My pride and my ego tell me that nobody can be trusted. It tells me that there is nobody I can rely on but myself. I am told that the moment our weaknesses are found, we will be undone.

So we build up these walls and barriers. We develop cover stories for our cover stories to make the chinks in our armor less visible, less pronounced, less vulnerable. We separate our emotions from our judgments, although we know our judgments are clouded by a dirty mist of emotional pain and angst that we will never leave behind.

We take our disappointments in ourselves and mentally scourge ourselves with the most painful afflictions– regret and shame. We take our failures and beat ourselves with rods of disgust. We use our shortcomings as excuses not to try anything that can potentially fail. It becomes a vicious cycle where we are always the loser and our faces show no delight. However, we only feel this way because we believe our talents, strengths and skills somehow contributed to whatever success we believe we accomplished.

We trust in our weapons, whether it be brute strength, sharp tongues or intellectual prowess to save ourselves and delight ourselves. But we quickly realize we don’t have enough weapons, lack the strength, and our intellectual prowess falls infinitely short to that of our enemies’. We correctly judge that it is “me versus the world” because that’s how we feel and what we’ve experienced; but, just because the rest of the world is against you doesn’t mean that you will fail, that your shortcomings are unforgivable or even that we’re perennial losers.

for not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm save them, but your right hand and your arm, and the light of your face, for you delighted in them. – Psalm 44:3

Psalm 44 is written as a “Maskil” type of poem, meaning that it’s didactic– trying to teach the reader to contemplate and reflect on how things actually work beyond simple perception and observation. The reason I started this quiet time with evocations of our past shortcomings, disappointments and failures was not for you to bring back dark memories you long tried to forget; rather to point out where we would often direct our frustrations. We put our lives in our own hands; and in our dissatisfaction, we project our misery and disappointment in ourselves, and assume that God feels this way towards us. What does that mean?

I mean to say that we basically think God feels the same way about us as we do about us when we fail, fall short or simply become disappointed. The good news is that God doesn’t feel that way about you or me. No, God is “delighted” in us.

He takes pleasure in us, regardless of what we think we accomplished or how well we think we performed. This is the didactic moment– what exactly did we singlehandedly accomplish in our lifetimes, that we should feel compelled to a prideful revulsion of things we couldn’t do on our own? When we look back on our histories, we didn’t really accomplish anything on our own.

We really don’t have much to take credit for. We didn’t really earn anything. Despite all the hard work we put into something, there was something else moving other things into place which pushed opportunities for us forward that we really only stepped into. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me the phrase “with a lot of work and a little bit of luck” wasn’t referring to this exact phenomena. Yes, we work hard, but so does everybody else; interestingly, we’re the ones moving forward, and it’s not because you outworked everyone else.

Read our passage for today, it says: “not by their own… but your [God’s] right hand and arm.” Everything we have or did until this moment, our successes, as well as our shortcomings, were opportunities afforded to us by God who “delighted in us.” God takes pleasure and finds incredible satisfaction in us, in our flaws. God delights in us despite what we can or cannot do.

This is evidenced by Jesus, the perfect Lamb of God, who sacrifices Himself for people who fall short, fail, and disappoint consistently. Christ does this in love, knowing we will fail Him sooner rather than later, just like his disciples did when they scattered at His trial. He accepts our shortcomings and doesn’t find misery in them, like we do. Rather He uses it to transforms our lives to show us that we are not alone, nor abandoned; and, trusting in Him to fight for us is delightful. Let us all accept and live into the identity of being who we are: His delight.