God Rejoices Over You, and You Didn't Earn It

Picture the face you think God makes when He looks at you.

Not on your best Sunday. On a plain Thursday, when supper ran late, you were short with the girl at the drive-thru window, and your Bible has been under a stack of mail since the weekend.

For a lot of us, that face is a sigh. Patient, maybe. Kind, even. But tired. The look of someone who loves you because He promised to, and who is still waiting on you to get it together.

Here's what most of us have never let ourselves believe: God rejoices over you. Scripture doesn't say He puts up with you, or loves you while looking the other way. It says He rejoices over you, with singing. And you didn't do one thing to earn it.

What Zephaniah 3:17 says about God rejoicing over you

"The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing." (Zephaniah 3:17, KJV)

Read it slowly and count the verbs. He will save. He will rejoice. He will rest. He will joy. Every one of them is God doing something, and every one of them is aimed at you. You aren't the one singing in this verse. You're the one being sung over.

Look at where He is, too: in the midst of thee. He isn't up in the balcony with a clipboard. He's in the middle of your kitchen, your car, your 2 AM.

Zephaniah is not a soft little book. For most of the book, the prophet tells God's people the plain truth about where they've gone wrong, and it isn't pretty. Then, near the very end, the tone turns. God promises to save the ones who limped and gather the ones who'd been pushed out. And right in the middle of those promises, after all the hard words, He sings.

That matters. This verse wasn't spoken to people who had it all together. It was spoken to people who had been warned, had failed, and had come up short. That's the crowd He sings over.

The line we rush past

Tucked in the middle of the verse is a phrase that's easy to skim: he will rest in his love.

The Hebrew in these verses is hard to pin down. Bible scholar Margaret Odell, writing for Working Preacher, notes that the phrase can be read as God being silent in His love, and she reads that silence as full acceptance, with old conflicts left in the past.

Think about what that means if you keep a running list of your own failures. You've been going over it at night: the sharp word, the skipped quiet time, the thing you promised and didn't do. He isn't lying awake going over it with you. He's quiet about it. Then He sings.

Why it's so hard to believe God rejoices over you

Most of us have heard "God loves you" so many times that it has started to sound like a sign at the bank: true, but flat. We sing about how much we love Him. We pray to love Him more. We hear far less about how He feels when He looks at us.

So we fill in the blank ourselves, and we fill it in with the voice we use on ourselves.

When we asked women on our anonymous form what they wanted six weeks from now, six out of 25 named something like "how I view myself," "the way I feel about myself," or simply, "To feel whole." Not a new routine. Not a cleaner house. Just to stop seeing themselves the way they do.

Here's the part nobody admits: we assume God sees us the way we see ourselves. We take our own tired sigh and put it on His face. Then, because we've decided He's disappointed, we keep our distance and try harder, hoping to earn our way into a look we already have.

You can't earn a song somebody is already singing.

What it looks like to let Him sing

So what do you do with a verse like this? Not a project. Not a plan to become the kind of woman He'd want to sing over. He already does.

Try this tonight. Before you turn out the light, read Zephaniah 3:17 aloud, slowly, and everywhere it says "thee," say your own name. It will feel awkward. Read it anyway. Then lie still for one minute and let it be true without adding "but."

If you'd like more quiet minutes like that, the free Make Room for Joy guide is seven short days of exactly this: a verse, about ten minutes, and room to hear it.

Tomorrow, when you catch yourself bracing for that sigh, after the late supper or the sharp word or the Bible still under the mail, stop and listen for the real sound in the room. The Lord thy God is in the midst of thee. He is mighty. And He is singing.

If you'd like to hear a room full of women sing back to Him, come to Make Room for You on Thursday, November 12, 7:00 to 8:30 PM near Louisa. It's a free evening of worship and rest before the holiday rush starts. Save your seat here.