourselves.
- Because we are redeemed
The Bible makes it clear that sin is an affront to God. God does not, cannot, wink at sin. He doesn't say, "Well, boys will be boys… girls will be girls, ho, ho, ho," and look the other way. Quite the contrary! Anything that sins must die!
However, in His grace, God sent His son to become a man, to live a life as a human, and to be crucified. Then, because His divine son was sinless and did not deserve to die, God was willing to accept His death for ours.
The condition is that if we believe in Jesus and accept Him as our personal savior by faith, we can be spiritually born again. God is willing to accept His death for ours, to place our sin on Him, and to place His righteousness and eternal life on us.
So, now that we are spiritually born again, our new self has been created in the likeness of God, in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:24). As a result, God has removed our sins from us as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12).
Therefore, God no longer sees us as sinful creatures, but as redeemed children. Of course, there is still sin in our lives, but the sin originates not from the redeemed inner man but from the flesh, the unredeemed outer man in which our redeemed inner man still resides.
That is the point that Paul is making in Romans 7:18-20.
“For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.”
God knows that our body, our outer man, is doomed. It will never go to heaven. But our inner man is already ready for heaven. There is not another thing that has to happen to our inner man in order to go to heaven except that it must be separated from our outer man (1 Corinthians 5:8).
So our sin no longer separates us from God, since He sees the “true us”, the redeemed inner man, and knows that
our inner man will soon be separated from our sinful outer man.
- Because God is motivated by love
When my wife and I were in seminary, we adopted a stray cat, which we named (curiously) Pooch! We found her late one night furiously chasing June bugs, like a pauper trying to grab hundred dollar bills blowing across the parking lot. Her frantic, bizarre and athletic antics were comical and endearing to us. We kept our eyes on her for a couple days before finally concluding she was a stray.
We took her into our apartment where I expected that, well fed and cared for, she would settle down into a lazy, purring, bundle of domestic joy. Never happened. She remained a coiled, neurotic collection of nerves her entire life. She didn't like to be held, she was forever trying to break out of jail (our apartment), and she never made peace with domestic life. As I hinted in point number one, we got something less than we’d bargained for.
But we loved her, adjusted to her idiosyncrasies, and gave her a good life. We didn't bail on her just because there were some things about her we didn't like. Love does that. It hangs in there through thick and thin.
We are even more secure in God's love than Pooch was in ours, because God is not surprised by our idiosyncrasies, since He created us. Not only
knowing what we would be like, but
determining what we would be like, God had the advantage of not being unpleasantly surprised by us. Then, add on top of His foreknowledge His unconditional love, and we are secure.
So, how can God know everything about us and still love us? Well, He created us specifically just as we are for specific purposes, He redeemed us and solved the problem of our sin, and He is motivated by intense love backed up by omniscience and omnipotence. If we will come to Him in faith, there is not a force in the universe that can keep us from God's love (Romans 8:37-39)!
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