Restoring Delight | Asheritah Ciuciu

don't think we've ever talked about this. Have you ever gone through that struggle of trying to measure up spiritually, or falling into the performance trap with God?

we drive to the airport. So. Yeah. But I understand. I understand that concept. And I'm really glad we're going to be discussing this today.

doing it right. And when Jesus was on the cross, he achieved everything that is needed to be made right with God. It is Jesus's sacrifice plus nothing else. That is why he said it is finished. So whenever we try to add to Jesus's sacrifice through our our good deeds, through even reading the Bible or going to church, there's this sneaky deception that can sneak in where we think we need to do something to make God happy with us. But if we belong to Christ, when God looks at us,

he sees the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. There's nothing else we can do to add to that. So reading our Bible and praying and going to church and fasting and sharing the gospel with our neighbors or friends or coworkers. Those are all things that we do out of the overflow of what Jesus has accomplished, not to add to it.

I'm going to send the counselor and he will lead you in all truth. So when we sit down with Leviticus and we're like, what's with the blood? What's with the sacrifices? What's with I don't understand. We can ask God's Spirit, would you open my eyes? Would you help me to see Jesus here? Would you give me a hunger and a thirst to get to know you more? And once you see Jesus in Leviticus, it just unlocks a world of understanding of who he is and what he's done for us. It's such a fun adventure.

read my three chapters today, right? Can I check off this list of okay, I'm on track or no, I'm three days behind. It's going to take me so long to catch up. It's showing up to the page and saying, God, would you show me something about yourself? I think reading the Word of God, this rhythm of the word, is really about delighting in his revelation for us. He wants to teach us who he is. He wants to reveal new things about his heart toward us. And he does that through Scripture.

relationship and delight. When sin entered the picture, it kind of twisted that to where we now seek happiness and joy and delight in other things, instead of finding that fulfillment in God. And so my invitation to you, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, the Bible is an ancient book. It's not relevant today. It feels boring. It's just a legalistic thing that people say that you should do. My invitation to you would be to reach

out to God in prayer and ask him. Ask him to reveal himself to you and sit down with a few chapters of of the book of John and ask, what does this say about God? And Jesus promises that he will gather his sheep, that he will speak to his sheep, and they will hear his voice. And if you truly, honestly want to get to know God, if you truly want to know is this real? It is God's delight to reveal himself to those who seek him. Those who diligently seek him will find him when they

seek him with all of his heart. God says, I will make myself found to them. So what a great adventure! Then, if you're in that place where you're like, I'm not sure if this is real or not. Ask God. It will be his delight to say, let me show you. As long as that request comes from a humble and honest heart that pleases him.

of my life just prior to writing this book. Feeling myself in a place of just hardship and heaviness and darkness and really questioning like where did my joy go? God, if you are my happiness and I'm not experiencing that happiness anymore. Then is this still true? Am I somehow, how of your favor or your grace? Is that why I feel this heaviness and this sorrow in my soul?

And that's what made this book so difficult to write, was because I wanted to tell the truth, and I had to first grapple with my own lack of joy. And so that's where all of this, actually the beginning of this book starts. It opens with me crying out to the Lord and echoing David's words in Psalm 13, God, turn and answer me. Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die. And I didn't even start writing

anything until almost a year later. So all of what I had learned in theory up to that point, all of what I had experienced on the sunshine days of life, all of that then entered into what felt like the valley of the shadow of death and saying, Will you still walk with me? Will. Will you teach me about your delight and your presence, even when I'm not joyful and God in your kindness, would you restore joy? Like if this is to be the rest of my life, if it is to be obedient and diligence, even if

my emotions aren't there, then I will follow you. But God, it would just. It would mean so much if you were to restore my joy. Like, would you, in your kindness, help me to sense your delight again? And what followed was the Lord's kind healing of me, body and soul and spirit and mind just a whole person restoration where now I can say a couple years down the road he has restored the sparkle to my eyes.

gospel begins. The gospel begins in Genesis chapter one. It begins with a God of delight who created humans in his image as his image bearers in the world, out of delight, with an invitation then to relationship and delight an understanding that God cares about our happiness. That God truly longs for us to experience the fullness of joy in his presence. Psalm 1611 says, in your presence is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

