How can I be accepted for who I am
Everyone wants to be loved - to be accepted for who they are. And this desire can drive people to change the way they look / sound / behave, or to do things they later regret, or to pretend to be someone else - and still not feel accepted at the end of it! So where can we find genuine unconditional love? The answer the Bible gives us is: a relationship with God.
But how can we know for certain that God loves us?
He created us : Whether you're talking about the ancient origins of the human race, or the formation of an unborn baby in the womb, the Bible says that God made us. He may have used biological processes to do it, but God put us here � and that means we matter. Just as my children mean the absolute world to me, so we mean the absolute world to God.
He died for us : Because God is just and perfect and we're not, He has to judge the wrong things we do. But God loves us so much that He became a human being, in Jesus, to take the punishment for those things by dying in our place - on a cross. As Jesus died He was thinking of each and every one of us and was saying' "This is how much I love you".
That's how we can know that we are truly loved and accepted. So often we will look to other people to make us feel that way, but even in the strongest marriages, the happiest families, the greatest friendships, there are limitations to human love - sometimes people can let us down. The message the Bible gives us is that God never will. He will always love us - no matter what.
Steve Edney:
Steve Edney became a Christian at the age of 16, after turning to the Bible for answers to big questions about life. He worked as a freelance graphic designer after leaving school, until he married Kellie in 1998 and went to train at Moorlands College in Dorset. He then worked as a Youth Minister in London for three years, before moving to Maidstone in 2005 to become Pastor of Boxley Road Evangelical Church. He and Kellie have two children.