Acceptance of Self

An important aspect of acceptance is acceptance of self. We know that we are accepted by God, not because of our own moral rectitude, but because Christ is our righteousness.

A lack of understanding on the subject of righteousness can cause some Christians to be angry with themselves, because they do not behave a certain way. But we can now accept ourselves as we are, with the condfidence that God accepts us just as we are.

With this assurance we should no longer allow other people’s opinions of us, or
how we think they feel about us, dictate how we feel about ourselves. Some Christians believe that the message of righteousness by faith can instil an apathy in believers towards change and making efforts to do what is right. But the more we attempt to do what is right in our own strength, the more we deny God’s grace.

When we desire to do good but do not have sufficient grace, we end-up talking about doing good, but never getting round to it. But when we take the focus away from our own weak, corrupt nature and focus on the finished work of the Messiah, we begin to embrace more of the divine nature that Christ died to give us.

1 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.
2 A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
3 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
4 And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
5 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them - living and breathing God!
6 Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life.
7 Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing.
8 And God isn't pleased at being ignored.
9 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about.
Romans 8:1-9 MSG