When we understand, then that that is what God is inviting us into is a restoration of delight and relationship. That yes, sin marred that and destroyed that. And because of that, we lost the Garden of Eden. And Jesus came as the God become flesh, God and humanity united so that he might restore to us what has been broken and stolen. Then Jesus dying on the cross is not just for our sins. It is for death and destruction and the curse of evil and everything that is

broken in the world. And his resurrection is, yes, the the victory over sin and the enemy, but it also brings in the new kingdom of God. Jesus looks at people and in his day and he says, the kingdom of God is here in your midst. It's moving out in power. So the Spirit of God then coming to

dwell in us is not about sin management. It is about the Spirit of God, then restoring to us his own presence and and doing this good work of growing into what it means to be followers of Jesus, what it means to be those who love, who restore, who bring the kingdom wherever we go. And that is the work that we do. Then it's inviting people not into

this transactional like get out of hell free card. It's not just about eternal security, and we just kind of hang tight until Jesus comes back or until we die and see him face to face. Like that misses the heart of the gospel, which is that God has always been about restoration and bringing about relationship and delight to

the fullness of what he created us for. And I think it's once we capture that vision of, oh, how much more is available to us through God's Spirit, how much more he invites us into that, then it's not about reading my Bible and praying every day because that's what God expects of me. It's. Oh my goodness, God wants so much for us here and now as the

body of Christ as His church. And so I'm going to seek his face today, Lord, in these appointments that you have for me in these projects at work, in the challenges of parenting my children or with in-laws or neighbors in these places. What does it look like to say your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and start here. Start in my home. That then becomes a redemptive collaboration with God's Spirit.

That is what we see from Genesis to Revelation is this is the big picture of what God invites us to. And it is a compelling call then to say, Come to Jesus. It's so much more than the Romans road. Think. Thank God for those truths and for the beauty and theological truths of atonement. But it is so much richer and more beautiful and more compelling when we grasp the heart of God for redemption and restoration. And that's not just someday in heaven. It starts here and now with us,

with God's Spirit in us. Yeah.

comes from God. Every wonderful thing, everything that's ever brought a smile to your face has at its core, a kernel of the goodness of God. So joy and happiness are gifts from God. Where the problem comes in is when we seek to fill that core desire for delight and joy and happiness. What God created us in the

Garden of Eden to experience in him. When we reach out for the fruit, when we seek to take hold of that experience through food, through shopping, through alcohol, through relationships, through money or power, when we reach for those other things than to fill that desire and that void, that is where we go awry. That that is where the desire for a good thing is leading us in the

wrong direction. But when we find our true happiness, our true desire and fulfillment in Christ, in Jesus, in the fullness of who he is and what he's done, then we can then receive those things as good gifts from him. We're told that whether we eat or drink, we should do it for God's glory. So even Jesus modeled this, that he would have such a good time with his friends, he would sit at late dinners and parties and have

just the grandest time. I feel like Jesus would be such a fun party guest that the Pharisees accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton like Jesus knew how to receive food as a good gift, and it brought joy and satisfaction because that was in its proper place. He received it as a good gift from his father.

So every good and beautiful gift in our lives, whether it's cuddling a baby and seeing the twinkle in their eyes or playing catch with a son or a daughter or, I don't know, seeing the sun rise and watching how the sky is painted, all the beautiful colors or watching your your team, your favorite sports team win a game when God is in that place that he is our true delight. All these other things we can receive as

gifts of joy from him and. And what a beautiful, what a beautiful reality that God is a good father who gives good gifts to his children. I think rather than trying to push those aside and pretend they don't matter, I think that does a disservice to our good father

who blesses us with so many gifts. I think instead, when we learn to delight our souls in the Lord, we can then receive all those things as the good gifts that they're meant to be, that then reveal the heart of the father who delights in us.

observed this? Do you think people feel close to God in different ways? What's your response to that idea?

in my own life. Um, the way that I feel close to God is different from how my husband feels close to God, and is different from how my friends feel close to God. And once we accept that they're all gifts, like avenues and channels of love and adoration, ways that we experience God's love, and ways that we can express our love back to him, there's such freedom that comes with that. That there is no one size

fits all quiet time formula in the Bible. There's nowhere in Scripture that says that you need to get up before the sun gets up and read your Bible for an hour, or try to read, you know, the Bible in a year. I've done that multiple times. I know I keep picking on it, but it's been a good experience for me in seasons of life, and at the same time, I've gone through seasons where that wasn't a possibility and I dealt with so much guilt and shame

because of a self-imposed project. Was God truly displeased with me that I fell behind somewhere in numbers, or was that my own expectation of I think this is what God wants from me? Searching scripture and saying, how does God invite us to draw near to him, brought such liberation to see that there's no formula. And so there's this freedom that there's one way to God the Father, and that is through Jesus Christ the Son. And if you come to God through Jesus, there are a multitude

