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My Identity: What does God say about me?: Delightful

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In 2 Corinthians 5:17 the Bible reads that we are “new creations” if we are followers of Christ. Have you ever wondered about the way God feels about you? We can be very hard on ourselves at times. We often struggle with our identity. This week, we’ll turn to God’s Word to find out how He views us and how we can find our identity in Him.

 

Delightful

 

“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

Zephaniah 3:17, NIV

5_Delightful_FRIDAYHow does God feel about you? Does He think about you? These are questions that Scripture answers for us. Even though I often feel that God is too busy being the God of the Universe to worry about the details of my life, the truth of the Bible contradicts those feelings.

Today’s verse is one of my all-time favorites and one that God has used in my life many times. According to this verse, God takes great delight in you. He even rejoices over you with singing. It seems a little backwards to me. We sing to God and worship Him, which is appropriate since He is worthy of our praise. But God delights in us so much that he rejoices over us with singing. How wonderful!

God sees you as delightful. There are other verses that corroborate this idea as well:

“He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.” 

Psalm 18:19, NIV

“For the Lord takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with victory.” 

Psalm 149:4, NIV

God also thinks about you. For each grain of sand on the whole earth, God has a thought about you:

“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!”

Psalm 139:17-18, NLT

It’s important for us to understand that we are a source of delight to God. As children of God, our identity is secure. In return, God desires for us to seek Him first and delight in Him. He wants us to choose Him. Once we understand how much we are treasured by God, why wouldn’t we want this loving companion as our Lord? He’s the One who will love you without ceasing.

I pray this week’s Daily Doses of Encouragement have been a helpful reminder of your identity and great worth in the eyes of God. Remember, you are loved, forgiven, known, beautiful, and delightful to God.

Seeking Him,

Allison

A Place at the Table: Hallelujah

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As much of a social butterfly as I consider myself to be, one social situation sends my heart racing – and not from excitement. I turn into a bundle of nerves when I have to find a seat at a table, especially in a public place. What if there’s not a seat for me? What if I sit in someone else’s place? I’ve come to discover that those fears reflect some fears I didn’t realize I had about the Kingdom of God. I’ve learned though, sitting around tables across the world, that there is always room at His table. Hopefully you’ll find some encouragement in these stories shared around my table.

 

Hallelujah

Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD, O my soul! I will praise the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.
Psalm 146:1-2

TuesdayIt’s nearly 8:00 pm in a village in Swaziland, and I’m marching through a tall field of grass with four other girls. Being in the middle of nowhere changes the way the stars look. We’re not lost and we’re not crazy. We’ve been invited to a local church dinner.

From the field, we can see the faint light of the church in the distance. We hear the voices inside singing and immediately realize we’re in for a long night. When we finally arrive, we join them in worship. We’re dancing and singing, but only one word.

Hallelujah.

Over and over again, we sing the word hallelujah. For six minutes, this goes on—our dancing and our one-word song. We could have kept it up for the entire night, and it would have gone down in my book as one of my favorite church services of all time.

Something about singing the word hallelujah again and again before sitting down around the table together made us feel like we had stepped back in time to the early church. Worshipping arm in arm and passing plates of food between us seemed to go hand in hand with one another. Our precious Swazi brothers and sisters had sacrificed to give us a feast unimaginable and invited us in with genuine joy and love. I realized that this is what the heart of Christ looks like.

He invites us to His table full of love and joy and asks us to partake with Him and enjoy the blessings He places before us. Around that table, things get spilled and messes get made, but even still it remains a table and a feast that can be defined by one word: hallelujah.

We’ve done nothing to deserve our place at His table, just like we had done nothing to deserve a place at the church dinner in Swaziland. Even so, we have been invited to enjoy a feast at the sacrifice of another, and for that, a six-minute song of hallelujahs seems not nearly enough.

Chelsey

A Place at the Table: Everyday Doxology

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As much of a social butterfly as I consider myself to be, one social situation sends my heart racing – and not from excitement. I turn into a bundle of nerves when I have to find a seat at a table, especially in a public place. What if there’s not a seat for me? What if I sit in someone else’s place? I’ve come to discover that those fears reflect some fears I didn’t realize I had about the Kingdom of God. I’ve learned though, sitting around tables across the world, that there is always room at His table. Hopefully you’ll find some encouragement in these stories shared around my table.

 

Everyday Doxology

I will praise you, O LORD, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonders. I will be glad and rejoice in you; I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.
Psalm 9:1-2

As crazy as it may seem to some, I had never heard the word Doxology until I was in college. Twenty-four hours after a tornado ripped through my college town, I found myself in the backyard of a pastor’s home with 50 college students singing these four lines:

MondayPraise God from whom all blessings flow,

Praise Him all creatures here below,

Praise Him above ye heavenly hosts,

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost,

Amen.

The only thing that made sense to us in a season of destruction and rebuilding was to praise God. For weeks after the tornado, we would gather in a pastor’s backyard for dinner and sing the Doxology together. Those nights helped those four lines sink into my bones and take root, to a point where I find myself still breathing out those words habitually throughout the day.

It’s easy to repeat the Doxology after a day when the sun is shining and everything is going your way. It’s easy to stand and sing praises when your life is an adventure and the hand of God is evident in every day. But sometimes a tornado sweeps through your life, literally or figuratively, and you’re stuck figuring out which way is up again.

The Doxology is a piece of quiet comfort to me. It’s a simple song full of strength, and one that can almost be finished in one breath. It’s a song for times when we’re not eloquent or put together, for when all we know to do is to acknowledge that God is with us.

When we find our place at the table of God surrounded by the people of God, praise should be pouring off our lips. Our Creator delights in us every day, in every moment. This should lead us to delight in Him in the same way, to live and breathe that Doxology every day and in every moment. The good and the bad, the happy and the sad—whether the sun is shining or a tornado is coming.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Chelsey