OK
You Will Never Be More OK with God Than You Are Right Now
Don Keesee
Visit the Online Serial Novel Ran Lives:
You Will Never Be More OK with God Than You Are Right Now
Don Keesee
Visit the Online Serial Novel Ran Lives:
Who is Ran? A man who decided to live by the Word
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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Holy Bible as updated for modern English usage by the author of this book.
Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of the Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, Today’s New International Verson ™ TNIV ®, Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society ®.
(Donations and regular mail correspondence address)
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Holy Bible as updated for modern English usage by the author of this book.
Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of the Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, Today’s New International Verson ™ TNIV ®, Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society ®.
All rights reserved worldwide.
[If marked NKJV]: Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.
[If marked NKJV]: Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.
All rights reserved.
۰1۰
You Will Never Be More
Accepted Than Now
You Will Never Be More
Accepted Than Now
A believer in Jesus? Then you can never get yourself more accepted by God than you are right now. Never for the rest of your life. Not for a million years. If you believe in Jesus you’ve done all you can do. You can do nothing more. You are accepted now.
This is plainly and simply what the New Testament says. This truth is the heart of the New Testament. It tells us that we have been made into new creations because of our faith in Jesus and are completely accepted by God. Doing good things has many great spiritual benefits but has nothing to do with getting this acceptance. It is a gift that comes by faith. You cannot earn this. Thinking you can will cause problems in your life. (See Ephesians 2:8-9; Colossians 1:21-22; Romans 5:1-2.)
——
You can never get yourself more accepted
You can never get yourself more accepted
by God than you are right now.
Never for the rest of your life.
Not for a million years.
——
Never for the rest of your life.
Not for a million years.
——
Jesus came and died and came alive again for the purpose of making full acceptance a reality for you. God set up a new deal with mankind, and in this new deal you get total acceptance only by believing in Jesus. Period. Nothing else you do can add to your already complete acceptance. Nothing. You may change the world through the power of God, but in the end, you will be no more accepted than at the beginning. Why? Because acceptance by God is a free gift (repetitive, I know).
You will be rewarded for the good things you do. But you are already completely accepted and seen as OK by God. As we will see in a fuller way later, God did an amazing thing to make this happen. His Son Jesus took your sin and gave you his perfect standing before God (2 Corinthians 5:21). When we totally accept this, our prayer lives will never be the same. We will stand before God without a sense of condemnation, without a nagging feeling that we are not quite good enough.
The good things you do after you believe are great. God loves it when you do things for other people, etc. But you were one-hundred percent accepted before you did one good thing. Believing in Jesus brought us full acceptance. That acceptance does not grow. It is already infinite.
The question is, Do we absolutely, completely, without any reservations believe this? It is reality after all. If we don’t believe it, then some of the real problems in our lives—in our whole lives, now and from a long time back—are probably there because of this lack of acceptance of our total acceptance by God. It is not humility for us to say we are not worthy to stand before God. It is a big mistake, not humility—for we have been made worthy by Jesus death and his coming back alive again.
——
In this new deal you get total acceptance only by believing in Jesus. Period. Nothing else you do can add to your already complete acceptance.
Nothing
——
In this new deal you get total acceptance only by believing in Jesus. Period. Nothing else you do can add to your already complete acceptance.
Nothing
——
Your worthiness is not about anything you did or didn’t do. It is about what Jesus did for you when you put faith in Him. He gave you his righteousness, that is, his right standing before God, his full acceptance. When we do not fully accept our acceptance by God we are holding ourselves back from the best God has for us. In pages to come, I will explain how the New Testament plainly tells us this very thing. Galatians, for instance, presents this fact in a very radical uncompromising way.
۰2۰
It Is a Thing Called
“Sin-Consciousness”
that Is Holding Us Back
Why would Paul be moved to place right in the middle of the world changing book Romans the words “There is now, therefore, no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus”? He would do this because the world is being smashed under the weight of what he calls in the next verse “the law of sin and death.” Near the very beginning of the Bible, we see these words concertaing the result of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “In the day you eat from it, you will surely die.” This is the law of sin and death right in front of us. People walk away from God into darkness (that being what sin is), and then death comes.