of ways that you can do that. So you can listen to the audio Bible as you drive to work, or you might write a verse on your hand and look at it throughout the day and meditate on it and memorize it and think about how does this reveal the heart of God to me? Just meditating on that one verse you might spend. I did this last year. I spent a whole year in the sermon on the Mount, and I would listen to those three chapters morning by morning,

just letting those words wash over me. Um, I love that God invites us to come to him the way that he created us to. And so some of us are auditory learners and some of us are visual learners, and some of us are kinesthetic learners. And so what what works for me, the way that I learn is going to be different than the way my friend Amanda or Melissa learns. So why would I impose on them a certain standard of oh, this is what you must do, or this is what good Christians do? If that's not

in Scripture, then we're treading on legalistic ground there. We're starting to put on other people a burden that was never from God. So I think what he invites us to is this glorious invitation with open hands, Jesus saying, come to me. Come to me. And and if you don't know how to do that, if you feel like, well, I've tried all these different ways that work for different people, and I feel like it doesn't really work for me.

Then I invite listeners to ask God, ask him to show you, how did you create me to connect with you? How did you create me to experience your love? Maybe it's going for a walk in the forest and talking to God out in nature. Maybe that's how you feel closest to God. Or. Or maybe it's gathering with others in corporate worship and singing your heart out, or sitting quietly at the piano at home and playing some worship

songs to the Lord. There are so many different ways that God invites us to come to Him in Jesus Christ. I think as the body of Christ, we can do a better job celebrating that diversity and the variety, rather than comparing and trying to force people into a box that never came from the Lord.

And so as I've kind of been working on this topic and thinking about delighting in the Lord and the different ways that we can delight in him, I found that people tend to fall in one of these five general categories. I'll say like primary, devotional, personality type. I think we all can feel close to God in these ways, but you might be more likely to connect with one than the other, so I'll go through them. But if listeners are curious, we actually put together a quiz called

the Devotional Personality Type Quiz. It's absolutely free. Listeners can find it at Delighting Angieslist.com. And we've had over 30,000 people take this quiz over the last couple of years. So we've seen these results pan out again and again. But I'll say that the five types that I find people tend to relate to or lean into is those who feel close to God in worship. I mentioned earlier singing corporately or playing songs of of worship or hymns

at home. There's just something about song and more so than song. Feeling like everything they do is an act of worship and adoration, delighting in the heart of God. So that would be our our radiant worshippers there, those who feel close to God through the word and I. I'm one of these. I affectionately call us word nerds. When I learn something new about God in Scripture, my whole face lights up. I feel like God just gave me a nugget, an insight into who he is, and I.

I feel his love toward me. I feel his personal revelation in Scripture. I love delighting in his revelation in the word. And so there are people who will feel close to God that way. We've got word nerds and such a fun group. We could talk to you for three hours about one theological concept and never tire out. Um, and then we have those who feel close to God

in prayer, and I call these people the Whisperers. Um, it's because there are in ongoing, continual conversation with the Lord, whether it's in their quiet time with their prayer journal and their bringing to God requests and interceding on behalf of others, or they're praying as they're washing dishes, they're praying as they're running errands, they just have a heart posture of ongoing whispers with heaven. And also, these are those who are more likely to hear God's voice whispering

back to them. I talked about the good Shepherd who speaks to his sheep, and they hear his voice. They recognize his voice. These are the people that you want to go to and have in your life. When you need intercession, when you need discernment, when you need someone to. Would you beseech God with me? And what you'll notice about all of these devotional personality types is they are

all needed in the body of Christ. So we need to celebrate that we have word nerds and whisperers and worshipers, but we can all grow in these rhythms as well. It's just I think one of them might come easier, or it might be dominant in our lives than others. So we got the worshippers, the word nerds, the whisperers. We have what I call the wonder chasers. And these are those who feel closest to God when they experience

awe and wonder. It might be standing on a beach and watching the waves crash in and just sensing the grandeur of God and their own smallness. And it's in that moment that they feel like they have this mountaintop experience with God. It might be that they stand on their front porch with a mug of coffee, watching the sun rise or set and saying, oh, the beauty and wonder of a creator who can paint the skies this way. These are people who walk through life with eyes wide open.

