The Sympathetic Advocate
God cannot condone sin nor company with it, whether that sin is in the sinner or in the saint. Sin always, everywhere, separates from God. When the believer sins, his fellowship with God is broken, but he cannot restore himself any more than the sinner could save himself. As the sinner needed a Savior to open a way to God through redemption, the saint needed an Advocate to keep that way open through restoration.

Such an Advocate must be one who sympathetically understands the awful power of sin, and himself has felt its tremendous pressure upon spirit, soul, and body, and yet one who has been uncompromising in his refusal to yield to it in thought, word or deed.

Such an Advocate must be one who can have access moment by moment to God and has a remedy to offer God for the things he attempts to make right.

Such a righteous and effectual Advocate the believer has in Christ Jesus. Such an efficacious remedy for cleansing and restoration Christ has in His shed blood.

1 John 2:1

“My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.”

1 John 1:6-7

^6 “If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth. ⁷ But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.”

As the sinner is cleansed once and for all from the guilt of sin through the precious blood of Christ, so the saint, in the same way, is cleansed daily from the defilement of sin.

The Faithful Intercessor
God was not satisfied with delivering the sinner from the old sphere of death, darkness, and disorder, but He wished him to claim and use to the full his possessions and privileges in the new sphere of life, light, and liberty. He is not content merely to have a man saved, but He purposes to have him saved to the uttermost. God is able not only to lift the sinner from the lowest depths of life on the plane of the natural but also to exalt the saint to the highest heights of life on the plane of the spiritual. For this, He has made ample provision in the faithful intercession of the exalted Lord.

Romans 8:34

^“Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ who died, yea rather, who is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.

Hebrews 7:25

“Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”

The intercession of the exalted Son is the capstone of His finished work. What He made potential through His crucifixion on the Cross, He makes actual through His intercession on the throne. “The intercession of the exalted Christ for the saint is the projection into experience of the saving act of the crucified Savior for the sinner. It is by His work from heaven that we appreciate His work upon earth.”

In His last prayer with the disciples on earth, recorded for us in John 17, He unveils the nature and the content of His High Priestly intercession for all believers. He prays for their safety and their sanctification; He anticipates the oneness of life which He as Head will have with them, as members of His Body; and prays for His perpetual presence in them that it may mean the perfection of His life in theirs. “Christ ever liveth to make intercession for us,” praying that God’s eternal purpose, which He wrought out in the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and exaltation of His Son, may be perfectly realized in the life of the believer in his complete deliverance from bondage and in his full acceptance of Christ.

In the ascension and exaltation of Jesus Christ, God completes the fourth span in the bridge of salvation.

Source: “Life on the Highest Plane” by Ruth Paxson

Lord, tonight we just bow our heads and say Thank You!