Humankind walked away and they died—not physically until later, but spiritually they died right then—and the fear of the punishment of death infused itself miles deep into the souls of humankind. Adam and Eve surely sensed that something horrible was coming later. However vague at the time, what they feared was irreversible condemnation—a condemning sentence of physical death and spiritual death forever. The fear of the horror of horrors, the hideous void, branded itself in us as deeply as we could possibly be branded. Adam’s first recorded words afterward contained the phrase “I was afraid.” But God never wanted any of this to happen. Never. Explanation coming.
Jesus came and reversed irreversible condemnation. This is the reason he came, the reason he and the Father planned it for so long. No, God never wanted this condemnation to come on us. Not at all. But if you make free-will creations—human beings—you give them the power to walk away from the only life source in the universe and into death. You let them choose. You always let them choose. But after the horror that followed the bad choice, Jesus came and took upon himself that sin and the condemnation it gave birth to. Then he gave us his own right standing before God the Father (right standing: righteousness, 2 Cor. 5:21).
Everything is OK now. We are totally OK now by faith in Jesus alone. All is well. We will never be able to do one additional thing to be any more OK with God. It’s done. It’s finished. If you believe in Jesus, you are OK. You are accepted.
——
Jesus came and reversed
irreversible condemnation
——
All this is great news. It is the best news the world has ever heard about. Yet, again, despite this, there is still a problem. Yes. All of the not-believing-in-Jesus people don’t know and/or understand this great central truth of mankind’s freedom yet. And a very great number of believers in the world don’t quite understand it either, thinking that good things they do will somehow make them a little more acceptable to God. And it seems to them that they can never quite do enough good things to get fully accepted.
The idea that we can earn our acceptance by God is not just a misconception without much impact. No, it’s a very destructive belief, having many bad effects including—in some cases—that the concept moves people further away from God. They thought they were not accepted, so they drifted away. But we are, in truth, accepted from the second we believe. We are justified—made OK before God—by faith alone and in no way at all by what we do. In what may well be the very core of the New Testament’s truth about our relationships with God, Galatians 2:16 says this:
. . . a person is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified. (Today’s New International Version)
It doesn’t get any clearer than this. It doesn’t get any better than this. Faith only—you are totally OK with God. And you are OK now.
——
It doesn’t get any better than this. Faith only—you are
It doesn’t get any better than this. Faith only—you are
totally OK with God. And you are OK now.
——
——
Many people, knowingly or not, spend a large part of their lives attempting to somehow escape the eternal death that came to humankind because of sin in the Garden. Many come up with extreme ideas like getting frozen and on and on. Others are in a lifelong pursuit of youth. Others dull the reality with substance abuse or maybe by constantly finding something else to think about through diversions of many kinds. But the truth is that we have already escaped spiritual death if we believe in Jesus. And whoever has not believed in him can do that in a second, and they too will be just accepted as we are.
Believing in Jesus is the thing that will make anyone anywhere completely accepted by God and completely free from eternal death. Every believer in Jesus has eternal life instead. Now and forever. Good deeds are very important. But they do not make us even one tiny bit more accepted as God’s children. It was faith in Jesus that did that and nothing else. Period. A person is made right with God by putting his trust in Jesus Christ.
Still, as we have seen, so many of us don’t realize that the goal of getting us acceptance has been accomplished, that we are free now. If we have a less than total acceptance of our acceptance, we have remaining within us, then, at least a measure of sin/condemnation consciousness. If that is where we are in our belief, then deep inside we still see ourselves as not quite measuring up. We don’t see reality—that we are standing before God as his dear children, children whom he sees as having no wrong act at all connected with them.
——
Good deeds are very important. But they do not make us even one tiny bit more accepted as God’s
Good deeds are very important. But they do not make us even one tiny bit more accepted as God’s
children. It was faith in Jesus that
did that and nothing else.
Period.
——
Period.
——
The infusion of sin/condemnation consciousness into the entire human race was so massive and so complete that we have incredible difficulty seeing past it. So we fall back into thinking that there must surely be something else to do to earn our freedom from death. But there is not. So the real question is not, “How do we escape condemnation, death?” It is this: “How do we get rid of this sin/condemnation consciousness thing that holds us back?”
