God Delights In You

by Barb Fisher

Zephaniah 3:17
“The Lord your God is in your midst, A victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.” (NASB)


Imagine the halls of heaven. The angels are actively moving about accomplishing their missions. Some are covering the holiness of the Omnipotent One with worship. Others are going to and fro ministering to those who would be heirs of salvation. (Hebrews 1:14) Some of the saints, who have passed on to that realm of glory, are joining in the song of the angels. Others are peering into heavenly vaults filled with the wonder and goodness of the magnificent Creator of all.

Suddenly a powerful, majestic sound is heard coming from the heights of this glorious place. Everyone stops to listen. It is your name they recognize echoing throughout the celestial place as your joyful Father brags to all who would hear of your most recent step of faith empowered by Love.

The verse above describes Father who exults or rejoices over you with great joy and mirth. Your heart has increased in its capacity to align with and carry His presence to a greater degree, and that caused uncontainable gladness to bubble up and out of His gracious Being. He begins to brag or boast about you. He is overflowing with happiness and delight.

Consider Job 1:8. In the midst of the heavenly counsel, God said of him that he was blameless and upright and one who feared Him and turned away from evil. He told all the hosts gathered there to turn their attention towards Job. God was bragging about His son. Is it difficult for you to imagine that God would be rejoicing over you?

We all have our perceptions of God. Some are based on Truth, and some are not. Some have been formed by our life’s experiences, while others have been formed by erroneous teachings. Romans 11:33 says that His ways are unfathomable or incomprehensible. That does not mean that it is impossible to know Him, it means that knowing Him exhaustively is an eternal quest.  One of the great joys of eternal life is plunging into the secrets and mysteries of God, and have Him uncover Himself to us in revelatory stages. Consider the above verse and what it reveals about the nature and character of God.

First, He is “your” God; He is “my” God. He is not “a” god or “the” God. He is a personal God, who lives in your very midst, intertwined with you and your life. He is not distant. He is not unaware. He is not un-invested in you. If God wrote a book that contained all the days of your life, while you were being formed in the womb (see Psalms 139:16), then He is most assuredly invested in the completion of those days as His will intends.

He is a victorious warrior. He is Champion above all champions. He is our Avenger, our Deliverer, our Savior, our Helper, our Preserver. That is who He is. He is never overcome or defeated. Therefore, He causes us to never be overcome or defeated. God is on our side, when we are aligned with His will and purposes. And even when we are not in alignment, He is still on our side in that He is waiting right at the place where we moved away from Him, and expecting our return. The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15), describes the father as seeing (recognizing) his son while he was a far off. That means that his father must have been looking for him and expecting him to return.

You are your Father’s overwhelming delight. You are not a disappointment. God is not angry with you. He never walks away from you. He is quiet in His love for you. Some translations use the word rest. Our various translations of the word, quiet, fall short of its Hebrew meaning. The Hebrew word used here is charash. If we trace this word in its Semetic origins, it has the idea of being so taken with an object or a person that one becomes obsessed with them. Therefore, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that God is obsessed with you. You are who He thinks about. And His thoughts toward you are always good. (Jeremiah 29:11)

Psalms 139:17-18 “How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered!  I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand!” I would call that obsession. Your surrendered, conquered heart stirs an emotionally charged response of joy from God.

When you, through faith, walk out even one of those days written in His book with a humble heart of worship, God boasts or rejoices with shouts of joy. That is the purpose of our existence, to bring Him pleasure. Anything and everything that we say or do by faith that is empowered by love, pleases Him. (Gal. 5:6; Heb. 11:6) You may not have a reputation here in this world that causes men to boast and brag, but those in the heavens know who you are because God exults over you with joy.
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