An advocate to help us and to be with us forever.  Help.  Forever.  You know this word advocate: someone who speaks up for you; someone who is on your side.  Our bridge over troubled water.  With us forever.  Has been, is, and always will be.  Jesus Christ makes this promise to those who have faith in him: faith that saves, faith that brings life, that restores life.

Christ wants us to keep his commandments.  He didn’t say commandment: there are more than just one.  What he commands is what his Father commands.  Jesus does not command what his Father in heaven has not commanded.  Jesus told us the very heart of the law; indeed, Jesus is the very heart of the law: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:37-40).  The Ten Commandments are a brief outline of what Jesus’ command will look like in action.  Jesus tells us he did not come to abolish the law (Mt 5:17), that it would be a serious misunderstanding if we thought that the law no longer mattered, no longer had any specific content, any specific prohibitions.  In Christ, we do not live under the law, that is true, and thank God.  The law without Christ is condemnation.  In Christ, the law is in us, and thank God for that, for the law of Christ, the commandment of Christ, is life.

I’ve mentioned on several occasions a very wise saying I collected from a missionary in Mozambique: love looks like something.  Jesus is telling his followers that love looks like something.  He would know, wouldn’t he?  Jesus knows love looks like something!  He reminds us when he tells us that those who love him will keep his commandments, will live after the pattern for life that God gives in the law, His instruction.

Jesus isn’t talking about the sacrifices and the categories of ritually clean and ritually unclean: that was all about maintaining relationship with God and having approval to be in the presence of God under the law.  In Jesus Christ, we are in relationship with God; in Jesus Christ, we have approval to be in the presence of God.  If we strive to live totally dependent upon the grace of God in Jesus Christ, if we strive to live confident in the ability God gives us through the Holy Spirit, if we strive to live walking the narrow way of Christ’s commandments, we show that love looks like something, that our love for Jesus Christ looks like something.

Without love for Jesus, there is no positive, that is persuasive, motivation for following these commandments.  We don’t follow and then love: we love and, loving, we follow.  We don’t obey for the sake of obedience.  I don’t observe the speed limit for the sake of observance or the sake of the speed limit.  The spirit of obedience sprouts from the soil of the Spirit of Love, the Holy Spirit, who creates what did not exist, who has the power to turn no into yes, impossible into possible, no way into way, and death into life.  This is the power with us.  This is the advocate Jesus promised that he would give us, a gift, a blessing, someone who speaks up for us, who is on our side to help us, forever.

The Spirit is not an accuser, the Spirit does not condemn.  The Spirit causes growth, change, from glory into glory, the glory of salvation in Christ becomes the glory of eternal life with Christ.  As sure as we have this helper with us forever, so surely we have this life.  The intervening time, our lives on this earth, is time for showing that love looks like something.

It doesn’t look like fear.  Yes, love is prudent, wise—God may have shown us and given us a reckless love, but it is no foolish love, naïve love, façade of love.

Is it clear to you, by now, after these several weeks, and these several years, and these several decades, that the world is fond of telling its own stories, addicted to its own stories?  Is it clear, now, that the world has its own interests and aims?  Oh, these interests and aims are presented in ways that are meant to be persuasive to get us aligned with them, but each earthly story misses the truth of God in pursuit of its own visions of righteousness.  Beloved, Jesus tells us that we, as we truly hold to his teachings, shall know the truth, and the truth shall set us free (Jn 8:32).  Those who are not free do not know the truth, and those who do not know the truth are not free, no matter the stories they tell.

There is power in truth: the power of true freedom.  In these times of restriction and prohibition, surely we are coming to appreciate freedom.  True freedom is so much more.  Even those confined to bed, confined to broken bodies, if they are in Christ, even they know and have true freedom.

The world is obsessed with fictions of freedom, false freedom.  This is the freedom that comes through restriction, prohibition, freedom that concentrates power in the name of the common good: power used, as we are told, to protect, to prevent.  Disciples don’t offer such supposed freedom: we offer freedom in the name of Jesus Christ.  In Christ, we enjoy the reality of freedom.  There are no chains that can bind us; no prison that can hold us . . . .  The responsibility of our freedom in Christ is staggering, and we have the Spirit to help us, forever.  Oh, we stumble over our sin.  We stagger and lurch, sometimes, as if we were three sheets to the wind.  No, although we are in Christ, we don’t live yet just as we long to do, and we’ve made many choices, freely willed choices, that now cause us shame and regret, but this isn’t the end of the story.  The Spirit does not condemn.

