DELIGHT!

Ahhh, beautiful 1^st picture of 2^nd grand baby!  We are over the moon again!  What is it about a whole new person being formed and coming into the world that brings such excitement and joyful anticipation to my heart?  Sweet baby – you are a delight!  We delight in you and who you are and all that God placed in you to pour out and share generously!

Delight, it seems people do not think much about it.  The word has fallen low on our list of regularly used vocabulary.  Just the word itself, actually saying it, verbally forms pleasure- DE- LIGHT!  It’s so full of promise!  A form of joy – delight is that brightening upon contact with, that ecstatic pleasure taken in something or someone.   It’s the look that loving grandparents have when they see their grand babies – eyes brimming over with love and thankfulness.  It’s that look that good mamas and daddies have - that radiant glow in their eyes for their beloved babies.  It’s that indescribable exhilarating sweetness!

God made us for delight!  We are formed, designed, to first receive delight from God (you can’t give what you have not received) and then we can properly delight in Him!  His true love for us delights us – we take pleasure in his love for us!  But the true place of delight unstoppable is when we delight in Him.  He is the place of significance and value, He holds untellable goodness – He is the source of all things excellent, noble, majestic, perfect, deeply beautiful, loving and kind – He’s holy – no other like Him, the pinnacle and manifestation of true goodness.  His heart is the only true, safe place to find value and worth in and to give value and worth to.  We are safe in His love and His delight in us is genuine.   When we were placed into Jesus (which truly – was before we were ever born) – His radiant look of love and delight were upon us – deeply engaging everything within us.    We have only to look into His eyes to engage once again, deeply.  And, we can practice learning how to do that more frequently and readily.  Funny, when we do that – we become delight!

I have some friends who have trouble looking into God’s eyes and seeing His delight for them.   There have been many things put into their path that has gotten in the way of them properly seeing God’s eyes upon them.  They actually think He does not even look at them or think about them at all.  They don’t know.   Some have been wounded and blinded by other people or situations and have taken that to mean that God is somehow bad or doesn’t care or that somehow, maybe, they just don’t measure  up to deserve His love and delight.  Well, the good news, no one measures up – no person is of themselves, without God, good enough to be worthy.  That’s what makes God’s over the top love and delight so very good!! Actually, God is just really that amazingly generous and kind.  He loves people, warts and all! No person alive is perfect – we all (if we are truthful) know that we have many flaws.  We’d like to think of ourselves as good persons (and we can fool ourselves by thinking we can somehow perform more good to sort of earn worth and outweigh the not so good in us – but, it is a sham, a lie).  The GREAT NEWS, God loves us when we could never be in any sense worthy of love – we could never earn His love and delight (though that is sometimes disconcerting as we prefer to run our own show and make our own way) .  Jesus came and gave himself in order for people to know and be connected to God, who loves them so very much.  He wanted every bit of connection with people, who He loves.  He knows who He has formed each person to be and He – the creator – is the only one who can properly value and fulfill each one.   Each one will only ever be fully who they truly are designed to be by Him and content, truly satisfied, in connection with Him.  All other “selves” we think we could be outside of connection with Him are false and unfulfilling.  They are counterfeits – cheap knock offs.  Many folks are walking around as cheap knock offs of themselves, shunning God’s love and delight and instead embracing their own lifeless, death filled “self –justification”.  They don’t know the maker invites them to live vibrantly fully alive in His delight as the real article.  I love telling them, helping them to ponder it, inviting them to just taste and see!   It’s something I delight in!

    Psalm 1:2

But they delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night.

 


    Psalm 18:19

He led me to a place of safety; he rescued me because he delights in me.

Psalm 27:4

The one thing I ask of the Lord— the thing I seek most— is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, delighting in the Lord’s perfections and meditating in his Temple.

Psalm 37:4

Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires.