October
2, 2005
“Our God Accepts Us”
Romans 15:7
Accept One Another
Prayer and Scripture
Reading: John
A.
My exegetical guide says that the Greek word
translated accept means to receive into fellowship or communion. And that requires much more than a casual
acceptance. It means truly receiving
and accepting all that each person is and has been and will become. When I was a kid in Ohio, there was a group
of bullies who liked to make my life miserable. After all, I had to wear special geeky-looking shoes because of
the birth defects in my feet, my parents made me get buzz cuts, plus I started
wearing glasses in the fourth grade. I
probably would have picked on me too! The
ringleader was David Comer, and he was a royal pain. He was as big as I was and would actively look for ways to pick
on me. Wintertime in fifth grade was
when things changed. David Comer made
the mistake of coming down my street on an icy day and tried to embarrass me in
front of someone I would probably have called my girlfriend. I’d had enough. It was two hits – my fist hit his chin, and he hit the driveway. He ran away crying and I never had a problem
with him or his gang again. His friends
accepted me, but not as a friend. They
accepted me as a foe to be reckoned with.
That’s not the same as receiving me into fellowship or communion.
B.
For
one of the years I was teaching, we had a principal at the high school who was
probably more into status and position than anybody else I’ve ever met. The higher up you were on the food chain, so
to speak, the more he thought of you.
The lower you were, the more he’d treat you like dirt. Well, being the lowly part-time music
teacher, guess where I was on the food chain.
Just about rock bottom. But
come to find out, many employees expressed similar experiences to the
superintendent, so this principal had a change of behavior. He accepted me, but only as one who had to
be tolerated. That’s not the same as
receiving me into fellowship or communion.
C.
The
acceptance Paul is writing about has nothing to do with being a foe to be
reckoned with. It has nothing to do
with mere tolerance. It’s much more
than grudgingly accepting someone because we have to or we’re supposed to. Accepting one another is a heart thing. It involves heart change. We’re commanded to accept one another just
as Christ accepted us, and that means that we’ve got to allow Him to change our
hearts. Why? Just think of someone you’re not accepting of. That’s why.
We live in a world that has so blurred the lines of tolerance and
acceptance that it believes that to tolerate means to accept. Our world teaches us that we have to accept
everything a person does or we’re intolerant.
The Church in America has bought into that philosophy and even its
opposite – that accepting someone is the same as accepting what they do. Both are false by biblical standards.
D.
Jesus
loves and accepts us with all of our warts and blemishes even as He hates the sin
within us. God hates sin, and since
Jesus is God became man, He hates sin as well.
But God loves the sinner, and showed His love by sending His Son to die
for us. Romans 5:6-8 – You see, at just the right time, Christ died
for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will
anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly
dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his
own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. If that isn’t accepting us at our worst, I
don’t know what is! Jesus didn’t wait
for us to conform to His standards, which we couldn’t do, nor did He lower His
standards, which He couldn’t do. He
gave His life so that we can be accepted.
And in light of that sacrifice, what right do we have to refuse to accept
each other?
E.
I
know that’s a loaded question and that it sounds a bit harsh. But the truth is that in our fallen
condition we’ve picked up the very nasty habit of refusing to accept people who
don’t measure up to whatever our own individual standards are. Satan loves that! Satan loves it when we use our own personal standards to exclude
people because then we’re playing right into his hand. It goes back to what we’ve been talking
about for the past four weeks – loving one another sacrificially and as family,
honoring one another above ourselves, living in harmony with one another. Excluding people from our personal
acceptance makes it impossible to love them, to honor them, to live in harmony
with them. It causes division in the
body, which Satan also loves.
F.
So
what do we do about it? How do we know
what acceptance is and isn’t?
Acceptance means receiving who a person is, not necessarily what they
do. Another way of putting it is
accepting the sinner while rejecting the sin.
The Church in America is known by and large by what we don’t approve
of. I think it’s about time that we’re
known for what we approve of. We
approve of all people as created in God’s image and therefore very precious,
and we can do that without approving of sin in their lives. I read a book a while back called “What’s So
Amazing about Grace” and a friend and I were talking about it a few days
ago. This friend made a very
significant comment – that when we focus so much on one point, in this case
grace, we go overboard and forget about how it fits within the whole of
Scripture. For example, in this book
Philip Yancey asserts that God won’t punish homosexuality as a sin because of
His grace. But the Bible clearly states
that it is a sin and therefore can exclude someone from heaven. Likewise, we can focus so much on one part
of a person, such as a sin in their life, that we forget to accept them as a
person created in God’s image.
