Our Defender
Bible Reading: 1 John 2:1-2
e continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
At times we may feel like we're the worst sinner in the whole world. We just seem to keep doing the same things over and over again. We feel guilty! Can God just wink at our sin and pretend that it's all right? How can he repeatedly forgive us for committing the same wrongs?
The apostle John said, "My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous. He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins but the sins of all the world" (1 John 2:1-2).
God takes sin very seriously. As a righteous Judge, he can't just ignore sin and act like it doesn't matter. But we can be forgiven completely and repeatedly. The words used here are legal terms. Jesus is our advocate, a defense attorney in a court of law, who intercedes for us, the lawbreakers. But he is not only the defense attorney; he's also "the sacrifice that atones for our sins." This means that his death has been accepted by the court as admissible payment for all of our sins. We're all guilty. The sentence is death! But our sentence has already been paid by Jesus, if we've trusted in him. When we bring our sin to Jesus, he goes back to the Judge on our behalf, reminding him that the sentence has already been served.
There is nothing in our lives that Jesus can't handle.
To purchase this devotional please visit New Life Ministries
Taken from The Life Recovery Devotional: Thirty Meditations from Scripture for Each Step in Recovery by Stephen Arterburn and David Stoop. Copyright © 1991 by Stephen Arterburn and David Stoop. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.
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