September 27, 2026 | We Have an Advocate

This is the holy gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ according to Matthew.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

And Jesus said this.

What do you think?

A man had two sons.

And he went to the first and said, Go and work in the vineyard today.

And the son answered, I will not.

But afterwards he changed his mind and he went.

And then the father went to the other son and said the same.

And he answered, Go, I go, sir.

But then he did not.

Which of the two of these sons did the will of the Father?

And those gathered there said, The first.

And Jesus said to them, Truly I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.

For John came in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him.

But the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him.

And even when you saw it, you did not go afterwards and change your mind and believe him.

The gospel of the Lord.

Let us pray.

Holy Spirit, we ask that you would come and open our ears right now to listen to your life-giving words.

Open our hearts to receive your word with faith and with obedience.

We ask this all in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

I love baptisms.

If you couldn't tell when I was doing it, I love baptisms.

I remember when I was very young, one of our church members had some land at the Paclet River.

And we would go there as a church, and we'd have a service by the riverside, and then people would wade out into the water and they'd get baptized.

And I remember very distinctly, I remember the baptism of this one man.

He was uh I didn't know him, but he had a big beard, and he he was covered in tattoos, and he drove a motorcycle, and as a child, I thought he was very intimidating and also very cool.

And I remember he went out into the water and then he started to give a testimony, and he talked about the kind of life that he'd led, and he talked about things that he'd done that he now deeply regretted.

And he talked about how he had found faith in Jesus, and then I watched as the pastor put him under the water, and I watched as he came up out of the water, and the look on his face, it was one of the happiest looks I had ever seen.

I was a child, and I couldn't possibly comprehend what it might feel like to live the life this man had lived, or to carry around the kind of regrets that he'd carried around for years.

But I understood enough of what was happening even then to know that for the first time in a very long time, maybe the first time ever, this man was feeling the joy of being clean.

All that remorse, all those regrets he'd been carrying around.

It was like they were just all washed away in the waters of the Packlett River.

And even as a child, I just thought that was beautiful.

And now looking back on it, I can't help but wonder, I can't help but wonder what was going through that man's head that day.

Specifically, what did he think would come next?

I wonder whether maybe he thought now that he'd been washed, now that he believed, now that he was a new man, maybe he thought he'd never have to deal with the pain or burden of regret again.

Maybe he thought that once he came up out of that water as a new creation, that all his old vices and bad habits, selfish ways, that they'd all just immediately disappear.

I don't know what he expected.

But I do know that there are some Christians who live their lives with these kind of expectations, with the impression, the impression, as J.I.

Packer once put it, that normal Christian living is a bed of roses, a state of affairs in which everything in the garden is lovely all the time and problems no longer exist, or if they come, they only have to be taken to the throne of grace and they will melt away all at once.

This is to suggest, Packer goes on to say, this is to suggest that the world, the flesh, and the devil will give us no serious trouble once we are Christians.

Nor will our personal relationships ever be a problem to us, nor will we ever be a problem to ourselves.

Such suggestions are mischievous, however, because they are false.

Those three precious children that we just baptized, Nina and Gray and Sullivan, my prayer for them is that they will never know a day outside of the love of Jesus Christ.

I pray that as they grow up, that they will come to embrace and to cherish with their own faith the promises that they receive today, the promise of their own forgiveness of sin, of their adoption as children of God.

I pray that they will come to embrace their new life in Christ.

I pray that they, even as a young child, that they will already begin to trust and to follow the voice of their shepherd Jesus.

That's my prayer for them.

But even as I pray this, I know that their lives will not be without failure.

I know that they will do things they deeply regret.

I know that they too will have to struggle against sin, the flesh, and the devil.

And I know that sometimes in that struggle, they will fail.

And that is why, as I think about them this morning, it's why I also pray that they will come to know the peace that we find in our fourth and final comfortable word of our liturgy.

The words of 1 John 2, verse 1.

1 John 2:1

If anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father.

Jesus Christ, the righteous, he is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.

You know, if you read that verse in your Bible, 1 John 2, 1, you'll notice that's not exactly how the verse begins.

The verse actually begins with the previous sentence.

My little children, John says, My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin.

And that's a good place to begin because that's exactly where the Christian life begins.

In Romans chapter 6, the Apostle Paul tells us that all who were baptized into Jesus Christ, that we have all been baptized into his death.

Romans 6 · chapter mention

Which doesn't just mean that our sins have been forgiven, but that sin's power and control over us has been put to death to a watery grave.

For one who has died, Paul says, has been set free from sin.

Or as he puts it in 2 Corinthians, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has gone, behold, the new has come.

All of which is to say, once you are joined to Jesus by faith, you're just not the same as you used to be.

Sin doesn't control you any longer.

And that's why John starts the way he does.

My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin.

But John isn't naive.

He knows that we've been freed from sin.

He knows that it's possible for us who have received the Holy Spirit to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh.

But he also knows that even as we grow and mature in the faith, he knows there will never come a day, this side of heaven, that we will entirely be freed of the burden of our sin.

He says as much in the verses that immediately precede this one.