And they see wonder wherever they go. They seem to retain that childlike admiration for the fingerprints of God throughout their lives, and not just nature, but in their own life. They'll be the first ones to say you'll never guess what God did. It feels like God's always moving in their lives in a powerful way, and it's more so that they're just awake to the wonder that God has placed in each of our lives. So those are the

wonder chasers. And then the last ones, I'll say, are those who feel predominantly delight in God, or sense his presence and his delight in them as they walk out obedience with God. So these are the the obedient walkers. They're the ones who you might hear them say, well, God's Spirit told me to call that person or God's Spirit really just impressed on my heart that I need to do this thing or I need to move in this way. And there's just this sense in which they

are walking in step with the spirit. They're knowing where God is moving in the room, where he's moving in the world, and they're joining him in what feels like such a personal way. And these are the ones who are most likely to be active in the church, in the community, they're more likely to be activists, to seek justice, to to want to see God's kingdom come in the world. They're not content with just reading their Bible and praying and keeping their faith to themselves. They want to see

it move out into the world. So they're walking in obedience with God in their own personal life and and sometimes in a bigger way, too. So we have these five devotional personality types, ways in which we experience God's delight in us, and we delight in him in in return. And I would argue, all of us need all of these. Like we all need to be in the word. We all need to experience the gifts of God through wonder

and delight in his heart through worship. I think Jesus, when we look at the Gospels, he lived out all of these rhythms of delight as well. But I'm sure even as listeners, we're we're hearing me talk about these five devotional types Hopes that they might find themselves kind of gravitating toward one. So my encouragement would be, if

you're like, ah, I'm not sure which one is mine. Um, there's that quiz that you can take, but also if you feel like you're in a dry place spiritually, if you feel like, gosh, I'm doing all the things, I'm reading my Bible and going to church and praying, and I just don't sense God's delight. Maybe he's inviting you to lean into that one primary way that he wants to express his delight toward you. Maybe it's time for more walks outside, or it's time to really dig into Scripture.

That might be God's invitation to delight for you. Today.

he an angry God? I mean, one of the most influential sermons in American history is Jonathan Edwards Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And in my own life, I. I grew up thinking that God's primary disposition toward me was one of expectation and, by implication, disappointment, that that God had such high hopes for me. And here I go, sinning again. Here I go, falling into the same temptation. He must be so disappointed. He must be so angry.

And I think Tozer would agree in this that we often type our view of God on our experience of our own fathers. How we experience our fathers is often how we view God. And so if we had fathers who were angry, we're more likely to think that God is angry. If we had fathers who would set aside

what they were working on to turn toward us. When we walked in the room to greet us with compassion and excitement, if they wanted to listen to what we had to say about our day, then we're more likely to think that God's disposition toward us is that he wants to hear from us, that he's eager to to listen in prayer. So I think, yes, it's important how

we view God. And I think there's good work for us to do to unpack how much of our theology and how we view God is scriptural, and how much of it is just what we've inherited from our culture or our own experience growing up. But I would agree with Lewis. I think more important is how God views us. Is God's disposition toward us one of pity, one of

anger or disappointment, or is it something else? And this was just such an incredible journey for me to go through Scripture to study this theme from Genesis to Revelation. I actually went through and read through the Bible. Not in a year. It took like 18 months for this project, but I read through the Bible cover to cover, underlining every single time the words joy or happiness or delight or celebration showed up. Actually, one of the Hebrew words

for Blessed Asher is also translated happy. It means a profound happiness is what? Blessed means. So I would look up those verses and cross-references as well. And as I did this deep dive into the theme of joy and happiness in Scripture, what I found is that God's disposition

toward us is not one of pity. It's not one of anger or judgment, but rather the Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious and kind, that he has toward us a heart of love and joy and delight, that again and again that is who God presents himself to be. He says, I don't delight in the death of the wicked. I don't delight in punishing my children. Even discipline comes from a heart of love and a longing to restore

to that place of joy and fulfillment. And I think when we understand God this way, when we think God actually cares about our joy. God actually longs for us to experience the fullness of joy in his presence. That changes then how we engage in these spiritual disciplines. It changes how we set goals for our year. It changes how we make decisions because then we want to experience that love, the love of a God who delights in us. I think it makes all the difference.

