Accepting acceptance
For me, the whole spiritual scene comes down to one concept. Theologian Paul Tillich called it “accepting acceptance.” The concept is simple. The idea is that God accepts us (with all our faults and sins) but we do not easily accept His acceptance. All our guilt surrounds our inability to accept God’s acceptance.
God not only forgives our faults and sins, but He forgets them. We want to carry our guilt around with us all our life and have a miserable life in the process. We can all be free (of guilt) if we want to.
Have you ever heard the expression, “He (she) can’t take “yes” for an answer?”
That is the problem. We can’t take God’s “yes” for an answer. As soon as we realize this fact, we become free. Our life changes.
The “good news” (there must be some “good news” or all religions are pointless), is that we are forgiven and saved.
If our religious services don’t give us good news on a continual basis, they are missing the whole point and should close their doors.
Most people who belong to organized religions figure that they have to work extremely hard to be saved.
How do they carry this out? Normally they do this by multiplying prayers, devotions and various pious activities until they “earn” their salvation.
This is very much like earning air points. If you earn a certain number of air points, you earn yourself the ability to travel a certain distance.
The actual fact is that you can pray or multiply devotions till you are blue in the face, but you can never earn your way to heaven.
It is God who brings us to eternal life because He loves each and every one of us. Nobody is excluded. We are all human and we are all created and loved by God.
We are all terrified of a big test to come yet we have passed the test already. That is the good news! You either accept acceptance or you don’t. If you do, you have nothing to worry about.
If you don’t, you will probably be filled with guilt and you will not be able to figure out what life on Earth is all about, yet God will accept you anyway.
Actually, it is no more complicated than that.
The work of our salvation is complete. Salvation means entering into a higher state of consciousness after death. Some people call this state “heaven.”
We need to look at things in a very broad perspective. This pertains to all people who have ever lived, are living now and will live in the future.
The point is that God loves all creation. We should show our gratitude in accepting God’s gift of love to us. We simply need to “accept acceptance”