Our Lord Prays for His Own

The book my wife and I are reading for our morning devotional is called, "Our Lord Prays for His Own" by Marcus Rainsford. It is a study of the Lord's prayer for His people in John 17. This morning's reading was based on John 17:6 "I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours, You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word."

Here is what Rainsford writes:

How it must have amazed His disciples to hear such words! What a world of grace must have been opened out to their understanding! The Lord here reveals to them, and to us, the very secrets of His Father's heart. He opens to us all the purposes of the everlasting covenant, and points out the subjects and objects which it embraces. "Men" -- not angels, nor archangels -- but men, and sinners. "The men which you gave me"; the men--Your specially chosen and beloved ones among the sons and daughters of men. From whence were they taken? "Out of the world." It was not that they were better than others: they were "of the world"; they were "in the world"; they "had followed the course of this world"; they had been like the world, carried captive at his will by "the prince of this world"; blinded as to their understanding by the world and its glittering nothingness; guilty, "children of wrath even as others," condemned, enemies of God, no love for Him, no desire towards Him, no knowledge of Him; yet loved with an intensity that only God can be conscious of and given to the Lord Jesus Christ to be saved in Him with an everlasting salvation. "Thine they were, and thou gavest them to me." Seven times in this prayer Christ reminds His Father that He had given His people to Him.

Evidently He regarded this gift as the greatest proof of His Father's love to Him; even as the Holy Ghost teaches the believer to regard the gift of Christ as the greatest proof of our heavenly Father's love to us.