Did You Know God Delights in You?

He not only loves you, but he likes you too.

It’s one of those mornings. One child is lying on his unmade bed sobbing because he can’t get the fitted sheet off. Another is too busy telling imaginary stories of what happened at school yesterday—something about an elephant in their classroom. Another is complaining that he has to do everything around here because I asked him to put the lunchboxes in his brothers’ bookbags.

We’ve only been awake for twenty minutes.

It’s a sprint to get out the door in time. Two are fighting over boots, another is crying because he can’t get his zipper to work. I have a sinus infection and I’m already contemplating crawling back into bed once the bus is gone.

Just as the bus lights blink between the trees by our yard, we all run down the wet driveway and get loaded on the bus. I come inside and pull the door closed, taking a deep breath.

This is a normal morning for a house of three boys and a single mom. Yet as I stumble sleepily back to my bedroom, I pause in front of my oldest’s bedroom doorway, smiling at the cardboard plane with the jagged, crooked wings he’s been diligently working away at for the past week.

I’m tired. I’m weary. I’m overstimulated. But I delight in my boys. I often keel over at their antics, their ‘serious’ conversations amongst themselves, and their imaginary tales. I love to scoop them up, cover them in kisses, and tickle them until they squeal. I still count their little piggies on their feet. I love them and I like them.

Woman and Child Before a Mirror by Paul Seignac (1870s)

Have you ever considered that ‘like’ and ‘love’ are two very different expressions? To like someone means we delight in being with them. Love at times carries this idea of obligation—this person loves me because they have to, but do they truly enjoy my presence and like me?

For true love to exist, there must be like and delight. Otherwise, it’s merely tolerating, fulfilling responsibilities, executing empty actions, and performing our duty. Lewis wrote, “Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.”¹ The police officer who protects the criminal from the raging mob does so not because he loves the criminal but because it’s his duty to protect the criminal’s rights. As parents, spouses, and friends, our love is not solely duty but delight in those we have set our love on. Of course, at times those we love try our patience and leave us frustrated, perhaps even hurt or angry. But that delight is always there. It’s why we can scold our child one moment but then laugh at their silly faces. Or how we can have an argument with our partner but minutes later find ourselves in a tickle fight struggling to breathe. The part of love that allows the switch is our delight. Without the delight, we would continue to scowl and become further enraged.

Have you ever considered that this delight exists in God’s love for you as well? Author and theology professor Kelly Kapic writes in You’re Only Human,

Have you ever felt that your parents, or spouse, or your God loved you, and yet wondered if they actually liked you? Love is so loaded with obligations and duty that it often loses all emotive force, all sense of pleasure and satisfaction. Like can remind us of an aspect of God’s love that we far too easily forget. Forgetting God’s delight and joy in us stunts our ability to enjoy God’s love. Forgiveness—as beautiful and crucial as it is—is not enough. Unless it is understood to come from love and to lead back to love, not merely a wiping away of prior offenses, unless we understand God’s battle for us as a dramatic personal rescue and not merely a cold forensic process, we have ignored most of the Scriptures as well as the needs of the human condition.²

While I’d never articulated that I believed God merely tolerated my presence for the sake of his Son, that’s how my heart and mind operated as I considered God’s love towards me. How could God, holy and perfect and majestic, like sinful, weak, puny me? Annoying me? Constantly-screwing-up me? I was the tiny worm on the wet sidewalk he graciously didn’t step on and allowed to live. That was his love towards me! Yet just as I delight in my children running around at my feet and chattering in my ears, God delights in me as his beloved child.

Truthfully, he delights in me much more perfectly than I ever could of my own children. I get over stimulated by their noise and ask them to be quiet. Their slow walking speed tests my patience. Some days it seems it’s one problem after another they bring me with loud screaming and tears.

Yet God patiently endures with me. He never grows weary of my coming to him, of repeating the same errors and sins; his arms remain outstretched for me. He calls me to come to him with every thought, to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes. 5:17) and be “constant in prayer” (Rom. 12:12), never growing tired of my return to his throne. Dane Ortlund says the exact opposite happens when we regularly come to him: “He does not get flustered and frustrated when we come to him for fresh forgiveness, for renewed pardon, with distress and need and emptiness. That’s the whole point. It’s what he came to heal . . . Christ’s heart is not drained by our coming to him; his heart is filled up all the more by our coming to him.”³

Part of what I love and delight in with my kids are their oddities and peculiarities. I love how one of my boys tells story after story, his imagination trying to weave so many types of fabric together to create the most absurd, mismatched tapestry. I adore how another must know the inner workings of every mechanical item, turning it over in his hands and taking it apart to see how each piece works together. Their individual traits all brought together make up who they are and make them unique. I love every angle and facet of them.

All of us are unique in our makeup, the way the specific pieces of our personalities, appearances, and quirks are all put together in their particular fashion. Lewis says God delights in this about us, and that he made each of us so that we love and serve him in a way no one else could. Our souls are “a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance.”⁴ He went on to write,

Each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.⁵

God loves and delights in each of us in the peculiar way he has knit us together. He pours his lavish love out on you specifically. “For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”⁶

We don’t just love our children as a whole and express it solely in all-encompassing terms. We dote on each one as they are and for who they are. Every mom can tell another the specific things about each of her children that she adores. In the same way, our Father delights in drawing each of us to him in our unique way. He sanctifies each one according to their needs.

For so long I lived not believing in the delight of God toward me. And as Kapic writes, it stunted me, in more ways than one. It is a fearful thing to confess your sins to a God who does not delight in you. God, to me, was akin to the parent who you hide your disobedience from because you know the wrath that awaits you—not the love, forgiveness, and help. Yet God is not that parent. He is the one of whom we proclaim, “I really screwed up. I need to call my dad.” Not because he will get me out of the consequences, but because he will rescue me and love me still.

Without knowing the delight of God in us, he is a fearsome creature we come trembling before. We obey only when we know it is required of us and when we think he is watching most closely. This God is only a king, sitting in his throne and watching over the kingdom at large and concerning himself with those grander needs that affect the whole. But the God who delights in us is also our Father, who knows each of our hearts deeply and loves us dearly, bending on his knee to look into our eyes. We obey because we love him and we feel free in his love. We can be courageous in this love because we know it will never stop shining on us.

1. C. S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain,” in The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (1940; repr., New York, New York, United States of America: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 639.

2. Kelly Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States of America: Brazos Press, 2022), 19.

3. Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Wheaton, Illinois, United States of America: Crossway, 2020), 37, 38.

4. C. S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain,” 640.

5. C. S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain,” 642.

6. C. S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain,” 640.