“As compared with His own people, God cares for nothing else. ‘The Lord’s portion is His people: Jacob is the lot of His inheritance.’ (Deut. 32:9)
Has not God other things? Ah, what is there that He has not? The silver and the gold are His, and the cattle on a thousand hills.
All things are of God; of Him, and by Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things; yet He reckons them not in comparison with His people.
You know how you, dearly beloved, value your children much more than you do anything else. If there were a fire in your house to-night, and you could only carry one thing out of it, mother, would you hesitate a moment as to what that one thing should be?
You would carry your babe, and let everything else be consumed in the flames. And it is so with God. He cares for His people beyond everything else.
He is the Lord God of Israel, and in Israel He hath set His name, and there He takes His delight. There doth He rest in His love, and over her doth He rejoice with singing.
I want you to notice these different points, not because I can fully explain them all to you; but if I can only give you some of these great truths to think about, and to help you to communion with Christ to-night, I shall have done well.
I want you to remark yet further, concerning these notes of possession, that they occur in the private intercourse between the Father and the Son.
It is in our Lord’s prayer, when He is in the inner sanctuary speaking with the Father, that we have these words, ‘All mine are thine, and thine are mine.’ (John 17:10)
Here is the Son speaking to the Father, not about thrones and royalties, nor cherubim and seraphim, but about poor men and women, in those days mostly fishermen and peasant folk, who believed on Him.
They are talking about these people, and the Son is taking His own solace with the Father in their secret privacy by talking about these precious jewels, these dear ones that are their peculiar treasure.
You have not any notion how much God loves you.
Dear brother, dear sister, you have never yet had half an idea, or the tithe of an idea, of how precious you are to Christ.
You think, because you are so imperfect, and you fall so much below your own ideal, that, therefore, He does not love you much; you think that He cannot do so.
Have you ever measured the depth of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, and of His death on Calvary? If you have tried to do so, you will be quite sure that, apart from anything in you or about you, He loves you with a love that passeth knowledge.
Believe it. ‘But I do not love Him as I should,’ I think, I hear you say. No, and you never will unless you first know His love to you.
Believe it; believe it to the highest degree, that He so loves you that, when there is no one who can commune with Him but the Father, even then their converse is about their mutual estimate of you, how much they love you: ‘All mine are thine, and thine are mine.’”
–Charles H. Spurgeon, “Christ’s Pastoral Prayer for His People,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, Vol. 39 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1893), 39: 507–508. Spurgeon preached this sermon on John 17:9-10 on the Lord’s Day evening of September 1, 1889 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
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