Accepted and Approved: Living Free From Shame

By David Shearin

Many people are hindered from moving forward in life because of a nagging sense of guilt or shame from their past. From the pages of this book, you will gain a revelation of the righteousness that comes through faith in Jesus Christ, and carry away an unshakeable confidence in His acceptance and approval of you, so that you are able to live

• Language: English
• Publisher: Word of Life Christian Center
• Release date: Jun 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781940697123

David Shearin

David Shearin is the founder and Senior Pastor of Word of Life Christian Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. The church has grown from 5 people to over 2,000 and continues to reach out through various ministries, including a weekly television broadcast, The Word For Living. In addition to pastoring, David minister's in churches, conferences and Bible Schools throughout the U.S. and in other nations.

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INTRODUCTION

Perhaps you haven’t identified what it is that is holding you back from seizing your God-given opportunities for success and rising to your highest potential. Many people are hindered from moving forward in life because of a nagging sense of guilt or shame from their past. The Good News of Jesus Christ has the power to set us free from guilt and shame because it reveals how God has not only forgiven us, but has accepted us and approved of us apart from anything we have ever done to deserve it, and in spite of the fact that we really don’t deserve it! Righteousness is the ability to stand before God without a sense of guilt, condemnation or inferiority, and the New Testament teaches that God has given us His righteousness as a free gift. Everyone has a deep longing to be genuinely accepted and approved; everyone wants to be able to love others without fear of rejection. It is my desire that you will gain, from the pages of this book, a revelation of the righteousness that comes through faith in Jesus Christ, and carry away an unshakeable confidence in His acceptance and approval of you, so that you are able to live your life and fulfill your God-given destiny, free from shame!

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. (Romans 1:16-17 KJV)

The powerful truth about righteousness is that it has the power to revolutionize your life. I know, because for years it’s been revolutionizing mine. Ever since I began to study righteousness many years ago, it’s been producing in me one breakthrough after another …and it’s never stopped. Even today, after decades of preaching the Gospel, I’m still discovering how powerful the righteousness of God actually is.

Righteousness is one of those words in the Bible that most Christians often read right past without really understanding what it communicates; yet it’s one of the most important terms in the Scriptures. It’s a word that’s foundational to our faith in God. It is, in fact, the central point of the Gospel.

In its simplest form, righteousness means right relationship with God. It means to be brought by Him into a right state or condition of which He is the standard. As E.W. Kenyon phrased it, Righteousness is the ability to stand in the presence of the Father God without a sense of sin, guilt, condemnation or inferiority.

The Gospel is the message of how God made His righteousness available to all mankind. It’s the Good News about how Jesus, the Son of God, came to give it to the whole world. For those of us who are Christians, hearing and believing this Good News is what saved us and put us on the path to heaven. It’s the message that brought us into God’s kingdom when we were first born again and yet it’s a message we never outgrow.

Whether we’re hearing it for the first time or the thousandth time, the Gospel never becomes old news to those of us that allow the power of the Gospel to enlighten and enrich our daily lives. It’s always—right now, in the present tense—the power of God for us who believe. The more we hear it and meditate on it, the more it lifts us from one level of faith to another. The more we water the soil of our hearts with the basic truths of the Gospel the more we flourish and grow into trees of righteousness, that glorify the LORD. (Isaiah 61:3)

In Las Vegas, where I live, I’ve had some experience getting trees to flourish. I’ve broken up rock with a pick and dug holes for them with my own hands. I’ve planted them in the ground and watered them day after day. If I didn’t have an irrigation system, I put a hose out because I’ve learned that if I don’t water my trees consistently they’re not going to thrive.

Actually, out here in the desert, pretty much everything that’s green—except for the cactus—needs that kind of constant watering. You can’t water your plants just long enough for them to get established and then ignore them. If you do, before long they’ll be in trouble. I remember one time my entire lawn turned brown when I was out of town for a few days because the gardener accidentally cut some wires to the watering system and shut down my sprinklers. As soon as I saw what had happened, I got the sprinklers fixed fast. I turned the water back on so my lawn could start to come back.

