Morning Devotional

August  16, 2005
"The Lord's Delight"      
    by Don Emmitte

Home

The LORD thundered from heaven; the Most High gave a mighty shout. He shot his arrows and scattered his enemies; his lightning flashed, and they were greatly confused. Then at your command, O LORD, at the blast of your breath, the bottom of the sea could be seen, and the foundations of the earth were laid bare. He reached down from heaven and rescued me; he drew me out of deep waters. He delivered me from my powerful enemies, from those who hated me and were too strong for me. They attacked me at a moment when I was weakest, but the LORD upheld me. He led me to a place of safety; he rescued me because he delights in me. (Psalm 18:13-19 NLT).

The Lord delights in you. It’s hard to imagine a thought more foreign than this. Take all the religions of the world, including the way many approach Christianity, and you have a history of people trying to please a distant, holy, monolith of a deity with little assurance of success. As humans, we grovel, we confess, we beat our bodies, we deprive ourselves, we go through steps and stages of development trying to reach some level of respectability that would allow us to be worthy of the “presence,” and then we wait for lightning to strike should we get anywhere near. Would we ever think in terms of bringing this God anything He didn’t already possess? Bring God pleasure? How could anyone ever expect to do that?

And yet we do—without doing anything at all. Any parent knows the feeling of watching their children sleep. There’s nothing that can fully describe this. There’s something about them in those moments of innocence and vulnerability that pulls at your heart and swallows you up. It takes your breath away. We don’t know what to do with all the pictures we have of our children sleeping. We can’t stop taking them. And isn’t it interesting that our children are doing nothing while all this is happening? They aren’t smiling. They aren’t posing. They aren’t performing. They aren’t doing anything but sleep, and they are breaking our hearts in two.

What is this except our taking sheer pleasure in their being? We delight in them because of who they are, and while they sleep, nothing gets in the way of our admiration. They bring us sheer pleasure without doing anything at all. I imagine this is how it is with God. Since He has made us like Him, whatever we experience as parents has got to mirror something of what God feels toward us. And I imagine he feels the same thing. So shut your eyes and rest in the knowledge of His love. Know that you bring your heavenly Father pleasure simply by being who you are. You are His and He is yours, and there is nothing you can do today, or any day, to change that. The love He has for you is a constant. He loves you because He loves you. If an earthly dad knows what this is, you can bet our heavenly Dad does too.