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
