I often find myself watching my son or daughter doing something adorable and think, “You are the most precious thing in the world. How can you be so precious?” Then immediately after that thought leaves my mind, this thought comes racing in, “How much more precious am I to God, than these children are to me?”
We’ve all heard or sung these words from the well-known children’s song: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world…They are precious in his sight.” We’ve been singing it for years, but do we really understand how precious we are to God? I can tell you we’re precious enough that he sent his perfect, holy, way-more-precious-than-us Son to Earth to die for us.
The Oxford Language Dictionary defines precious as “highly esteemed or cherished.” Now read what Paul writes about Jesus in Colossians 1:15-19: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities…For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”
Wow, I don’t know about you, but that screams highly esteemed or cherished to me, to the point of leaving me speechless. And what did this enormously precious person, the literal image of God, do for you? He died so that “in him, we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Another great thing about being precious to God is that it’s not conditional. I’ll be watching my kids, barely able to contain myself with how precious they are, and then my two-year-old daughter will smack my son on the head. Then my four-year-old son will push my daughter down into the sandbox and that sweet moment of preciousness is gone. But that doesn’t mean they’re not precious to me anymore! They are, and always will be, precious to me.
“The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17). You are infinitely more precious to God than your children are to you. Even in those moments of shame and doubt, where all you can think about is how unworthy you are, you are still precious to God.
