Everyone goes through life with a gnawing sense of unease, an unspoken dread we’ve lived with for so long we hardly know it’s there anymore. It taints everything we do with a strange sense of displacement and dissatisfaction. Even when things are going our way, at the end of the day, alone with our thoughts, the whispering anxiety remains. It is there when we wake up in the morning and hovers at the edge of awareness all the time.
If you don’t believe me, then try this: Find a quiet place where you can be alone. Sit still for five minutes and just breathe. Pay attention to your thoughts. Make no attempt to control them—just watch where they go. What did you experience? An unshakable peace and contentment? A calming and comfortable assurance of God’s acceptance and approval of your life?
Probably not.
I am willing to bet—because this is how it usually works for me—that you quickly gravitated toward the nagging list of “shoulds and shouldn’ts” we each carry around. It started with things you should be doing right now instead of this pointless exercise. Then you moved on to reliving things you wish you hadn’t said or done, or things others have said and done to offend you. Perhaps you thought you should have this kind of quiet time more often—and then felt a stab of guilt when you remembered all the unfulfilled promises you’ve made to yourself and God. Your mind began to swing like a pendulum between past regret and future anxiety, with you hanging on for dear life in the middle.
No wonder we fill our lives with distractions!
Here’s the point: All that mental turmoil—to which no one is immune—arises from the same place, a deep and driving fear we all share: We’re afraid we’ll never be good enough for God. Like awkward teenagers in gym class, we are sure we’ll never be His first pick for anything. We find it impossible to rest, to stop judging our mistakes and plotting how to be better next time, in the hope of finally measuring up.
We desperately want what every child wants: to be accepted by our father.
Certain that God’s acceptance is out of reach, we settle for a sense of belonging in the world. We seek all kinds of counterfeit experiences to try to fill the hole in our hearts: sex, drugs, money, power, success, and so on. But not only do these things never satisfy our hunger for God’s acceptance, they deepen it by reinforcing our reflexive desire to run and hide from Him. They only strengthen our belief that, as we are, we’ll never be welcomed home in His house.
Let’s face it: That is one sad story.
But what if I told you that it is also wrong?
- What if God rewrote the plot long ago, the moment Jesus completed His mission of atonement and redemption on the cross?
- What if you are already accepted by God without any limit or condition?
- What if you could wake up tomorrow free of every nagging fear and doubt—absolutely secure in God’s acceptance?
- What if radical honesty with God is an open doorway leading you to peace and security in Him?
All of that is absolutely true, but don’t take my word for it. Jesus said it first in a parable long ago (tomorrow’s post).
