Sometimes when I’m wrestling to figure out what is on God’s heart for me to preach on, I’ll take a pictorial directory of our church family, look at the pictures one by one and pray, “Lord, what is on your heart for this person, for that family?”
I did just that this week, thinking about this morning’s sermon. I looked at a picture and asked, “Lord what’s on your heart for this person? How can I pray for them? And the answer came right away, “pray that they will know that they are precious in my sight.” So I did. Another picture caught my eye, somebody that I hadn’t even met yet or learned anything at all about, and the answer came again. “Pray that they will know that they are precious in my sight.”
I can’t claim that I’ve mastered the art of hearing God’s voice. But does that sound like God to you? I know that’s how he wants me to learn to look at each of you, as precious in his sight. I haven’t mastered that, yet either.
Well, that’s what brought me to our scripture for this morning, Isaiah 43:1-7. Would you please all stand as Warren comes to read it for us.
1 But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
2 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.
3 For I am the LORD your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
I give Egypt as your ransom,
Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you.
4 Because you are precious in my sight,
and honored, and I love you,
I give people in return for you,
nations in exchange for your life.
5 Do not fear, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
6 I will say to the north, "Give them up,"
and to the south, "Do not withhold;
bring my sons from far away
and my daughters from the end of the earth—
7 everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made."
It’s 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 and far away from here. 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 don’t do 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’re a big pain. But they’re 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, aren’t you?
We are God’s creations, we have come from him, his children, and 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, the thought is repeated with a slightly different spin in the next phrase, “he who formed you, O Israel.” Can you hear a little more care in that? He formed us. He is forming us every day. The Bible tells us over and over again that God is molding 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.
When I was trying to learn all I can about just 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’s 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.
Is there anyone here this morning in whom God has not already made an incredible investment to make you what you are today? He is building this church with a great deal of care, molding each and every one of us very, very carefully, chipping away at our rough spots, the parts that stick out and keep the other stones from fitting close to us. It’s a huge job. He has invested an awful lot in us. And that makes us even more precious.
And often times 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’s mad at us or has abandoned us, but no, he’s loving us and teaching us. He’s molding us. And we often look back at the darkest times of our lives and look at the lessons we learned there and the growth we experienced and, looking back we wouldn’t wish it has been any other way because those lessons, his wise forming, was so valuable. Time shows us that God’s wisdom and love are always there if we will accept them.
The first verse goes on, “Do not fear, I have redeemed you.” That’s 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’s 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 Second Kings and Second Chronicles.
These words of God’s love in Isaiah 43 weren’t 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 that they are blind towards him. They had been robbed and plundered by their enemies. They are now 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’s the anger of someone who cares. Because they are precious in his sight he wants so much more for them and he just doesn’t give up working on them.
That’s when this word “redemption” is needed. God’s children are in trouble. And he was taking it upon himself to bail them out.
Being a parent at parent-teacher conferences is fun when your kid is the one who has all the “A” papers posted on the bulletin boards at school and when you know the teacher is just going to rave about how well your kid is doing.
But what if your kid is the one who always gives the teacher a very hard time, and there will be none of your child’s homework posted in the classroom, and he has carved nasty words into the top of his desk, and other parents are getting mad at you for what your kid has done to their kid. That’s when love is tested. That’s when the question gets harder, “am I going to be there for my child or not?”
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. Well, old 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 speak of God’s love for us lightly. He has paid such a 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 dishonor upon that name. But he’s 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.
Now look around the room. Do you see anyone who is not precious in God’s sight? We all probably can find someone who rubs us the wrong way. We can all find somebody whom we know or at least suspect still needs a lot of God’s shaping before they are finished. Let’s help you spot them, anybody who still needs some of God’s shaping, a lot of God’s shaping raise your hand. We all should have our hands up. We may see somebody whom we suspect is off in exile right now, feeling very far from God, maybe desperately grasping at straws trying to get life back under control. Maybe you can see that they aren’t making wise choices in that desperation. Maybe they are uncomfortable to have around. Maybe you can see they still have a lot of rough edges that need trimming. But is there anyone in this room who is not precious in God’s sight? It’s 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 doesn’t seem to fit near you at all is just the person you need to show you what work you still need done.
In our text, verses 5 and 6 talk about God gathering the scattered Israelites from the four corners of the earth, north, south, east and west, gathering them together.
How many of us here drove south to get here today? How many came north? How many came east? I came east, and it was such a long way. How many came west?
He’s gathering the stones to build something here. I don’t know yet all of what it will be. But every one of us has a place because every one of us is precious.
And when he brings us stones close together and things start to rub, we can be tempted to push away. But what kind of building can God build if the stones refuse to be shaped, or they insist on leaving big gaps between themselves, or they look at that stone that just came in from the quarry and they see the rough edges and they say, send it back, we don’t want it? No, he brings us together so that we can see the spots that need trimming down. And the closer we come to one another and the more we rub against each other the more opportunity we have to grow and be conformed into his image. And so when we feel the rubbing start to happen, we don’t push away. We need each other. We need to learn how he plans to fit us together. We need to learn to lovingly adapt our lives to each other. We need to learn to talk things out when there are rough spots. We need to see through God’s eyes, that every one of us is precious in His sight. AMEN
