Unimaginable Delight
The best way to find out which phrases you say the most is to listen to your kids talking to each other when they don’t know you’re listening. This is how I realized how often I say “Ope!” and “Dad-gum-it!” (like the Baptist-raised Midwesterner-at-heart that I am), and how regularly I remind the kids that we are made in the image of God when I overheard one child saying emphatically to another, “You have to give me your toy, because I am made in the image of God and so you need to treat me with honor and respect—RIGHT NOW!” *palm to forehead* Clearly, we still have some clarifying to do…
I recently overheard a sweet little conversation between our oldest and youngest. They were playing together in the other room while I was making lunch in the kitchen, and I heard Sam say, “Jane, you’re so cute! I just delight in you!” I smiled as I made another peanut butter and jelly. This is a phrase I know for certain I’ve said to them often.
“I delight in you.” It’s not a phrase you hear used very often, is it? In our modern English, we just don’t talk like that. It feels a little…over the top. A bit too much. Kinda uppity and eye-roll-worthy. Like, can’t you just take it down a notch and say, “I love you” or “I like being with you” or send that emoji with the smiley face with the hearts around it?
I get it. I will concede that maybe it is a little much. But I say it in hopes that hearing me repeat these words over and over again will fixed them in their memories and hearts so that when they hear about God’s delight in them, their imaginations will be primed to receive his delight, to be transformed by it, and to extend it to others.
I was reading Psalm 18 recently, and when I made it to v. 16-19, I had to stop and read it again.
“[God] sent from on high, he took me;
He drew me out of many waters.
He rescued me from my strong enemy
and from those who hated me,
for they were too mighty for me.
They confronted me in the day of my calamity,
but the LORD was my support.
He brought me out into a broad place;
he rescued me, because ________.”
How would you fill in the blank on the last part of v. 19, if you had to guess how this passage ends? What reason for his rescue comes to mind reflexively? Pause for a minute and consider your answer.
And when I tell you that v. 19 in its entirety says this—
“He brought me out into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me.”
—what is your first reaction?
In Scripture God gives a hundred different reasons that he chose to save us. Like a multifaceted diamond, no single answer can possibly encompass the glory and the beauty of God’s rescue of the cosmos through Jesus Christ. But I do think that how we anticipate that verse to end, as well as our reaction to the reason the psalmist gives us in Ps. 18, tells us something significant about who we believe God is and who we believe we are in his eyes.
Because of my parents’ faith in God and the way they shared it with me from my earliest days, I have never had a moment where I did not know about his love for me. And I can honestly say that I have never struggled with doubt about whether God loves me—a gift from him that I do not take for granted.
But that God not only loves me, but actually likes me? That he rejoices over me with singing (Zeph. 3)? That he delights in me? In many seasons of my life in Christ, that has felt unimaginable. Impossible. A little much.
My ability to receive and trust in his delight in me is one of the places where God has worked the greatest, most miraculous transformation in my heart and mind in recent years. And so when I tell our kids every chance I get—not just in the sweet moments, but also in the hard ones—that I delight in them, it is equal parts a declaration of how I feel about them and a prayer that the Spirit would open their hearts and imaginations so that when the Word tells them that God delights in them, they would know that his delight in them is like…
kisses all over their perfect round baby cheeks and teeny little noses,
belly-laughs at their stories and antics,
being held while rocking back and forth, back and forth, in the squishy gray chair after a hard day or a hard conversation,
snuggles while reading stacks of books, complete with different voices for each character,
a gentle hand lifting their chin and an understanding smile when they feel the weight of their sin,
telling and re-telling the stories of the day they were born every time they ask,
asking thoughtful questions and listening closely to their answers,
giggling before bedtime over favorite family tales and hilarious things they’ve said over the years, which their daddy carefully records in a notebook,
reminding them in a thousand different ways of who they belong to, who made them and calls them good, and who has brought them into his glorious story of redemption.
Maybe, if I tell them I delight in them, they’ll know that when they hear God singing over them, “I delight in you,” it will almost feel a little much, a little over the top. And they’ll know that they live in the warm glow of his extravagant grace.