Accepted In The Beloved – What Is It To Be Accepted?

Passage: Ephesians 1:6

“…to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”

One of the cherished economic things in international relations is to gain the so-called “Most Favored Nation” status as a trading partner with the United States of America.  That status gains the particular country in view privileges and favorable terms in its dealings with us in economic matters.  It is not a status that is given automatically to just any nation (though it certainly seems as if it is given pretty indiscriminately at times).  It is a special status that yields special privilege and benefits that are not available to just any old nation.

Paul is trying to communicate to us this idea of the “special-ness” of the blessedness that God has bestowed upon us as His children.  He has told us that God has given us every spiritual blessing in heavenly places in Christ and that He called and predestined us to adoption as sons because of the good pleasure of his will.  The end result of this, here and now, is that we are accepted by God.

“Accepted” is from a Greek word meaning “…to grace, that is, endue with special honor: make accepted, be highly favored.  The root word means to make graceful, charming, lovely, or agreeable.  The idea here is that, in the Beloved, God graces us, gives us special honor, favors us to a special degree.  The word is used one other time in the New Testament – to refer to Mary when Gabriel told her that she to be the mother of the Messiah in Luke 1.  She was “Highly Favored” and “Blessed above women”.  That is the idea contained in the word here as well.

The focus of this idea is that we are accepted by God.  The implication is that, before Christ, we were not accepted by God.  Where we were not favored by God before we came to Christ, we are favored now.  Where we were not graced, or blessed by God before we received salvation, we are graced and blessed by God now.  That is the crux of the idea; namely that we have experienced a change in status with regard to God’s favor or His blessing.  We have been “made charming” or “lovely and agreeable” to God.

What a remarkable concept this is!  We all wish to be acceptable to God.  That is the cry of the spiritual man’s heart!  We are all aware of the shortcomings that are all to visible a part of our lives and we are all very much knowledgeable about where we fail and where we come up lacking.  The cry of our heart for God to be happy with us in spite of our failings. 

The righteousness of Christ makes that acceptance a reality.  For those who are believers, who have received the gift of God’s grace and the imputed righteousness of Christ, the acceptance and approval of God is a fact of spiritual life.  The enmity that was a feature of our lives before our salvation is forever gone, swallowed up in the enormous favor that is ours in Christ. 

The reality of all of this is that we are now on solid ground with God.  That ground is not our own righteousness, faulty and shoddy as it is.  We do not depend on our own strengths or our own agreeableness or loveliness to commend us to God.  That is all past, all gone and cast away as useless and insufficient.  We now, as believers, trust in the work of Jesus, forever finished and eternally effective to commend us to God.  Our loveliness and our agreeableness to God rooted in the perfect obedience of Christ to the Law of God while He was here on earth.  It is His righteousness, that of the Beloved, that God sees when He looks at His children.

We are, indeed, accepted by God!  That means that we are the recipients of His approval, His grace and His mercy.  He has declared that, now and forever, we are His and He is ours.  Sin is no longer an issue that separates us from Him – that sin having been dealt with finally and completely by Christ.  We stand accepted in the Beloved!