Loved and Still a Disappointment

You have the love part settled. That is not what this is about.

You could teach it. You could stand up in front of a room and explain, from the text, that God loves you, and you would not be faking it. You believe it. It has held you together through things that would have taken other men apart.

What you cannot get anywhere near is the idea that He is pleased.

Loved, yes. Delighted in, no. In your version He loves you the way a good man loves a son who has not turned out the way he hoped. Faithfully. Permanently. With a small sigh somewhere in it that never quite goes away. And your body is where that sigh lives, because it is the part of you that you believe would be visible to Him, and the part you have most obviously failed to get on top of.

You have carried both of those at once for thirty years and never once noticed that they do not fit together.

Let me say the plain thing first, because it comes last too often. You have not been careless with this. You have gone at it and gone at it, in more ways than you have ever listed for anybody, and you have gotten up every time and gone on serving people and going to work and being where you said you would be. That is not the record of a man who did not try. It is the record of a man who has been trying for decades while carrying a sigh he thinks is coming from heaven.

So I am not going to spend this page on the love part. You already believe that one and it is not where the leak is.

I want to go after the sigh, because it is not His.

Where the sigh came from

A sigh like that has a source, and it is worth knowing that it has a history, because a thing with a history can be put down.

It is usually a room. A particular room and a particular face, years ago, belonging to somebody whose approval mattered to you more than they knew. And they loved you, and they were also disappointed, and you learned both at once from the same person, and you have never had them separated since. So love arrived in your life pre-mixed, and now when God says He loves you, the mix comes with it, because that is the only recipe you have ever been handed.

You are not reading God accurately when you hear a sigh, and the mix you were handed has never once been His. Zephaniah 3:17 says He will rejoice over thee with joy, He will rest in His love, He will joy over thee with singing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a face from years ago out of the face of God.

And notice how respectable that mix is. Nobody ever calls it what it is. A man who believes God loves him and is faintly disappointed in him looks like a humble man. It reads as maturity. It is the reason nobody has ever corrected it, including you.

You have been calling something humility that was never humility at all, and God has not once been mildly let down by a man He redeemed. The written word says He rests in His love and joys over you with singing, which is not the vocabulary of a disappointed father, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an old face out of a verse.

He will joy over thee with singing

Zephaniah writes a sentence about God that is almost embarrassing to read slowly.

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, King James Version)

Read the verbs. Rejoice. Rest. Joy over. Singing.

There is no version of that sentence with a sigh in it. There is no room in it for faint disappointment. It is not God tolerating somebody well. It is God enjoying somebody out loud, and the prophet reaches for music because ordinary words for approval were not strong enough.

You are being sung over, and there has never once been a sigh anywhere in the sound. Zephaniah 3 is the written word where God rests in His love and joys with singing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man able to hear music that has been playing his whole life.

And read the middle phrase, which is the one that gets past a man's defenses. He will rest in his love. Rest. Not strive with it, not maintain it against evidence, not renew it every morning after reviewing the file. Rest.

You have never once been a matter God has to keep renewing, and the love over you has been at rest the entire time. The Spirit of God is the one who makes rest audible to somebody who has assumed maintenance, and Zephaniah 3:17 says He rests in His love and joys over you with singing.

What a body has to do with any of it

Now the part I came to say, and it is the one that finishes the job.

The sigh had to land somewhere, and it landed on your body, because your body is the part of your failure you believe is on display. That is the logic underneath thirty years of this. And it is worth saying out loud so it can be seen in the light: it means your own body has been read as the visible evidence of the thing you believe God is quietly sad about.

There is no such doctrine. It does not exist. Nowhere in the book is a man's frame treated as the display case for God's opinion of him.

You are not exhibiting God's disappointment, and your body has never once been the place a verdict on you was posted. The written word says He rejoices over you with joy and rests in His love, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a wrong idea out of a man without leaving a hole where it was.

And here is what goes in its place, and it is better than an argument. Not the absence of disappointment. The presence of singing. There is a sound over you that has been going the whole time you have been apologizing.

You were being sung over during every year you thought He was sighing, and the music has never once stopped for a review. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a man hear it, and Zephaniah 3:17 is the written word underneath it, where God is in the midst of somebody, mighty, resting in His love, joying over them with singing.