I’ve been thinking lately about
Zephaniah 3:17: “The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will
take great delight in you, He will quiet you with his love, He will rejoice
over you with singing.” Have you ever thought about God delighting in you?
That’s hard for me to comprehend. Yeah, I know God loves me, but so what? You
mean He actually delights in me?! I can’t imagine why. But for whatever reason,
God doesn’t just love me, He likes me. And He doesn’t just like me, He delights
in me.
J.I. Packer writes in Knowing God, “There is, certainly, great
cause for humility in the thought that he sees all the twisted things about me
that my fellow humans do not see (and am I glad!), and that he sees more
corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is
enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in
the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and
desires to be my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to
realize this purpose.”
I think that we tend to forget
that salvation comes to us because of God’s love and delight. He didn’t just
take pity on us poor defenseless creatures, like we might pity the kitten that
shows up on our doorstep. God is love, and love can’t be self-contained. His
love overflows to the people He created in His image. Larry Crabb writes in Connecting, “Nothing is more fundamental
to appreciating the essence of Christian living than to ponder the implications
of a central but often neglected truth: We have all been created by an Eternal
Community of three fully connected persons. When we’re told that we bear God’s
image, we immediately know two things: 1. We were designed to connect with
others... 2. Connecting with others depends on using our capacity to
relate for the enjoyment and enhancement of someone other than ourselves."
I really enjoyed reading Connecting. It struck a chord in me that
reminded me that we not only need to experience God’s delight in us, but we
need relationships with people who delight in us as well. The church should be
a place where that happens regularly, and yet it often doesn’t. Far too many
people come to church once a week (or more), but fail to have any kind of
meaningful relationships that reach outside the walls of that building. I
desire to have at least a few relationships with people who know me and who
delight in me for who I am, not for what I do. That kind of intimacy is
possible because of the life of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit in us. Paul
wrote, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and
for all, as we do for you” (1 Thess. 3:12). I haven’t seen that kind of
abundant love in many churches, and perhaps just small pockets in many other
churches.
If the local assembly of the
Body of Christ were fully united and working together in the abundant love of
Christ, I’m sure there would be no problem attracting new believers and new
members. As I’ve shared with a couple people, true community has a healing
power that is largely untapped as we settle for superficial imitations most of
the time. Certain people have an ability to touch lives more deeply because
they willingly invest themselves in the people around them. My own experience
has made this clearer to me lately, and I would love to see that multiplied in
other lives.
One of the illustrations in Connecting keeps coming back to me. Brennan
Manning would regularly meet with an older man, and each time they got spotted
each other at their meeting place, the man would jump up and down with delight
saying, “There’s Brennan!” Later, Brennan gave the same kind of reception to
Larry Crabb, and it filled him with joy. Are there those people who delight in
us and jump up and down (either literally or figuratively) when they see us?
Some parents are welcomed home each day by the delight of their young children.
But are there others who know us intimately and love us anyway? Have we ever
taken the risk of letting someone get that close to begin with?
I’m beginning to experience the
truth of 1 John 4:18, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out
fear…” Even imperfect love can begin to break down the walls of fear, and love
seems to expand to overflow whatever space it’s given. At little love goes a
long way. I keep thinking of Lilo &
Stitch. Experiment 626, who was created to destroy everything he sees, is
adopted, named Stitch, loved in spite of his aggressive nature, and he begins
to transform and reform. And by the end of the movie he realizes he has a
family that loves him and he doesn’t want to leave. While it’s a cute kids’
story, I wonder whether we aren’t all longing for that kind of love: a love
that fights for us even when we aren’t worth fighting for, and a family that
sticks together even when some members are broken, wounded, and weak.
So I’ll leave you with two
thoughts today: 1) God delights in you and me, no matter how unfathomable that
may seem, and 2) because of the transforming power of God’s love we can love
and delight in one another.
“Delight yourself in the Lord,
and He will give you the desires of your heart.” -Psalm 37:4
