What Comes Back to You

There is a small verse hidden in one of the shorter books near the end of the Old Testament, and almost everyone walks straight past it. I do not want you to. I think it may be the most astonishing sentence about God in the whole Bible.

"The LORD your God is in your midst; He is a warrior who can deliver. He takes great delight in you; He renews you by His love; He shouts for joy over you." — Zephaniah 3:17 (NET)

He shouts for joy over you.

Stop, and let that be true for a moment. The One you have been straining to love — the God who is love, the God who knelt on the floor of the garden and drank the cup — is, right now, singing over you. You lift your small voice to Him, and He answers by covering you in a louder song of His own. You cannot out-give this God. Whatever you bring Him, He sends back more. And not as a bargain — not so much praise traded for so much blessing. It comes back larger simply because of who He is. A love that endless cannot take the love you offer and answer with anything less than all of itself.

Jesus put a picture to it: Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure — pressed down, shaken together, running over — will be poured into your lap. Running over. Your two hands cannot hold what comes back. Not because you earned a bigger share. Because the One pouring it can no more hold His love back than the sun can hold back its light.

You remember the story Jesus told about the boy who took his inheritance, threw it all away, and came home broke and ashamed? The father in that story does not wait at the door with his arms folded. He sees the boy while he is still far off down the road — which tells you the father had been watching that road, every day. And he runs. An old man, gathering up his robe, running down the road to a son who came home with nothing. He throws a robe over the boy's shoulders and a ring on his hand and kills the best calf in the yard and throws a feast. The son came back empty. The father gave back everything, and more. That party was never measured to match what the son deserved. It poured out to match what the father felt.

And under all of it runs the simplest, strongest logic in the whole Bible: He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all — how will He not also, along with Him, freely give us everything? He already gave the costliest thing there is. Why would He turn stingy now? Once you have received the cross, you never have to wonder again whether God is willing to be generous with you.

That is who you are dealing with when you love Him. A Father who runs. A God who sings over you. A love so far past your imagining that when you hand Him what you have — all of it, like the woman with her jar — what comes back is more than your arms can hold, and there is still more behind it.