What Does it Mean to Accept Yourself?
Accepting yourself begins with knowing and accepting God's design for all of humanity. He wants us to shed our "self-reliance" and become what we call "God-reliant". As a God-reliant person, we set our “life foundation” on God and what God provides for us, not what we achieve for ourselves. We shift our mindset by acknowledging that we can achieve nothing with God's power, God's love, God's plan, and God's grace. Through these foundations, we begin becoming the person God wants us to become...our new self!
Once we accept the self that God designed and intended, our lives dramatically change. When we accept our new self, we begin relying on God's power (no longer self-reliant), we live for God's love (not the love from others), we trust God's plan (not our own decisions), and if we comprehend God's grace towards us we become humble and serving towards others…just as God intended.
Accept God's design and intention for you ... Accept the shift from living for idols, to living for your relationship with God ... Accept the shift from living a life of self righteousness tied to being good and achieving much, to living a life of humble gratitude for being saved. Accept yourself!
Key Points to Consider
- If it feels like we are going against the grain, it is because you have accepted the wrong path. God intends for us to rely on him. The more we rely on ourselves, the more it feels we are going against the grain.
- God is real and has created a natural world that has rights and wrongs. We feel this every day ... it is God in our life.
- God has been gracious enough to let us have a relationship with him. He loves each of us, cares about each of us, and has designed a natural world that makes sense when we make our relationship with Him the most important thing in our life.
- There is no true acceptance of self unless there is acceptance of the self that God designed and intended.
- Accepting of yourself as God designed allows you to shed the concerns, frustrations, anxieties, and anger that come with seeking the wrong things in life.
- When we comprehend that God has created the natural world, created us, allowed us to have a relationship with Him, and provided a path towards Heaven, then we can be nothing but humbled.
- Accepting yourself as God designed provides for peace, hope, and a strong desire to serve God's other natural creations.
“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience....”
“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”