God Accepts You to Come as You Are, but You Don't Accept Him as He is

For His part, God will accept you if you come just as you are.  It is you who refuses to accept Him as He is. Since He is the Creator and you the creature, it's you who need to be changed; He never changes.

He is holy!  But you are unwilling to be transformed into someone who is holy like Him.  You don't want to part ways with your sinful, poisonous, hedonistic way of life.

All glory belongs to Him! But you are unwilling to accept Him as the awesome, almighty, transcendent, unchanging God who deserves every bit of credit, merit, honor, and praise.  You want some credit for your efforts, which you are deluded into thinking can somehow atone for your transgressions against the Creator of the universe.

He is righteous! But you resent the discomfort of conscience you would feel in the presence of His purity and perfection. You prefer to stay in your own sin rather than be covered in Christ's righteousness.

"At [His] right hand are pleasures forevermore," but you are too addicted to your inferior, worldly stimulants and diversions to give them up for the superior pleasure and unspeakable joy of knowing Jesus Christ!

He is King! But you are unwilling to submit to His authority. You fancy yourself as self-willed, unaware that you're actually a pitiful slave to God's cruel enemy.

He is love! But you cannot give up your grudges and bitterness toward people who have violated you or your judgment of those to whom you feel superior, whether morally, mentally, or physically.

How long will you resist Him?

Something is Wrong. What are you going to do about it?

If you're like most people, you know God is there, but you don't really know Him.  Something isn't right. 

1.  You didn't appear out of thin air; someone made you.  On some level, you tend to believe that God is your Creator.

2. You don't really know your Creator.  You know your friends; you can describe their likes and dislikes, peculiar aspects of their personalities, and their mannerisms, but with God everything you claim to know about him is vague and distant.  You know God even less than you "know" your favorite celebrity.  You comfort yourself that He cares about you personally, but the curious thing is that instead of getting to know Him, you demonstrate little desire to find out what He is really like, His history with humanity, or what He has expressed about Himself.   

3. You don't bother to find out what He wants you to do.  You selectively remember a few religious nuggets of wisdom you've heard here and there, but you rarely make an effort to investigate whether or not He has explicitly revealed His expectations for behavior.  You reassure yourself that all He wants is for you to be nice to others (the golden rule and all that,) but you can't be bothered to crack open the main book on the topic or ask some critical questions of some of the people who claim to know.  Your apathy is evident in your failure to take advantage of available resources. 

4. You call yourself, and everyone else, His "children," indicating your knowledge on some level that He created us to be a reflection of Himself.  And yet instead of comparing yourself to Him (your lifestyle, the words you speak, and your actions) you assess how "good" you are by comparing yourself to other people. You let yourself off the hook by thinking of others you consider much worse than yourself.  You measure yourself by the wrong standard, comparing people to other people instead of comparing people to God.

Clearly, there is a major problem between you and God.  Things are not okay, and it's a bad idea to let that go on indefinitely.  So, what are you going to do about it?