Chosen Before Time

"Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him..." John 17:1-2 (NIV)
In His great High Priestly prayer, Jesus says in verse 2 that He gives ‘eternal life to all those you have given Him'.
We read in Ephesians 1:4, “He chose us in Him before the creation of the world”. Now many of us have heard of the “Lamb’s Book of Life”. And if I were to ask you when was your name written there, most people would say, “When I became a Christian, when I was 5 years old, my name was written in the Lamb’s Book of Life”. Others might say when you were baptized or when you were born, but most people would say, “The day I received Christ”.

But in Revelation 17:8 it says that those names were written from the creation of the world. Who wrote them? We know it is the Lamb’s Book of Life, so the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, most likely has written the names there. Now, concerning this Lamb, 1 Peter 1:20 and Revelation 13:8 respectively say Jesus was chosen and slain before the creation of the world.
Some of your antennae have already gone up and you are thinking, “Does that mean that I don’t have a role in my salvation?”…or…”Does that mean God chooses who gets saved and chooses who go to hell?”
I’d like us to change the station from these thoughts and just see a profound Biblical truth from Jesus’s prayer.

Jesus says that He gives eternal life to those the Father has given Him. When were those names given to Jesus? When did the Father call out the names and Jesus wrote them down in His Book of Life?
Paul told Titus in Titus 1:2 that eternal life was promised before the beginning of time. Who made that promise? It was the Father. He was promising to the Son that His inheritance would be a people that are His very own.
There before the creation of the world, Jesus had already been chosen, slain, and made an inheritor of a promised gift, His love gift from the Father.

The Father gave His Son an inheritance that would never spoil or fade and that inheritance is You, and I.
We are the promise, the inheritance, what the writer of Hebrews described in chapter 12 as ‘the joy set before Jesus as He endured the cross’, it wasn’t just to be with the Father again, but to receive His treasure, the treasure in the field that is worth selling all you own and even giving your life to purchase so that you can obtain the treasure therein.
You and I are those who have been given as an inheritance gift, a love gift, from the Father to the Son, chosen before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.
Let that truth permeate in your mind for just a moment and tell me you still struggle with your self-worth! The dowry our Bridegroom was willing to pay for our hand in marriage was His own life, His own blood, and now we truly are a people who have been given to Jesus. God gave Jesus the right to grant eternal life to all who would receive Him, to those who would believe on His name. We are not our own, we were bought at a price, we are His. This truth should radically impact us!