See Christ yonder, sitting at his Father’s right hand! Believer! He is the pledge of thy glorification; he is the surety of thine acceptance; and, moreover, he is thy representative.
I imagine emotion oozing from Charles Spurgeon’s voice backed by unction from his gut, as he preached these words. Truer yet, I imagine a particular listener with tears glistening from his eyes, much like mine, at the sound of such unfair grace being preached with surety.
The one thing humans want is to just be accepted by someone. We will spend the entirety of our lives searching for this one thing. Men will go to great lengths in search of it. Every inch of every nook and cranny will be scourged in the pursuit of this one thing. Every sphere of the public square will be tried.
All of our searching ends in either rejection or a cheap acceptance. Nearly all of the acceptance we find is a cheap kind. A cheap acceptance is an acceptance that is conditional on the recipient of this so called acceptance to meet a certain standard. This is the nature of human acceptance. We are accepted upon conditions, and we accept upon conditions. So we are never really accepted purely just for us, but for our qualifications. It is maddening.
But our search for pure, unconditional acceptance ends in Christ. Unlike a prospective student applying for acceptance at a university, hoping to meet certain qualifications, we are accepted by God unconditionally. No application is necessary, no qualifications need be met. How can this be? It is because Christ is there, at the right hand of God, pleading our case to God. All those for whom Christ died, he will have accepted by God, conditioned entirely upon his payment for them. We are accepted by God upon being found in Christ, with no exceptions, no strings attached, and no catch.
Jesus is the surety of our acceptance. He is the guarantee of our inheritance. Jesus is our acceptance.
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