One of the most difficult things for pastors is determining what to preach every week. I try to plan my sermons a few months ahead of time, but as each week comes around, sometimes things change. It might be something in the news or something a person in the church is dealing with. Regardless, there are times when it turns into a wrestling match between me and God.

Like anyone else, I cannot claim that I have mastered the art of hearing God’s voice. I believe the truths the Bible says about God’s love for humanity are true. He looks at each of us out of His love. I am not sure I have mastered that, but I try.

I was reading through Isaiah this afternoon and one particular passage settled in my mind. We read in 43:17, “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you. Because you are precious in my eyes, and honoured, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

It is easy for us fallen human beings to start to feel like God is distant, uncaring, unreasonably demanding, maybe not even there at all. But this Scripture gives us a very different picture. Of course, it is God speaking to the nation of Israel a long time ago. But it shows us something in God’s heart that we should expect to experience, too. We are precious in His sight.

Why does God love His people? The first verse gives several huge reasons. “But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob.” The first reason listed is that He loves us because He created us. Those of us who are parents can understand that once you have brought a human being into the world, your child, a part of you, someone who shares some of your most essential traits, there is always going to be a connection there. And especially when they are young, they have not done anything useful for you. They may smell bad, they mess their diapers, they wake you up in the middle of the night. If you want to go out, you have to pack up all that stuff, diapers, bottles, formula, and stroller. They are a big pain. But they are a part of us and we love them.

I used to think of parenting as something you do for 20 years or so, then the kids are grown up and your job is done. But is it ever done? No, you are always going to be thinking about them, always connected to them, always vitally concerned about them, right?

We are God’s creations, we have come from Him. Like it or not He will always feel a connection to us, a desire for us. God loves us with a parent’s love, only better than any human parent can do.

He created us, but then, maybe to pin the thought down a little stronger, He repeats it with a slightly different spin in the next phrase, “he who formed you, O Israel.” Can you hear a little more care in that statement? He formed us. He is forming us every day. The Bible tells us over and over again that God is moulding us. He teaches us. He disciplines those whom He loves. We like to think that God’s job is to just give us lots of cool stuff, but the Bible talks much more about how He brings tests and adversities into our lives to teach us character and make us strong.

Life is a journey of learning about what it means when God said we are precious in His sight. I looked up other places in the Old Testament where the same Hebrew word, translated “precious” here, is used. It is used of precious stones, maybe diamonds or rubies, things that are just hard to get and very beautiful to look at. And, in 1 Kings 7:9, the word is used to describe the massive foundation stones used in building Solomon’s palace, “ costly stones, cut according to measure, sawed with saws, back and front.”

Think about a huge stone, maybe 5 feet deep, 8 feet long, 3 or 4 feet high, cut by hand out of a quarry, dragged by hand across miles of countryside without anything close to what we would consider a decent road, shaped so that the front and back were smooth and the sides shaped so that it would fit perfectly with the other stones brought together. This was before the days of power tools or dynamite and it took an incredible amount of work to prepare one of those stones. Every one that made it, that got fitted perfectly into the building had a huge investment in it and must have been worth an awful lot.

Each of us who are Christians, are a part of the building we call the church. He put it together with a great deal of care, moulding each and every one of us very, very carefully by chipping away at our rough spots. It is a huge job. He has invested an awful lot in us. And that makes us even more precious.

And oftentimes when He is chipping away at our rough spots and those tests and adversities start to fly fast and thick we can feel like He is mad at us or has abandoned us, but no, He is loving us and teaching us. He is moulding us. We often look back at the darkest times of our lives and from the lessons we learned there which have produced growth in our lives. It is through those lessons, from His wise forming, that makes us so valuable. Time shows us that God’s wisdom and love are always there if we will accept them.

The first verse goes on, “Fear not for I have redeemed you.” That is another reason that God loves us. He has redeemed us. And here we need to give some background. These words of Isaiah are not addressed to wonderful children of God who are hanging out in the temple all day, studying God’s word and obeying it wholeheartedly. He is writing this to a nation of Israel that had squandered God’s gift of the temple and now it had been destroyed. When things had gotten tough they had turned their backs on God, making alliances with pagan kings, serving pagan gods. And as they set off on their own in defiance of the god who created them and had formed them. They were invaded. Jerusalem was destroyed. Most of the people were forced to migrate into exile in faraway lands. You can read about it in the Old Testament in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles.

These words of God’s love in Isaiah 43 were not spoken in a time when God’s people made it easy to love them. They had disobeyed terribly. They had lost their freedom and their land. And if you back up and read the previous chapter, Isaiah 42, you will see some of the phrases used to describe how God saw his people at the time. They were blind towards God. They had been robbed and plundered by their enemies. They were trapped by their foolishness. And who behaves well when they feel trapped by their own foolishness? And God is really angry with them. But it is the anger of someone who cares. Because they are precious in His sight He wants so much more for them and He just doe not give up working on them.

That is when the word “redemption” is needed. Humanity was in trouble. God was taking it upon Himself to bail them out. Our God sees Himself as our redeemer, the family member who bails us out when we get in trouble. In the Old Testament, Abraham’s nephew Lot made a foolish decision to settle in the immoral city of Sodom. One day Sodom was raided and Lot and his family were captured to be sold as slaves and all his property was stolen. Uncle Abraham took off in hot pursuit with his servants and they made a surprise attack on those raiders and he got his nephew back out of trouble.

In one of the most incredible stories of the Bible, the prophet Hosea had a wife who betrayed him, having affair after affair. Finally, she left him altogether. She became a prostitute. One day he found her up for sale in a slave market, used up, hardened, embittered. And Hosea redeemed his wife. He bought her out of slavery and he brought her home again and he cared for her and he loved her.

I hope we never come to take God’s love lightly. He paid such a huge price for us. Jesus died on the cross to redeem us from our sins. He has put His name upon us, and we have brought dishonour upon that name. But He is our parent, our teacher, our husband, our redeemer. He has invested so much in each and every one of us that we are precious in His sight.

Maybe you can see that other Christians still have a lot of rough edges that need work. We all do. But it does not negate that we are precious in God’s sight? It is when the stones all come together out of the quarry and they are fitted close together that the imperfections show up and the final trimming can happen and the stones be perfected.

He loves us when we are unlovely. He is so committed to us that He keeps working on us, chipping away on our rough edges. Sometimes He uses us to knock each other’s rough edges off. Sometimes that person who just does not seem to fit near you at all is just the person you need to show you what work you still need to be done.

The Body of Christ is made up of people from every corner of the world, from every tribe, nation and tongue. All of us are connected together in and through Christ. He is gathering the stones to build something. I do not know all of what it will be. But every one of us has a place because every one of us is precious. We need to see ourselves and each other through God’s eyes and when we do, we will see too that each one of us is precious in His sight.