Sometimes we can be worried that God won’t accept us because of our sins. We think we’ve made too many mistakes, we’ve gone too far off His path for us, and that we don’t deserve His love. But we don’t need to be worried about that. Paul said: ‘Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.’ Before Paul’s Damascus Road conversion (you can read about that in Acts 9), he was ‘Public Sinner Number One’ (1 Timothy 1:15 MSG). Afterwards, God used him to reach the world with the gospel. ‘Grace’ was so central to Paul’s message that he mentions it at the beginning of all his letters. God’s grace means that we have His favour, even though we do things wrong and don’t deserve it. And we don’t have to do anything to earn this grace, it’s a gift. The Bible says: ‘You have been saved by grace through believing. You did not save yourselves; it was a gift from God’ (Ephesians 2:8 NCV). When we try and make ourselves right and pure before God we’ll inevitably feel like we’re facing an impossible task. But when we believe that God’s grace covers us, and all our mistakes, we can stop striving to be perfect and allow our perfect God to sort things for us. We’re His redeemed children and He sees us through the blood of Jesus, which cleanses all of our sins (have a read of 1 John 1:9). There’s nothing we can do to make God love us more, and nothing we can do to make Him love us less. So let’s stop striving to earn God’s love and acceptance, and acknowledge His grace towards each one of us.

What Now?

Spend some time thanking God for His gift of grace.