From: "Beverly French" <frenchb@vcss.k12.ca.us>
To: "Heritage" <gheritage@juno.com>
Subject: Joyous Greetings
Date: Sunday, September 09, 2001 6:57 AM

"Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands;
 Your walls are continually before Me."  Isaiah 49:16

Other translations of this verse are:
"See I have branded you on the palms of my hands..."  The Jerusalem Bible
"Lo, on the palms of My hands have I portrayed thee..."
Rotherham translation
"Behold, I have indelibly imprinted (tattooed a picture of) you on the palm
of each of My hands..."  Amplified Bible.

God is talking of His very own people; His church.  So precious and greatly
loved is His church.
We (Believers, His body, the Church) are always before Him.  He knows each
of us individually and intimately; when we sit, stand, lie down, our
thoughts, our path, all of our ways, what we are going to say before we
speak.  Psalm 139:2-4 tells us just this.

"You know when I sit down and when I rise;
 You preceive my thoughts from afar.
 You discern my going out and my lying down,
 You are familiar with all my ways.
 Before a word is on my tongue,
 You know it completely, O Lord."

Not only that but,
"You hem me in--behind and before;
 You have laid your hand upon me."  Vs. 5

There is no where we can go from His Spirit as this Psalm so surely states
for He is God, Ominiscient and Omnipresent.  Is it any wonder that the
Psalmist states later in verse 17,
"How precious to me are your thoughts, O God:
 How vast is the sum of them!"?

Then add to this Ephesians l: 3-5 and know just how precious His church is
to God.  For while we were dead in our transgressions; God, in His gracious,
lovingkindness and tender mercies saved us in Christ Jesus our Lord.
"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christs, who has blessed
us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.  For He
chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in
His sight.  In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through
Jesus Christ."

We are intimately known to the Lord and He desires that we come to know Him
intimately.  For Ephesians 4: 11-13 says,
"And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as
evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the
saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of  Christ;
until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the
Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to
the fulness of Christ."

All praise to our loving and gracious God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen.