Delight

"Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven"

- Matthew 5:12

"How beautiful and how delightful you are, My love, with all your charms!"

-Song of Solomon 7:6

So part of our internship includes reading. We have a list of 5 books we have to read by the end of the summer. nbd. No big deal. 

So the book I am on now is The Restless Tenderness of Jesus by Brennan Manning. One quote really struck me.

"One of the most beautiful fruits of knowing the God of Jesus is a compassionate attitude towards ourselves." 

I am my biggest critic. My biggest problem in my relationship with God is when I really mess up, I shut down. I crawl under my bed sheets, and wallow in my failure for months. Refusing to open the word, unable to even authentically pray. I know that God loves me, my disappointment stems from my inability to love him as much as he loves me. Because if I loved God, really loved God, wouldn't I stop sinning, turn from sins. When I mess up I just feel disgusted with myself. 

"The Father cannot be offended, nor can he be pleased by what people do"

The author isn't saying that SIN doesn't offend God. But our works can neither offend nor please, because then our faith would be work based. When God looks at us (and by us I mean Christians), he doesn't see sin, or failures, he sees Jesus. He has nothing but compassion and grace and love because we were not an accident to him. He picked us, knowing our weaknesses and all of our soon to be failures. 

"God loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity, He loves you in the morning sun and the evening rain, he loves you without caution, regret, limit or breaking point."

There is nothing we did to earn salvation. God picked me, for whatever reason, to experience a relationship with him. But I'll never get to experience the fullness of that relationship if I let my failure, or insecurities, knock me out of the game for weeks at a time. I know God loves me, but I don't live like God loves me. And I know it's because I don't REALLY know how much God loves me. Because it doesn't make sense. In all human reasoning, its irrational, impossible. But he does. That why Paul desperately prays

"For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." 

-Ephesians 3:14-19

"Healing our image of God heals our image of ourselves." 

Suddenly I am free. A child dancing. A bird soaring. A kite gliding. 

Free to forgive myself. Love myself. Love God. Have confidence in approaching God. For I have heard my fathers voice, he's rescued me from the pit. I owe him everything and he owes me nothing. But he delights in me, and my soul delights in that.