God accepts you and me also in exactly the same way, not as we are but as we are becoming.  Thus in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, as soon as the son made up his mind to come back and start afresh and trust himself to his father again, then without waiting to see what improvement he was actually going to make, his father gladly forgave him and received him at once as his own son in his own home.

God has come into this world as Jesus Christ to bring us back home and all that is necessary for us is first the trustful acceptance of forgiveness he offers in response to our whole-hearted penitence; and then the resolution henceforth to live for him; just the repudiation of the selfish life in the far country where God counted for nothing, and a longing to enter, as true sons and daughters, into the full life of Our Father’s household.

There is no waiting on God’s part till we reach a certain standard.  For Christ has come to fetch us home, to seek and to save the sheep lost in the wilderness.  And that is good enough for God: if we are willing to come back and start an altogether new kind of life, then he accepts us as what we can become in union with him.

That is the beginning of the spiritual life, of the soul’s life with God.  The rest of it consists in living up to the expectation and hope that God has of each one of us.  For God’s acceptance of us is by no means final – we can still fall away and be lost.  We have to work out our salvation in “fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), for St Paul admitted the possibility that when he had spent his life in preaching to others, he himself might be a castaway (1 Corinthians 9:27).