G.
Acceptance
means focusing what is good in the person instead of what is bad. That doesn’t mean that we ignore sin. In fact, there are many times when we’re
called to lovingly confront someone over sin in their life, but of course we’d
better be darn well sure God’s calling us to do it. What acceptance does mean is that we look for and celebrate the
gifts God has given them and how we see God moving in their heart and
life. When you see someone you have a
hard time accepting, take a minute and think about the good things about them,
how God has made them, how He has gifted them, what they’re talented at, how
He’s moving in their heart and life. If
you can’t think of anything good, then maybe it’s time you took the time to get
to know them a little bit. God will help
us overcome our natural prejudices and enable us to accept them just as Jesus
does.
H. Acceptance means unity of
heart and mind and spirit, not total agreement on everything. We talked about this a bit last week as we
focused on living in harmony with one another.
It’s okay to disagree on the negotiables, and to work toward agreement
on them. But it’s not okay to disagree
on the non-negotiables, the truth of Scripture that we can never compromise
on. Agreement comes through praying
together, seeking God’s heart together, talking about what God wants together,
and walking in obedience together. I
know these truths we’ve been talking about over the past months are hard to
grasp and hard to do, but we’re talking about basic issues of discipleship
here, learning to become disciples of Jesus, learning how to enable His Spirit
to fill us to overflowing and transform us from the inside out. Agreeing with one another is one of those
tough discipleship issues, because being united in heart and mind and spirit
means we’ve got to put our own rights and agendas aside and focus on what God
wants to do in us and through us and how we can best allow that to happen. John 17:20-23 records part of the last
prayer Jesus prayed before arriving at the Garden of Gethsemane to be arrested. “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray
also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father,
just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world
may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may
be one as we are one: 23 I
in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world
know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” Now if one of the last things Jesus prayed
before His crucifixion was for us to have the same unity of heart, mind, and
spirit that He has with His Father, then we can trust that it is a tremendous
priority for us. We’ve got to learn to
live in agreement so that our world will know that Jesus is Lord.
I.
Acceptance
means accepting ourselves individually as beloved and precious creations of
God. That’s what we are. Psalm 8:3-8 says, When I consider your
heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set
in place, 4 what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you
care for him? 5 You made him a little
lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. 6 You made him ruler over the works of your
hands; you put everything under his feet: 7 all flocks and herds, and the beasts
of the field, 8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim
the paths of the seas. Maybe one
reason we have such a hard time accepting others is that we have such a hard
time accepting ourselves. Satan wants
us to believe that we’re nothing more than worthless pieces of junk, and he
constantly whispers that in our ears.
So when somebody threatens what little sense of worth we have, we jump
all over them. When we do that we’re
really jumping all over ourselves.
We’ve got to accept the fact that, because God loved us so much that He
sacrificed that which was most dear to Him, His Son, so that He could receive
us into fellowship and communion with Him, we are indeed precious and highly
valued creations of God. We are loved
by God, and because we are loved by God we can love and accept one another just
as we are.
J.
Illustration
- Brennan Manning said, To me, it's more
important to be loved than to love. When I have not had the experience of being
loved by God, just as I am and not as I should be, then loving others becomes a
duty, a responsibility, a chore. But if I let myself be loved as I am, with the
love of God poured into my heart by the Holy Spirit, then I can reach out to
others in a more effortless way (as cited on PreachingToday.com). He’s right.
Because we are loved by God, we can love and accept one another with
God’s love.
K.
Folks,
for our church to thrive and to make the impact God has for us by the power of
His Spirit, we’ve got to choose to accept one another just as Jesus accepted
us. No pre-conditions, no expectations,
no holds barred. What we need isn’t
tolerance, but acceptance. What our
world needs isn’t tolerance, but acceptance.
We’ve got to accept the sinner and not the sin, and when we do, our
church and our world will be transformed.
A.
Please
bow your heads and close your eyes out of respect for one another’s
privacy. What’s God been speaking to
your heart about accepting one another as Christ accepts us. Let’s just take a few moments to listen to
His voice whisper to our hearts, and then respond to Him in prayer. Surrender to His call to accept one another
as Jesus accepts us. Give Him
permission to begin this work in you right now.
B.
Let’s
pray.