There Is An Advocate And I Never Called Him

In that part of town everybody knew about Grigore.

He was somewhere past seventy and he had a standing arrangement with the whole neighborhood, unwritten and absolutely reliable: if you had to go somewhere and speak for yourself and you could not do it, you called him, and he came, and he did the talking. The school. The housing office. The clinic where the appointments run late and the man behind the desk uses words on purpose. Grigore would put on the good coat, sit beside you, and speak.

Emil had been sending people to Grigore for eighteen years.

He taught in the mornings and he was the one people knocked for in the evenings, and he was good at it. He knew every provision in that neighborhood. He knew which office opened at what hour and who to ask for and, above all, he knew that Grigore existed and that Grigore had never once said no to anybody.

One evening in September his friend Dorel was in the study while the light was going gold across the desk, and Emil was telling him about a young family, and what the letter had said, and how he had told them to call Grigore, and how it had gone.

Dorel listened the whole way through. Then he said the plainest sentence in the world.

"Emil. Have you ever called him for yourself?"

Emil opened his mouth to say of course.

And then he did not say it, because it turned out that the answer was no.

Not once. Eighteen years of handing a man's name to other people, and never once in his own trouble, and there had been trouble, and he had sat through every bit of it alone in rooms where somebody could have spoken for him.

Dorel did not press it. He let it sit there in the gold light and drank his tea.

And after a long moment Emil laughed, very quietly, the way a man laughs at himself when there is nothing else honest available, and said, "Eighteen years."

"Eighteen years," said Dorel.

And there is a provision in your covenant that you can describe accurately, and recommend warmly, and explain to a person in trouble at eleven at night. And you have never once used it for yourself.

The provision sits inside the terms

Let me say the first thing carefully, because on this subject people brace themselves.

This is not an article about coming back. Nobody here is being walked to a doorway and asked to re-enter anything. You are inside the covenant and this is a clause of it, written in with everything else, and the Holy Spirit is not treating your worst week as a matter that put you outside the document. Scripture puts this provision in the middle of the terms rather than in a footnote about exceptions.

Here it is, and notice the grammar of who it belongs to.

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.1 John 2:1

Read the first half before the second, because the letter does. So that you may not sin. The provision is not a shrug about failure and nobody is pretending the failure was nothing.

And then: we have an advocate. Not there is one available. Not one may be appointed on application. We have. Present tense, first person plural, standing possession, and the word means one who is called to your side to speak.

You have an advocate with the Father right now, named in the terms, and He is named by name so that nobody has to guess: Jesus Christ the righteous. That is 1 John 2:1 and not my encouragement to you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moves a man from knowing that sentence to using it.

The room where the accused says nothing

There is a scene in Zechariah that is the whole thing in pictures. A man named Joshua is standing in front of the angel of the Lord, and the accuser is standing at his right hand, and Joshua is wearing filthy garments in front of everybody.

Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments. And the angel said to those who were standing before him, "Remove the filthy garments from him." And to him he said, "Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments."Zechariah 3:3 and 4

Now read the scene for what is missing from it.

Joshua does not speak. Not one word, anywhere in that chapter. He does not explain the garments, he does not make his case, he does not promise better. Somebody else does all the talking, and the sentence that ends it is in the first person: I have taken your iniquity away from you.

You were never required to be your own counsel in that room. The word says the garments came off at somebody else's order while the man they belonged to stood there silent, and the Spirit of God is not waiting behind you for a better statement before He lets that happen.

Which half is settled, and what is asked of you

Here is the line down the middle, and it goes here in the teaching where you can lean on it.

The advocate's standing is settled. His righteousness is settled, and it is His and not yours, which is the entire reason the office works. What is asked of you is real and it is small and it is not nothing: address Him. Say it to Him. Use the word my.

Because mercy is not a second set of terms that you now have to satisfy. This is where an article can quietly do damage, by making the provision itself into a fresh test with a standard of sincerity attached. There is no such standard in 1 John 2:1 and there is no probation in Zechariah 3, and the Holy Spirit does not run a waiting period before the garments change.

And I am not going to ask you to itemize anything. Not a list, not a full account, not a reconstruction of how it happened and who else was involved. One thing, named once, in ordinary words. A person who has to catalog a failure before mercy will hear him has been handed a document God did not write.

You have one sentence to say and an advocate already standing to say the rest, and Zechariah 3:4 is what He says: I have taken your iniquity away from you. His Spirit is the One who makes that a voice in a room rather than a line on a page.