He rescued me because he delighted in me. Luke 15 I tell you, in the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who don't need repentance. That is God the Father who is celebrating the return of his children. Zephaniah 317 the Lord your God is among you, a warrior who saves. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will be quiet in his love. He will delight

in you with singing. And here's the thing we cannot say that the Old Testament God is an angry God. And the New Testament Jesus is a loving and kind Jesus because they are one and the same. Jesus is God the Father. Jesus and the Holy Spirit share in these characteristics of love and joy and delight. In fact, when Jesus came on the scene, he came to make manifest God. He came to show us the heart of

the father. So what we see in Jesus, the one who describes himself as gentle and humble in heart, the one who opens up his arms and says to the children, come to me like, let the children come to me. Don't, don't stop them. The one who enjoyed a good party and the one who would look out on on the landscape and say, look at the birds of the air. Look at the lilies of the field, that Jesus, that is who the father is revealed to be, because Jesus revealed to us the heart of the father. And so

the father then is the one who delights. I just think we need to work so hard to hold on to this image of an angry, vengeful God when we read Scripture because the story from Genesis to Revelation is the heart of a good God who longs to bring his people and restore them back to relationship with him, so they are one in the same. The God who created humans longs to be in relationship, longs to restore joy and delight. And when we look at revelation, it

is the promise of that, that joy fulfilled. It is the promise that from Genesis what the God of the Old Testament promised and what the Jesus of the New Testament came to reveal that in revelation it will finally be fulfilled. God will once again dwell with his people, and we will be his people, and he will be our God. And we will finally experience the the longing, the fulfillment of that longing and what Jesus describes as a wedding. It's going to be a celebration. It's going

to be a party. That is what the God the Father and Jesus the Son and the Spirit of God in us are all working toward that part of the story, when all our hopes will finally be fulfilled in him.

this is God's very good idea. And part of what was just fascinating to me to learn was that God created a part of our brains to be kind of the Joy center. It's the right frontal cortex. It's right above our right eyeball. And this is the place where we can experience peace. We make rational decisions, we experience joy and goodness and balance. And then there's another part of our brain, the amygdala. It's kind of in the back of our head that triggers our fight or flight response.

It's where we experience stress. And so when we're scrolling our phones and there's bad news, when there's comparison, when we're just kind of in that doom scroll mode, or when we experience stress in our lives and our families and our bodies, we will respond out of the amygdala. And both of these parts of our brains will flood

our bodies with hormones. But what we've learned in recent years is we are spending so much time in the amygdala, we're spending so much time in that stressful part of our brains that we're having a hard time coming out of that. We're seeing increasing levels of depression and anxiety and sleeplessness and insomnia. So many concerns about our mental health and our physical health because we're living out of the amygdala. And what I've learned is it doesn't have

to be that way. I personally found myself stuck in the amygdala going back to the beginning of the interview, when I said I found myself in that dark place. That's where I was. And I share more about that in in this book. But what brought me such hope is we don't have to be stuck there just because we find ourselves repeating patterns of pessimism or criticism or bitterness or hopelessness or anxiety. We don't have to live that way. God created our brains with the ability to

renew and rewire, and this is called neuroplasticity. The more we repeat something, the easier it will become for our brains. And so one way I call it the joy pathway. One way for us to get from the amygdala in the back of the brain, back to the right frontal cortex. That joy center is through the rhythms that I share in the book. Things like having our eyes open to thank God for the good things in our lives. Celebrating

what we're learning about Jesus in Scripture. Even something as simple as going for a walk in the morning and allowing the sunshine to fill our lives with good things. Actually, the the morning sun rays do something in our brains where it helps set our circadian rhythm. I mean, all of these might sound like, okay. Ashreeta what's the point here? What's what's the connection is that all of these things are simple habits that God gives us to restore joy.

And in my own life, as I started practicing these simple joy, habits, rhythms of delight, ways in which to receive the delight of God in my life. He started rewiring my brain, and I found myself spending less time in the amygdala, less time stressed and sorrowful, and more time in a place of peace and tranquility and joy. And all of that is possible because of how God created our brains. And so this brain science that we're learning, that I've based the whole of my book, these rhythms

of delight are based on brain science. And the Bible is just saying, okay, this is what scientists are discovering, and they're not quite sure what to do with it. And yet God invites us to take what we're learning in science and combine it with what he's shown us in Scripture. And then that's how he's going to restore our joy. That's how he's going to heal our bodies and our hearts and our minds and our spirits. Those who look to him for help, Psalm 34 says, will

be radiant with joy. No shadow of shame will darken their faces. And that's what he has done in my life, is what I want to shout from the rooftops. I think it's the work that he wants to do in our generation. And so that is my invitation to those who are listening. Would you ask God to restore joy in your life? He's going to do it through your brain. He's going to do it through your life. He's going to do it through community, through the local church, through Scripture.

But that is his heart posture to invite us to delight in him.