That’s the way it is for us as Christians. For us to thrive in the righteousness that’s revealed in the Gospel there has to be a watering process. We have to keep renewing our minds and saturating them with the water of the Word. We can’t just learn once that we’re the righteousness of God. In order to flourish in the midst of the dry conditions around us and keep the heat of this world from scorching our life, we have to go over the Scriptures about righteousness again and again.

Many believers don’t realize this. They think that because they’re born again they don’t need to hear the Gospel anymore and as a result they fail to fully enjoy the benefits of their right relationship with the Lord. They struggle through their Christian life burdened with a sense of guilt, shame, and condemnation over past sins and present inadequacies. Even though they love God and desire to please Him, they’re plagued with a residue of unrighteousness they just can’t seem to shake.

Truth be told, we all find ourselves plagued by that unrighteous residue at one time or another. But we don’t have to put up with it. Jesus Christ came to set us free! He paid the price for our sins so we don’t have to keep living under the shadow of them. He won the victory for us so that instead of struggling (and constantly failing) to achieve righteousness on our own we can give up the struggle and do things God’s way.

What exactly is God’s way? It’s simply this:

That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. (Romans 10:9-10)

This, in a nutshell, is the truth of the Gospel. Through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, God made righteousness a gift. A gift is something you don’t earn or work for. It’s something you receive.

There’s no greater gift in heaven or earth you can ever receive than the marvelous gift of God’s righteousness! Once you have it, you never again have to be afraid to approach Him. You never again have to shrink back and wonder if He’ll accept you. Instead, you can draw near to Him with confidence. You can freely access His presence and have rich fellowship with Him anytime, any place.

All that God Demands and Approves

But Pastor David, someone might say, you don’t know what I’ve done. How can I come before God with that kind of boldness?

No, I don’t but I don’t have to because it’s not the things you’ve done—either good or bad—that make you righteous. As a believer you’re righteous because of what Jesus has done. When you put your faith in Him, He moved into your heart and brought His righteousness with Him. Your old sin nature died and through your union with Christ you became a partaker of His divine nature.

Bible scholar C.I. Schofield says, The righteousness of God is all that God demands and approves, and is ultimately found in Christ Himself. That means the moment you were born again you instantly became worthy of God’s full acceptance. Because you moved into Christ and He moved into you, in your spirit you instantly become all that God demands and approves.

As 2 Corinthians 5:17-19, 21 says:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. For he made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.

Look again at the first two words of that passage. They confirm that anyone can qualify to be in Christ. Anyone can be a brand-new creation. Regardless of who we are or what kind of sins we’ve committed, we can be made righteous by faith in Jesus because the whole world has been reconciled to God through Him.

The word reconciled is defined in Strong’s Bible Dictionary as a restoration to divine favor. In English it means to make friendly again, to restore harmony or friendship between. If you’re friends with someone, you have favor with them. So in a manner of speaking, being reconciled to God through the gift of righteousness makes you one of His favorites. It gives you a peaceful, harmonious relationship with Him.

Reconciliation can also be defined, according to Vines Expository Dictionary, as a change on the part of one party, induced by an action on the part of another. In our reconciliation to God, He’s the one who took the action on behalf of all humanity. He was the One who reached out to span the breach that sin produced between Him and us.

He wasn’t the One who caused the breach, of course. It wasn’t God who withdrew Himself from mankind. His attitude toward us was always one of love and He never changed. We were the ones who turned our friendship with Him into enmity. Starting with Adam, all of mankind went astray like sheep and turned, every one, to his own way.¹ Each and every one of us rebelled against God, departed from Him, and chose our own path—the path of sin.

Since the wages of sin is death,² somebody had to die to pay the penalty for our rebellion. Justice demanded it. Even earthly legal systems require crimes to be punished. When somebody commits a murder or a robbery, we expect there to be a penalty for it. God took it upon Himself to pay the penalty for the sin of all humanity. He so loved the world that He made the ultimate sacrifice to restore us to right relationship with Him. He sent His own Son to take on a human body and live a sinless life. Then He sent Him to the cross and there God laid on Him the iniquity of us all.³

For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-7)

God’s love is deeper than human love. He proved His love for us by dying for us while we were at our worst. He didn’t wait for us to get everything straightened out. He didn’t say to us, "Before I send Jesus