Mark Altrogge
If you spend any time in a church, you’ll discover a conglomeration of flawed and imperfect folks, with plenty of weaknesses and shortcomings. It’s easy to look at our brothers and sisters and see their warts and blemishes. Yet the perfect One, the holy One, the One without a single imperfection doesn’t look on His people the way we often do. Look what He says through David in Psalm 16:3:
As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent (or majestic, NASB) ones, in whom is all My delight. (Psalm 16:3 ESV)
It is amazing that God calls His children the “excellent” or “majestic” ones. Often I don’t feel particularly majestic. I picture Jesus pointing me out to Gabriel saying, “Look, Gabriel, there’s one of my majestic ones,” then I hear Gabriel say, “Who, him? Look at him nodding off in his devotions. And wait till he sees the dent his wife put in his car. Then you’ll really see how majestic he is.”
Sometimes our brothers and sisters don’t appear so excellent to us. Every church is filled with a motley collection of “majestic ones” struggling with a whole potpourri of sins and weaknesses. Like the new believer you spend three hours trying to encourage, who leaves you singing the Halleluiah Chorus, only to call you three hours later from the pit of despair. Or the son of Eeyore who whines that there’s no love in the church after 45 people helped him move last week. God calls them “excellent ones” – yes, we’re talking about the same people.
Not only does God declare believers to be His excellent ones, but the ones “in whom is all [His] delight.”
God sees us as excellent and delightful because He redeemed us with Christ’s blood, clothed us with Christ’s righteousness and is transforming us by His Spirit into Christ’s likeness. And since the Father’s delight is in His Son, He now delights in His children who are one with that Son.
If God sees His children in this way, then we need to as well. If God so delights in the saints, then so should we. If the saints are delightful, we should long to fellowship with them, serve them, and give our lives for them.