How do we live by the reality of our standing with God instead of by a false view about this? (In Galatians Paul says there is a “real” good news and a “different” good news, a false one.) The real truth is that the defeat of sin/condemnation consciousness comes through decision and renewing the mind: we simply decide with our hearts that we accept our total acceptance by God—this is called faith. And we keep renewing our minds with the truth of full acceptance by faith as you are doing right now by reading this book.
Having gotten this far, you probably already feel a good bit less sin/condemnation working in you than before you started reading. That is the power of renewing your mind. For you have been replacing thoughts and feelings of false sin/condemnation consciousness with full acceptance by God consciousness (righteousness consciousness). This comes from looking at the truth about the situation in his Word. One way to do this now is to just keep reading and renew your mind and the Word will drive out condemnation thinking.
۰3۰
Jesus Gave Every One of Us His
Acceptance by the Father
There is a cure for sin/condemnation consciousness. And there surely needs to be. For with it, we can never quite feel comfortable about being close to God. We will feel that we don’t measure up, either having not done enough good things or having done too many bad things to be accepted by God. There certainly needs to be a cure for this. And, as we have seen, faith in Jesus is the cure. And renewing the mind helps us to live as the cured people we are. These things being true, let’s look at reality, at how things actually would be if we laid aside sin/condemnation consciousness.
If we had no sin/condemnation consciousness, how would things be different? Here is how: We would stand before God as a child stands before its loving father. We would feel completely accepted. Each one of us would not have any doubt whatsoever that our Father wanted to answer every prayer, that our Father thought every one of us was the coolest thing he had ever seen, that he saw each one as perfect. We would be able to trust completely that he wanted the very best for our lives and that his leading would bring the very best. It is so great that there is a cure for sin/condemnation consciousness, for this kind of life is what almost every one of us wants. We want to feel accepted all the time, everywhere we go.
There is a cure for sin/condemnation consciousness. Jesus provided it. And, yes, we have seen that he made us completely accepted. But because some of us do not fully see and grasp that we are already accepted, we think and live as if we were not. Sin/condemnation consciousness blocks us from fully experiencing the total acceptance Jesus handed to us because of our faith in him. So what can we do?
As we saw above, Jesus gave us his own righteousness, and we can make this a reality in our lives by renewing our minds to this truth, by looking at the truth over and over until it becomes part of us. As we renew our minds, something begins to grow bigger and bigger inside of us. You could call this something full acceptance consciousness. As it grows, it will push out sin/condemnation consciousness. It grows as we simply take in the words God said about the reality and structure and basically the essence of God’s full acceptance of us now because we simply believe in Jesus. And this is exactly what we are doing here. This is not a book of baseless theory. It is a book presenting concepts from his Word about our total acceptance. These words create within us an experience of that acceptance as we take in them in. So let’s take in more of them.
——
As we renew our minds, something begins to grow bigger and bigger inside of us. You could call this something full acceptance consciousness.
——
As we renew our minds, something begins to grow bigger and bigger inside of us. You could call this something full acceptance consciousness.
——
YOU ARE
TOTALLY
ACCEPTED
BY GOD NOW
TOTALLY
ACCEPTED
BY GOD NOW
——
Here is an amazing seventy-one word passage. In these few words, we clearly see our total acceptance by faith alone. Romans 3:21-24:
21 But God has a way to make people right with him without the law, and he has now shown us that way which the law and the prophets told us about.22 God makes people right with himself through their faith in Jesus Christ. This is true for all who believe in Christ, because all people are the same: 23 Everyone has sinned and fallen short of God's glorious standard, 24 and all need to be made right with God by his grace, which is a free gift. They need to be made free from sin through Jesus Christ. (New Century Version--NCV)
“God makes people right with himself through their faith in Jesus Christ.” Do you believe in Jesus? Then you have God’s righteousness given to you free, totally and completely beyond any fragment of a necessity to earn it by doing anything. This is Jesus’ own righteousness, Jesus’ acceptableness to God, Jesus’ good-ness. It is good enough. How could it not be? It is Jesus’. It gives us total access to God the Father—total. With faith in Jesus, it comes right then. This passage shows that this is the present state of the believer, not just something that will come in the future. You have Jesus’ own righteousness (right standing, acceptance) now. The verse below makes this even clearer:
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21, TNIV)
Jesus took all our sin—the thing that gave us an acceptance problem with God—and then gave us his righteousness, his acceptance. Obviously God hated the separation that began when the human race walked away from him (generally called “the fall”). He wanted to be able to accept us back so badly that he sent his son to die taking all the sin and condemnation for it on himself. But Jesus did not stop with taking our sin (and this is what so many of us do not understand); he also gave us his own righteousness, his own acceptance. That is already done, as we saw in the Romans 3 passage above.
