 I was in the process of beating myself up over something when an email from a friend arrived with the following verse: "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" (Zephaniah 3:17). Wait a minute. God is taking great delight in me and I am beating myself up? What's wrong with this picture? Obviously I do not have God's view of myself. I have a warped view and I am going against God's plan when I give into it. If we were all honest, I think we would find that this view is pretty typical. We continually feel like we are falling way short of what is expected of us spiritually, and to be perfectly honest, most of us probably think God is administering a good share of the beating. That is where we are all wrong about God. Think about it like this: Why would God heap guilt and punishment on someone he went to such great lengths to save? Doesn't make sense, does it? And yet we love to engage in this "woe is me" way of thinking. We love to punish ourselves as if we could pay for our own sins. Well God's got other things in mind for us. He wants to delight in us. This is what life is all about, after all. God created us because it was his pleasure to do so. He made us so he could delight in us and we could delight in him. God gets joy out of every inch of his universe, but nothing like the joy he has over you and me. Why is it so hard for us to believe this? Probably because it's so rare in our human experience to have anyone experience sheer delight over someone else. We are so careful and guarded with our praise lest we unknowingly reward some wrong behavior. But God has already gathered up all our wrong doings and put them away on the cross, leaving him free to delight in us, and so he does. Think about who we could be and what we could do if we really started believing this.
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