Perfect Acceptance

God loves you as you are,

not as you should be.

- Brennan Manning, author of The Ragamuffin Gospel

Those who have read and listened to the Unshackled Life Ministries messages over the past month and a half will recognize the above quote from Brennan Manning. I use it quite often. There is so much life changing, freeing power in that short sentence. Once we realize it's true, we could spend a lifetime exploring the implications. There's nothing that we have to do, need to do, or can do to attain or increase the love of God for us.

But I had someone ask me, "If God is so accepting and loving, and never changes, then why was only the high priest allowed into the Holy of Holies in the temple and why did everything have to be perfect, and why do we have to do it His way or be cast away forever? If God is so accepting, then why can't we just hang out with Him without having to change?"

Well, the answer to the last part is we can. And we can't. But let's look first at the question of how we can call God accepting when He allows only perfect holiness to enter His presence, when He won't tolerate anything unrighteous? I mean really, you have to be perfect to come into My presence or you die doesn't sound very compassionate or accepting does it?

Let's look at it from a different perspective. The light of God's love is perfect and holy. I John 1:5 says, This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you; God is light and there is no darkness in him at all. God is light and there is no darkness in Him or around Him. It's not about acceptance or tolerance. It's about light.

I'm a photographer, and playing with light is part of what I do in that vocation. The contrast between light and shadow and the way light is used can make all the difference in the story that a photograph tells. But if you're really trying to show off an object for advertising or something along those lines, you want the whole object to be in the light where it can be seen. You don't want shadows obscuring the view. And to eliminate the shadows, or darkness, you need the light to be perfect.

When a room is set up with perfect lighting, a photograph can be taken anywhere in the room without capturing a shadow with the subject. That's because there is no shadow. Light, by it's very nature, destroys darkness. If the light is perfect then there can be nothing of shadow or darkness in the area, not because light doesn't like darkness, but simply because it is impossible for the two things to exist in the same place at the same time. Light eliminates dark just by being.

God is perfect light, and when the imperfections of anyone or anything are brought into the presence of that light, what is not light also, what is not of the same nature, is destroyed. Perfection can not coexist in the same time and place as imperfection.

But God loves His creation! He wants to have relationship with us. He desires to have us come into His presence and enjoy His company. And He went to great lengths to make that possible. It's quite a feat actually. He made a way to make the unholy holy, to make imperfection perfect, without destroying the object of His affection, which is us.

Since we, in our darkness, couldn't go into His presence, He came into our presence. Perfection took on imperfection. God wrapped Himself in flesh and walked among us. And when He did, he hung out with the imperfect, the broken and the outcast. He lived an earthly life spending time with those that even the imperfect of humanity considered too imperfect to associate with. People no relatively healthy person would go near Jesus actually touched. He ate with those no one would eat with. He talked to those no one would speak to. He accepted the rejected into His presence and had compassion on the wounded and broken in such a way that makes even the most accepting and tolerant of us all look uncaring by comparison. 

Because He is God, He lived that life of compassion and acceptance in such a way that the law of cause and effect never caused darkness. And then He extended His victory over darkness to the rest of us. He loved and accepted us so much that He suffered a brutal and horrible death for us to make it possible for us to come into His presence in His realm. He came to us and made the cross a tool of transformation so that imperfection could become perfect and exist in the presence of perfect light. 

In His wonderful acceptance, He made that transformation available to each and every person. No one is too anything to be included. The worst of the worst, the ones none of us would even want to give a chance to, are permitted to come. No one is excluded for any reason. No one is turned away. Everyone is free to come into relationship with Him. But it remains true that darkness and light can not dwell together, and the process of changing darkness into light is faith in Christ.

The love of God does not exclude anyone, for any reason. The grace of God extends to us all. There is not a single person that God did not provide a way for. That is total acceptance. That goes way beyond tolerance. That is love.