He says, If anyone, if we say, he says, if we say we have no sin, we are lying.

We deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

And if we say we have not sinned, we make God a liar.

And his word is not in us.

John knows we're new creations.

He knows we've been set free.

He knows we've been given the Spirit of God.

He also knows that we will sin.

That's why he says, My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin.

But, but if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father.

That word in the New Testament, it can have a variety of meanings.

The word advocate can refer to someone who's a comrade, to someone who's an assistant, really to anyone who comes alongside another person to help them, to support them.

It's the same word, actually, that Jesus uses in the Gospel of John when he describes the Holy Spirit as our helper.

Same word.

But in this case, John means something a little more specific because he has a specific scenario in mind.

What kind of helper do you need when your conscience condemns you?

What kind of helper do you need when you have disobeyed your loving heavenly father?

You need someone who will defend you against your own conscience, and you need someone who will do whatever it takes to restore your relationship to that father.

And that, John is saying, that is precisely who we have in Jesus.

When you sin, when you fail, when you give in to those old selfish fleshly desires, you're not alone.

You don't have to defend yourself, and you do not have to make yourself right with God.

Remember, John is saying, if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father.

And how does John describe our advocate?

He is Jesus Christ the righteous and he is the propitiation for our sins.

Both of those are very important.

Jesus Christ the righteous, the propitiation for our sins.

With these two phrases, John is telling us why and how Jesus can be the advocate that we need.

First, Jesus is the righteous one.

Which is to say, Jesus is the one who has done everything right.

You remember when the people of Israel, when they were in the wilderness, what'd they do?

When they were in the wilderness, when they got hungry, when they got thirsty, they grumbled, they complained, they disbelieved God, they started to doubt him.

Jesus, on the other hand, was entirely different.

When Jesus was in the wilderness, no matter how hungry he got, Jesus never once wavered.

His trust in God never failed.

He did everything right.

And when you and I, when you and I, when people wrong us, when they insult us, we often respond in kind.

We get offended, we get bitter, we get angry, sometimes we get even.

But not Jesus.

When people wronged and insulted and abused him, he showed kindness to his enemies.

On the cross, he prayed for those who were crucifying him.

Jesus did everything right.

Philippians says, we read it a moment ago, that Jesus was obedient even to the point of death.

Hebrews says that Jesus learned obedience through his suffering.

Romans says that whereas it was Adam's disobedience that brought death into the world, it was precisely the obedience, the righteousness of Jesus that brings us life.

Why does John comfort sinners, comfort a bunch of failures by talking about a man who did everything right?

It's because John knows that what makes us right with God has nothing whatsoever to do with our own uneven attempts at obedience.

It has everything to do with Jesus' perfect obedience on our behalf.

Because that's the wonderful truth at the heart of the gospel, the world of the word of comfort that the gospel speaks to a bunch of failures is to remind us that Jesus did everything right and that by faith his righteousness belongs to us.

We have an advocate who stands before the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one, the one who did everything right.

And when you sin, Jesus defends you not by appealing to your record, but by appealing to his.

What's more, he's not just the righteous one, he is also the propitiation for our sins.

And to understand what John means by that, it's a very heady term.

You got to go back earlier in the Bible, quite a bit earlier.

In fact, in Leviticus chapter 16, Moses gives instructions for a ritual to be performed every year once a year in the life of the people of Israel.

Leviticus 16 · chapter mention

Once a year, the high priest of Israel would go into a room.

It was the holiest room at the center of the tabernacle.

And because of their sin, the people of Israel were not allowed to go into this holiest of room, not even the priests, but once a year the high priest would go into that room, and he would take the blood of a sacrificed goat and he would sprinkle it on the mercy seat atop the Ark of the Covenant in that holiest of rooms.

And by that act, by that act, he would make atonement for the people of Israel, and their sins would be forgiven.

The word that John uses here, the word propitiation in Greek, it is the exact same word that is used to refer to that mercy seat and to refer to that atoning sacrifice.

So when John says Jesus is the propitiation for our sins, what he is saying is Jesus is the one who has fulfilled with all of the day of atonement foreshadowed.

Jesus is the high priest.

Jesus is the one who has come into the holiest of places.

Jesus is the one who has made the perfect sacrifice, not the life of some goat, but his very own life.

And Jesus, even now, in the presence of the Holy Father, he applies the blood of that perfect sacrifice to make atonement on our behalf.

As the book of Hebrews says, when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the throne of God, for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being saved.

You know, I don't know what happened to that man who was baptized all those years ago in the Paclet River.

I don't know what his life looked like after he came up out of the water.

I do know he wasn't the same man as he was before, because he'd been washed.

He'd been made clean, he'd received the Holy Spirit, he was a new creation.

But that doesn't mean that his life thereafter would be free of struggle.

The Christian life is never free of struggle.

Temptation never fully goes away.

So I know that man had his moments of failure.

And I hope when those moments came, I hope he didn't give in to despair.

I hope someone taught him this verse.

I hope he knew that when he sinned, he was not alone because he too has an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

He is the propitiation for our sins.

And not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.