God Treasures His Tired Children

If you are in Christ, God treasures you. You are precious to him. Especially when you’re tired, downcast, discouraged, and exhausted.

Last summer, after a long drive, we sat under the faces of four iconic leaders of America as they cast their gazes over the Black Hills of South Dakota. We had made it to Mount Rushmore, a celebration of four of the greatest Presidents our nation has ever elected. The monument has become such an icon that folks like our family log thousands of miles on their minivans to see it personally. The monument has also become a shorthand for talking about greatness. A “Mount Rushmore” of baseball players would include four of the best to ever play the great game, more exclusive than even the Hall of Fame. A “Mount Rushmore” of folks is an elite group of the best of the best, the GOATs—Greatest Of All Time.

If there were a “Mount Rushmore” of biblical characters, Daniel would probably be on the shortlist for getting his face carved in stone. After being kidnapped and taken into slavery in his teens, he served for another seventy years in the capital of the world, Babylon. He served faithfully and fruitfully. He’s a hero of the faith of the High King of Heaven.

Daniel’s life and story encourages us in a zillion ways, but I recently have found one part of his life especially encouraging. Daniel, one of the best of the best, got really tired and needed God to refill his tank and blow fresh wind into his sails. At the end of Daniel’s passionate prayer of confession and intercession in Daniel 9, Daniel says that he was in a place of “extreme weariness” (9:21). The word for “extreme weariness” is the word used for the way Yahweh does not get tired like even the most vigorous young folks (see Isaiah 40:30-31). Here Daniel is exhausted from praying, from confessing, from crying out to God. And Daniel’s tiredness can encourage us in our own tiredness.

We Get Tired

If we’re tired, we’re in very prestigious company. And we do get tired. We get tired for quite a few reasons and in quite a few ways.

• We get physically tired from lack of rest and hectic schedules.

• We get mentally tired from managing family, work, and life.

• We get relationally tired from stress and strain, misunderstandings, mood swings, and sinful reactions.

• We get emotionally tired from the strain in our world and our lives. We hear another tragic story. We experience a tragic story. From cancer to shootings to stress.

• We get spiritually tired from the weight of unanswered prayer. I’ve been at this point, even though I can’t claim to be the prayer warrior that Daniel was. I ask God for what I think would be his will, over and again. And I wait, and I’m tired. You know the feeling, too, don’t you? Asking and waiting. It can be exhausting.

Here was Daniel praying. Maybe he was determined to fast and pray until the evening offering, between 3pm and 4pm. Maybe he was close to concluding. Maybe Daniel was wondering whether God would answer, because time was almost out. Daniel was poured out, tired to the point of exhausted. And at just that moment of exhaustion, Gabriel arrived with God’s word.

God Meets Us When We’re Tired

God wants to meet us at just this point of tiredness. When we’re tired from life. When we’re tired of sin and self. When we’re tired of our constant failures. When we’re tired of the grind. When we’re just tired. Jesus wants to meet us when our bucket is empty, so he can pour living water into it. Jesus says, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30). Paul says, “When I am weak, then I’m strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Now, it’s one thing to know this theoretically and theologically. It’s another thing to experience such exhaustion—to feel the tiredness that often precedes the presence of God. Feeling the weight emptiness panics us and puts us in desperate mode. A friend recently talked about returning to South Florida after evacuating for a hurricane. In the middle of the state, with his family and dogs, his car was 3 miles to empty. Everywhere, power was out and gas stations were empty. It’s a desperate and wild feeling to be out of gas, he said. Yes and amen, both literally and figuratively. Often at the point when we are the most tired, the most discouraged and desperate—at this most empty point, God shows up. “Now,” he says, “Now, you’re ready for me because you’re emptied of yourself.”

God Treasures His Tired People

Hamudot Atah

Although Daniel had poured himself out for a long time, God dispatched the messenger with the answer on the front side. Yet there Daniel had waited. There might already be answers to my prayers and to yours on the way. “The check’s in the mail” is usually an excuse for someone who hasn’t paid his debts. But “the angel’s on the way” is a real thing in the spiritual war between earth and heaven.

The basis for God’s answer through Gabriel is the deep love of God for Daniel. “You are treasured!” (9:23). The Hebrew word for “you” is atah. The Hebrew word for “treasured” is hamudot, which means “precious,” “beloved,” “rich,” “valuable,” or “significant.” “A plural form of the word is employed in the Hebrew to indicate great value,” as scholar Stephen Miller notes. Two other times, in Daniel 10, Daniel receives this word (v.11, 19). Each of the three times God’s affection for Daniel is affirmed, it prefaces the revelation of a prophecy about the world. Daniel needed the affirmation of the affection of God for him before he could bear the revelation of God to him. Hamudot Atah! You are treasured, Daniel.

