Thursday Reading: 1 John 2:1-2
Key Verse: 1 John 2:1
1 My little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
Devotion:
If you look up advocate in a dictionary or even on-line you will get a definition not dissimilar to this: “An advocate is one who speaks on behalf of another person. Implicit in the concept is the notion that the represented lacks the knowledge, skill, ability, or standing to speak for themselves.” In other words when we talk of Jesus as our Advocate, we are saying that He is the knowledgeable one who is able to plead for our case with God. If we were to stand up and try and defend ourselves we would very quickly find ourselves condemned to death because of all of our sins.
How can He do that? How can He (Jesus Christ) stand up there and say that we are not guilty when we clearly are? The next word we need to study is “propitiation”. That means that Jesus is willing to placate or overcome distrust with God the Father on our behalf. Because Christ cannot lie, when He tells God that we are innocent, He must mean it. This is done because when we take our sins to Christ, He is able to say to God the Father that we are no longer guilty because our sins have been paid for already by Him. In other words, the punishment has already been carried out on our behalf.
How can that be when we had not even been born yet? That comes in the last phrase of the 2nd verse “but also concerning the sins of all the world.” Christ did not go to the cross just to die for the sins of the people around Him but on behalf of every person born on this world. Christ made a single, absolute atonement for our sins by giving his life for our sins. He had not sinned and yet He was willing to give up His perfect human life to make sure that we were able to follow Him to heaven because of that fact. All we have to do is to believe that that is what He did and to remember it... and try to act like it!
Points to Ponder:
How do you feel about someone taking your punishment?
How do you feel about Christ taking your death sentence?
