“Behold I have engraved you on the palms of My hands;
Your walls are continually before Me.”  Isaiah 49:16

God is speaking to His very own people, the church.  So precious and 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, lay down, our thoughts, our path, all our ways, what we are going to say before we speak..  

Psalm 139:2-4 tells us this:
“You know when I sit down and when I rise;
You perceive 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 presence as this Psalm clearly states for He is God; Omniscient! Omnipotent! 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!”

Add to this Ephesians 1:3-5 and know how precious His church is to God.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.  In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will.”

We are intimately known by the Lord and He desires that we come to know Him intimately.

Ephesians 4:11-13 tells us,
“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 fullness of Christ.”

All praise and glory to our gracious God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.