The thing God most delights to do is to bring your greatest joys to life in this world.
Maybe write down all the reasons why that statement makes you uncomfortable and ask God about them.
But the truth is God adores you THAT much. You're His favorite. He delights in your very being and is glad you exist. How could He want anything other than to put desires into your heart that He can make reality, just to show you how much He cares about you?
I know you have experiences and understandings that would seem to prove the opposite to be true. So do I. Life is hard. I know.
And that’s not the whole truth.
Let's use our imaginations and just pretend, then, that what I'm claiming is true. If you knew that God was intensely interested in the things that truly bring you joy (not the things you think you *should* want), do you think you might pay a little more attention to those things? You'd tune in to the small things throughout your day that make you feel loved. You'd practice noticing them, you'd look for them, maybe even with excitement, so that you could tell God that you saw them. You'd live in this perpetual state of gratitude and pleasure. You'd dream of big things without fear of judgment or of how they would come about, knowing the One who cares most about you takes great delight in conspiring on your behalf. The trust would be solid, and you would be a force of that same kind of generosity to those around you – in fact you wouldn't be able to stop the overflow of joyful generosity from spilling onto other people. You would be an open, expansive, magnetic conduit. Meagerness, stinginess, and fears of "not enough" would not be found in you.
Does this sound as glorious to you as it does to me? This is who we really are – who God made us to be.
What’s stopping us from embodying this fullness of joy? Only lies that are keeping us crippled and small. Only the stories that we believe about our experiences.
Stand up, take a step out of your chains. Embrace the truth of who you are.
“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4
“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand pleasures forevermore.”
Psalm 16:11
Chewing on the idea of joy:
A Hard Slog Through Lack in Search of Abundance