The truth is we have an advocate who is always living with us, in us.  The Holy Spirit lives in us.  It’s not as if the Spirit just checks in on us, every so often, or once in a great while!  The Spirit is always with us, guiding, counseling, warning, encouraging, cheering us on, opening our hearts to God’s love, our minds to God’s Word, and our lives to the truth that sets free.

Not everyone has this Spirit.  Not everyone has this love.  Apart from this Spirit we do not have this love, and apart from this love, we cannot have this Spirit.

This Spirit, forever with us to help us, is the same Spirit who assures us that God is our God and Father in heaven.  We are not left as orphans in this world that devours widows and orphans.  What is it to have a father, a true father?  There are fathers, too many, who have been absent, neglectful, or worse.  And there is that in us that longs for a Father in heaven: the Father who, like or very unlike our own father, loves us, protects us, provides for us, who disciplines us at the right time in the right way for the right reason—disciplines to teach us that love looks like something, and to shape us into the sort of person who lives in that spirit; our Father in heaven intends to cultivate maturity in us, adulthood, not to keep us in perpetual infancy; our Father in heaven serves us, is supportive, He is slow to anger, patient—oh, how patient, how blessedly, incomprehensibly patient He is!—this Father is dependable, compassionate, and involved in our lives, present, there.  This is the Father who stays connected with us.  The Spirit Christ gives us to help us, to be with us forever, is the Spirit that nurtures relationship with the Father, so that we begin to feel the glory of his presence in every dimension of our lives.

And how we need that help and that presence, that Father, that Savior, that Spirit, in this hour.  Some of us have returned, today; others will, later.  The right time is not the same for all of us.  All of us return wounded by what we have been through, what we are still going through, all that has happened in us and around us.  We don’t feel safe.  We don’t like to think this way, but everyone, now and for the foreseeable future is a potential threat, a potentially lethal threat.  Everyone.  We may be thankful for the blessings of reconnecting with a pared-down lifestyle, more family time, but the working from home thing?  With the kids?  And homeschooling?—I pay taxes so I don’t have to.  And we know people who don’t even get to work from home, because they don’t have a job, anymore.

All the uncertainties.  They were always there, but we used to remind ourselves that they weren’t something to obsess over, no matter the story the news was telling us.  Now, we seem to be thinking whatever the news wants us to think, feeling whatever the news wants us to feel—no wonder the commercials are always selling Tums and Prilosec.  Just the facts, ma’am—oh, but that was police work, not journalism.  Unpredictability, uncertainty, fear, worry—we built lives, a society was built around us, a mainline, mainstream faith, to deflect all that, to hold it off, to insulate us, and then China, or some joint government-scientific-diplomatic-technological venture, or microbiology, or Trump or Pelosi goes and ruins everything!  Do you know how long it’s going to take us to rebuild those walls to hold all that stuff out again?  How much effort, resources?  All the trillions we’re inventing and throwing around, plus the next round of how much more?

And is there no better way, beloved, to apply the time, the effort, and the resources?  Are we being called, in Christ, to do our part to rebuild those walls, or are we being called to direct the attention of others to the newly opened vista, now that the walls are down?  We have a comfort, beloved, in death and in life.

In the midst of uncertainty, disciples of Jesus Christ have certainty.  In the midst of insecurity, we have security.  In the midst of fear, we have faith.  In the midst of political and social turmoil, we have the Holy Spirit, our advocate, to be with us and to help us forever.  And if we have the assured help of the Spirit of God, beloved, with us, alive in us, what can’t we face with hope, confidence, peace, compassion, integrity, and love?  As we have faith, we have freedom, and as we have freedom, we have life.  There is nothing, beloved, nothing that can take away from us what God has given and guaranteed to us in the lifeblood of Jesus Christ.

To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!