21 But God has a way to make people right with him without the law, and he has now shown us that way which the law and the prophets told us about.22 God makes people right with himself through their faith in Jesus Christ. This is true for all who believe in Christ, because all people are the same: 23 Everyone has sinned and fallen short of God's glorious standard, 24 and all need to be made right with God by his grace, which is a free gift. They need to be made free from sin through Jesus Christ. (New Century Version--NCV)
“God makes people right with himself through their faith in Jesus Christ.” Do you believe in Jesus? Then you have God’s righteousness given to you free, totally and completely beyond any fragment of a necessity to earn it by doing anything. This is Jesus’ own righteousness, Jesus’ acceptableness to God, Jesus’ good-ness. It is good enough. How could it not be? It is Jesus’. It gives us total access to God the Father—total. With faith in Jesus, it comes right then. This passage shows that this is the present state of the believer, not just something that will come in the future. You have Jesus’ own righteousness (right standing, acceptance) now. The verse below makes this even clearer:
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21, TNIV)
Jesus took all our sin—the thing that gave us an acceptance problem with God—and then gave us his righteousness, his acceptance. Obviously God hated the separation that began when the human race walked away from him (generally called “the fall”). He wanted to be able to accept us back so badly that he sent his son to die taking all the sin and condemnation for it on himself. But Jesus did not stop with taking our sin (and this is what so many of us do not understand); he also gave us his own righteousness, his own acceptance. That is already done, as we saw in the Romans 3 passage above.
——
You have Jesus’ own righteousness. With faith in Jesus, it comes right then. Romans 3:21-24 shows that this is the present state of the believer, not just something that will come in the future.
——
You have Jesus’ own righteousness. With faith in Jesus, it comes right then. Romans 3:21-24 shows that this is the present state of the believer, not just something that will come in the future.
——
Again, this is total righteousness we are talking about, total acceptance based only on believing. For there is no way in the universe anyone could ever earn such a thing. Yes, we become more like God as we grow in our spiritual lives, but as far as acceptance goes, we have it the second we believe. That is the reason there is no way we can do anything to be any more accepted than we are right now.
Each one of us became God’s child the moment he or she believed. A baby is accepted by loving parents from day one. And God is a loving parent, much more loving than any earthly parent could possibly be. And in the words of Jesus, we even see the level of God’s love for us as his children:
22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22-23, TNIV).
Jesus did not say this only about his disciples at that time in history. He said it about them AND about all who would come to believe in him through their message (John 17:20). That includes you. A lot to take in. You are an accepted child of God that God the Father loves as he loves Jesus, his eternal son. You have all the love and all the acceptance you could ever need, all you can imagine.
You could do a thousand good deeds in the next six months but you would be no more accepted than you are right now. If you could do a million good deeds you would be no more accepted than now. At this moment, you are in a position to go right to the Father with no guilt or condemnation whatsoever. You can talk to him without any sense that there is anything wrong. People may see wrong, but God does not. He sees Jesus’ own righteousness with nothing bad in it at all. You can ask God for whatever you need based on his promises and fully expect him to answer. You are the righteousness of God. You are accepted forever.
——
You are an accepted child of God that God the Father loves as he loves
Jesus, his eternal son.
——
You are an accepted child of God that God the Father loves as he loves
Jesus, his eternal son.
——
I hope that I have made it clear that your acceptance is completely a faith proposition. This is the case because our acceptance by God is a gift that merely needs to be accepted by faith. We simply need to accept our acceptance. That is faith. That is all you need. God’s promises contain gifts to you that become active when they are accepted by faith. Some involve action on our part in order to receive by faith after the action (“throw your worries on the Lord, and the peace of God . . . ,” “Give and it will be given to you”), and some do not.
