If you can see that God accepts you and will never reject you, you will stand in His presence and be changed. God understands you and is aware of everything about you. Yet there is an inability in our carnal minds to really believe that the Lord accepts us.
O Lord, You have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
You understand my thought from afar.
You scrutinize my path and my lying down,
And are intimately acquainted with all my ways.
Even before there is a word on my tongue,
Behold, O Lord, You know it all.
You have enclosed me behind and before,
And laid Your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is too high, I cannot attain to it.
Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence? (Psalm 139:1-7)1
You have to wonder, “If God knows all of this about me, why do I find myself fleeing from Him?” It is a phenomenon of the carnal mind. Like David, we know that God is aware of us. He knows what our thoughts are going to be. There is nothing that is hidden from Him. Yet if we know that nothing is hidden from Him, why are we still driven to flee from His presence? The only way we are going to overcome that is to honestly have a revelation of God’s love and acceptance.
God has literally, physically done everything to deliver us and draw us into Himself so that we can stand in His presence. The Scripture says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). So you must be delivered from the carnal mind’s attitude, “God is going to reject me.” Christ did not die for us because we were worthy or already in a state of being perfected. Even before the concept of good and evil, Adam and Eve still had the nature that was capable of disobedience. Yet they stood in front of God with all of that in them and did not feel any rejection. They walked freely with God in the Garden and were absolutely unintimidated to be in His presence.
As humans, we reject ourselves. But you must get this revelation that God does not think that way. His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8). God absolutely does not think about you the way you think about yourself. And He does not think about your brother and sister the way you think about them. We must get by this impasse of rejection. Something must be real to us in our thinking that the Lord absolutely accepts us. He not only accepts you with all your problems, but He is also the provision for your deliverance as you stand in His presence.
The Father accepts you just the way you are right now. God will discipline you, but He refines you because He has already accepted you. There is no force that can outweigh God’s acceptance of you. He loves humanity (John 3:16). And I want us to think this way about each other. As we confess our sins to one another and pray for each other, we will be healed (James 5:16). If you stand in each other’s presence and expose what you have done wrong, the love and acceptance will bring healing. All you need is a revelation of God’s acceptance and when He appears, you will stand in His presence.
1 All Scripture references are from the New American Standard Bible 1995 (NASB1995).