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March 19 - April 1, 2025
Case closed. We cannot present a reason for Christ to finally close off his heart to his own sheep. No such reason exists. Every human friend has a limit. If we offend enough, if a relationship gets damaged enough, if we betray enough times, we are cast out. The walls go up. With Christ, our sins and weaknesses are the very resumé items that qualify us to approach him. Nothing but coming to him is required—first at conversion and a thousand times thereafter until we are with him upon death.
But Jesus does not say that those with pain-free lives are never cast out. He says those who come to him are never cast out. It is not what life brings to us but to whom we belong that determines Christ’s heart of love for us.
Psalm 63:8 expresses the double-sided truth: “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.”
Have you considered what is true of you if you are in Christ? In order for you to fall short of loving embrace into the heart of Christ both now and into eternity, Christ himself would have to be pulled down out of heaven and put back in the grave. His death and resurrection make it just for Christ never to cast out his own, no matter how often they fall.
his heart is the green pastures and still waters of endless reassurances of his presence and comfort,
In other words, we don’t feel the weight of our sin because of: our sin. If we saw with deeper clarity just how insidious and pervasive and revolting sin is—and, as Lloyd-Jones suggests above, we can see this only as we see the beauty and holiness of God—we would know that human evil calls for an intensity of judgment of divine proportion.
Romans 5:20: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” The guilt and shame of those in Christ is ever outstripped by his abounding grace.
But the grace of God comes to us no more and no less than Jesus Christ comes to us. In the biblical gospel we are not given a thing; we are given a person.
More acutely, if we can speak of grace as always being drawn out in our sin but as coming to us only in Christ himself, then we are confronted with a vital aspect of who Christ is—a biblical
when we sin, the very heart of Christ is drawn out to us.
but Christ, being perfectly holy, knows and feels the horror and weight of sin more deeply than any of us sinful ones could—just
so also the purer a heart, the more it is naturally drawn out to help and relieve and protect and comfort, whereas a corrupt heart sits still, indifferent. So with Christ.
Christ takes part with you, and is so far from being provoked against you, as all his anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it;
he hates not the member, for it is his flesh, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected the more.
He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin. He hates sin. But he loves you.
This is not to ignore the disciplinary side of Christ’s care for his people. The Bible clearly teaches that our sins draw forth the discipline of Christ (e.g., Heb. 12:1–11). He would not truly love us if that were not true.
it is intended to bring healing.
God looks at his people in all their moral filth. They have proven their waywardness time and again—not occasionally, but they “are bent on turning away from me” (v. 7). This is settled recalcitrance. But here’s the thing: they’re his.
The Bible says that when God looks at his people’s sinfulness, his transcendent holiness—his God-ness, his very divinity, that about God which makes him not us—is what makes him unable to come down on his people in wrath.
we are brought out from under our natural ways of creating God in our own image, and we allow God himself to tell us who he is.
One of the more neglected doctrines in the church today is the heavenly intercession of Christ. When we talk about Christ’s intercession, we are talking about what Jesus is doing now.
Justification is tied to what Christ did in the past. Intercession is what he is doing in the present.
His heart is as drawn to his people now as ever it was in his incarnate state. And the present manifestation of his heart for his people is his constant interceding on their behalf
What then does it mean for Christ to intercede? Who are the parties involved? God the Father, on the one hand, and we believers, on the other. But why would Jesus need to intercede for us?
intercession applies what the atonement accomplished. Christ’s present heavenly intercession on our behalf is a reflection of the fullness and victory and completeness of his earthly work, not a reflection of anything lacking in his earthly work. The atonement accomplished our salvation; intercession is the moment-by-moment application of that atoning work.
Romans 8:33–34: “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.” Intercession is the constant hitting “refresh” of our justification in the court of heaven.
Christ’s intercession reflects how profoundly personal our rescue is. If we knew about Christ’s death and resurrection but not his intercession, we would be tempted to view our salvation in overly formulaic terms. It would feel more mechanical than is true to who Christ actually is.
Christ does not intercede because the Father’s heart is tepid toward us but because the Son’s heart is so full toward us.
Even if we believed fully in the doctrine of justification and knew all our sins were totally forgiven, we would not come to Christ gladly if he were an austere Savior. But his posture right now as he is in heaven, his disposition, his deepest desire, is to pour his heart out on our behalf before the Father. The intercession of Christ is his heart connecting our heart to the Father’s heart.
We all tend to have some small pocket of our life where we have difficulty believing the forgiveness of God reaches.
But there’s that one deep, dark part of our lives, even our present lives, that seems so intractable, so ugly, so beyond recovery. “To the uttermost” in Hebrews 7:25 means: God’s forgiving, redeeming, restoring touch reaches down into the darkest crevices of our souls, those places where we are most ashamed, most defeated.
those crevices of sin are themselves the places where Christ loves us the most. His heart willingly goes there. His heart is most strongly drawn there. He knows us to the uttermost, and he saves us to the uttermost, because his heart is drawn out to us to the uttermost. We cannot sin our way out of his tender care.
by his intercession he prepares a way and access for us to the Father’s throne.”
Christ continues to intercede on our behalf in heaven because we continue to fail here on earth. He does not forgive us through his work on the cross and then hope we make it the rest of the way.
Jesus is praying for you right now.
even when we are negligent in our prayer life.”
the doctrine of his intercession reassures us with what he is doing in the present.
a present-day mediator,
the idea of aligning oneself with another.
An intercessor stands between two parties; an advocate doesn’t simply stand in between the two parties but steps over and joins the one party as he approaches the other. Jesus is not only an intercessor but an advocate.
My little children,
we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
Jesus shares with us in our actual experience. He feels what we feel. He draws near. And he speaks up longingly on our behalf.
Even our best repenting of our sin is itself plagued with more sin needing more forgiveness. To come to the Father without an advocate is hopeless.
one who came and sought me out rather than waiting for me to come to him, one who is righteous in all the ways I am not—this is calm and confidence before the Father.
Intercession is something Christ is always doing, while advocacy is something he does as occasion calls for it. Apparently he intercedes for us given our general sinfulness, but he advocates for us in the case of specific sins.
Christ, as Priest, goes before, and Christ, as an Advocate, comes after.
Sometimes we sin big sins. And that’s what Christ’s advocacy is for. It’s God way of encouraging us not to throw in the towel. Yes, we fail Christ as his disciples. But his advocacy on our behalf rises higher than our sins. His advocacy speaks louder than our failures.
he stands and speaks in our defense when we sin, not after we get over it. In that sense his advocacy is itself our conquering of it.
We are called to mature into deeper levels of personal holiness as we walk with the Lord, truer consecration, new vistas of obedience. But when we don’t—when we choose to sin—though we forsake our true identity, our Savior does not forsake us.
