Home  Articles  Site map

Practically every religion shows the follower ways to get right with God, through prayers, sacrifices, penance, self-denial, offerings, pilgrimage, etc. There are things the devotee must do in order to find acceptance. When they do them, they think they have attained to or achieved approval from God. But God has revealed through His word that this way is actually impossible for man because no works can atone for our sins. Therefore, He offers us free acceptance through Jesus who has already made atonement for our sins on the cross. When we acknowledge our sins and receive this salvation as a gift, we are accepted before God.

We can understand then that it is not possible to go before God with our own righteousness, but when we receive the righteousness of Christ imputed to us by grace through our faith (Ro.5:17), we are fully accepted before God, and we are given full access to His presence (He.10:19). Our record of sins is taken away and God considers us as being white like snow (Is.1:18).

However, this looks like being too fantastic for us to believe in the daily situations when we encounter the presence of sin in our life—either in our failure in actual sinning or in seeing the sinfulness within our nature (Ro.7:18). Satan also takes much pleasure in accusing us day and night, and we cannot pretend that what he points out in us is not true. Then we find ourselves in a battle trying to choose between standing on what God tells us about the fact that we have already been justified in His sight, and the fact of what we see in our flesh.

The tendency to stand on our own righteousness—thinking at times that we are ok with God because our conscience is clear at the moment—does not leave us quickly. It takes us time to get used to seeing that there is always something imperfect in whatever we do, and learn to give up our attempts to feel acceptable before God on that basis. We need to come to the place where we stop looking for that way of feeling accepted by God, and realise that the only way to find acceptance with God is to receive it by an unmerited favour from God. In a practical sense, this is a gradual growth in our understanding and faith that does not happen at once when we get converted.

The battle is stronger in the case of people with a certain temperament where there is a natural desire to do everything right—to be perfect—and to imagine that if only they tried harder they might reach that place. Everyone has to come to the place of seeing for himself that if he tried to make himself pleasing to God, he will only fail miserably. We have to learn to give up that idea and lean only the grace of God for acceptance.

When we learn to stand on God's grace, we can stand triumphantly and boldly without condemnation even while we are aware of the presence of sin in our flesh. Even though we fail at times against our wishes, God looks at our heart and sees that we don't want to sin (Ro.7:25;8:1).

Tweet