The gift of acceptance is one of those gifts that does not involve any action on our part in order to receive but to believe in Jesus. Other than this, absolutely no action of any kind is involved. No act will bring you one shred of additional acceptance as God’s child. And actually, the truth is that the promises that do involve action on our part are also received by faith. We act in faith and simply believe God for what God promised, and the promised thing comes to us. All promises are faith propositions—matters of faith from beginning to end. But again, when it comes to the gift of righteousness, the only thing in the world that will bring it to you is faith in Jesus.
——
We simply need to accept our acceptance.
——
We simply need to accept our acceptance.
——
۰4۰
The Key Is Realizing and Activating What
You Already Have
The Key Is Realizing and Activating What
You Already Have
One of the most difficult things for some of us believers is realizing that there are certain things that we do not need to seek for anymore. They are already here. They are already ours. Since there are no actions other than believing in Jesus connected with our total acceptance, what we earlier saw in Romans 8:1 fully applies to us right now: “There is now, therefore, no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Now no condemnation. We are totally cleared, totally accepted now. We need to think this way all the time, developing our acceptance consciousness and driving out sin/condemnation consciousness. For we are the righteousness of God in Christ now. We have his own righteousness—right standing with God, his total acceptance—now.
You do not need to try to be accepted. You are. You are already with Christ in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6). The New Covenant says this about you: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, 10 and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority” (Colossians 2:9-10, TNIV). You are completely an accepted child of God. You have been brought to “fullness” in that area. If you believe in Jesus, you are already fully a child of his. You can grow and do many great things in the world, but your acceptance is a done deal.
Notice the now in this passage:
But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— 23 if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel” (Colossians 1:22-23a, TNIV).
You are holy and without any sort of flaw in God’s eyes. How could such a thing be? We know we have flaws. How could God not see them? He doesn’t see them because Jesus took all of them upon himself. That is the reason. This taking away of sin and its effects is a real thing, not just a philosophical concept. And it is all there by faith. And as we see in verse 23, the only requirement is faith.
I want to tell you about an experience I had. You do not need to accept this personal experience in order to accept the clear New Testament message about your acceptance as presented here in this book. But maybe my telling you about something that happened to me will help you.
One night I had a two-part dream. Here, I will tell about only the second part, though the first part did confirm the second. In the last part of the dream for just a few seconds I saw Jesus. I looked at his face. He said nothing. But he didn’t need to. His eyes “said” it all.
I was shocked by what I saw. In his eyes, there was no recognition whatever that he saw anything at all wrong with me. There was total acceptance of me in his eyes. This was so clear, so obvious. It amazed me. I knew that there were things wrong with me. I knew I was not perfect. But his expression showed me that he saw none of this. It was all gone. Only acceptance was there in his eyes. I was OK.
——
You have his own righteousness—right
standing with God, his
total acceptance—now.
——
You have his own righteousness—right
standing with God, his
total acceptance—now.
——
I don’t really think I have ever been the same since that experience. Yet, you do not need a dream like I had to gain acceptance consciousness (though God will certainly answer your prayer for extra help in accepting his acceptance of you). For the New Testament contains the same message as my dream. It says plainly that God sees in you the righteousness—the good-ness—of Jesus himself.
You are without any blame at all in his sight. (Colossians 1:22 in New King James Version (NKJV), says that Jesus reconciled you to God “in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight.”) This great gift is yours at this moment and forever.
You can rest in God’s acceptance right now. The only requirement is believing in Jesus. So just keep believing. That is all you need to do to have his full acceptance. What could be greater? Yes, go live for him. Go do some great things for the world as you are led to. Doing this, you will have a very great life. But right now, before you do one more good thing, you are already totally accepted by the Father.
You can rest in God’s acceptance right now. The only requirement is believing in Jesus. So just keep believing. That is all you need to do to have his full acceptance. What could be greater? Yes, go live for him. Go do some great things for the world as you are led to. Doing this, you will have a very great life. But right now, before you do one more good thing, you are already totally accepted by the Father.
*******