The Image of God

We can claim the word for Daniel for ourselves. And it’s a good thing, because we need the affirmation of God’s affection for us before we can bear anything that God plans for us. First, we can claim this in a limited way because we are made in the image of God. God truly does love and treasure every person he has ever made. Sadly, though, that’s not the only or even eternally primary relationship between people and God. Because of sin and rebellion, we have distorted the image of God, and we have rejected him as our Father. Maybe you heard the stories several years ago of kids who would legally separate from their parents. We too have legally removed ourselves from our relationship with God as our Father. We have defaced the image of God in ourselves. So, on our own, we can’t really claim the treasuring love of God. On our own, we can’t claim Daniel’s hamudot atah, for ourselves.

The Reality of Union with Christ

Thanks be to God, though; because we can claim God as our loving Father in union with Christ. When we turn from our sin and trust in Jesus Christ, we don’t just acknowledge a new set of beliefs. Our whole identity changes. We are transferred from our identity in the first man who sinned, Adam, and we identified by God with Jesus Christ. We are united to Christ. We are in Christ. Jesus Christ is the eternal Son, eternally the son of the Father’s love (Col 1:13). The nature of God is Love (1 John 4:8), the eternal triune relations of love between Father, Son, and Spirit. Jesus Christ is the Son of God who became the Son of Man. He was the beloved of God in his human nature, taking the form of a servant. He was the new Adam, the perfect image of God.

Jesus loved us by taking on human nature. When I was in high school and college our church in northern California would send a mission team every year to the slums of Tijuana, Mexico. We would build a Christian family a home there. After the trip, everyone would return and think about the massive contrast between our middle- or upper-middle-class standard of American living and the poverty we’d just seen. But my mentor and youth pastor pointed out that we needed to take an even larger point. Think about the contrast between the life of God the Son and his moving to the slum of the world and taking human nature. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ: Though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). The love of Jesus shows in the incarnation, and then displays it culminating glory in the crucifixion.

In his baptism, the Father pronounced his affection for the Son, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.” This echoes the word to Daniel: hamudot atah. “You are treasured.” “You are my beloved.”

We’re doubled over with the love of God. God loved us through Christ in his incarnation and crucifixion, and he loves us in Christ in his incarnation and crucifixion. Your whole “you” is new if you are in Christ. You are seen in identification with the deeply beloved Son.

The Father’s word for you in Christ is the word spoken over Jesus in his baptism: “You are my beloved son and with you I am well-pleased.”

Hamudot atah: You are precious.
Hamudot atah: You are treasured.
Hamudot atah: You are significant.
Hamudot atah: You are cherished.
Hamudot atah: You are loved.

The Feel and the Real

There is a wide delta between Daniel’s condition and God’s affection. Daniel is exhausted, but he is precious to God. Often, we experience a delta between how we feel and what is actually real. What do we feel? A zillion fluctuating things in a thousand different moments. What is real? Jesus is real and our union with him is real. In Ephesians 1:3-14, we find one of the most powerful explanations of our inheritance in union with Christ in the Bible. First, we have a summary and then seven blessings of union with Christ, the seven words that help fill up the meaning of hamudot atah for us.

The Summary: Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens in Christ (1:3).

• Election: For he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, (1:4)

• Sanctification: to be holy and blameless in love before him. (1:4)

• Adoption: He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he lavished on us in the Beloved One. (1:5-6)

• Redemption: In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he richly poured out on us with all wisdom and understanding. (1:7-8)

• Revelation: He made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he purposed in Christ as a plan for the right time—to bring everything together in Christ, both things in heaven and things on earth in him. (1:9-10)

• Provision: In him we have also received an inheritance, because we were predestined according to the plan of the one who works out everything in agreement with the purpose of his will, so that we who had already put our hope in Christ might bring praise to his glory. (1:11-12)

• Ratification: In him you also were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and when you believed. The Holy Spirit is the down payment of our inheritance, until the redemption of the possession, to the praise of his glory. (1:13-14)

If you are in Christ, God treasures you. You are precious to him. Especially when you’re tired, downcast, discouraged, and exhausted. Remember when the disciples couldn’t stay awake on the edge of the most significant moment in history? Jesus was praying the most passionate and desperate prayer ever prayed, and “they couldn’t keep their eyes open” (Matthew 26:43). Even in that moment, Jesus rouses them and calls them back to his purposes. All things considered, it’s a gentle rebuke and a moment of grace, just like when we have to get our tired kids from the car to the bed sometimes.

God loves his tired children the way we love our tired children. When our kids get tired and fall asleep, we don’t yell at them and say, “You pathetic child, why are you asleep?”No, we take pictures of them, because we treasure them especially when they’re tired. We want to remember those sweet moments. For example, check out some of the pictures we’ve taken of our tired kids over the years.

Now, how much more do you think your Father treasures you, even and especially when you’re tired?

As a father has compassion on his children,
so Yahweh has compassion on those who fear him.
For he knows what we are made of,
remembering that we are dust.
(Psalm 103:13-14)