advocate

You don’t see those WWJD bracelets as often anymore, but when I was a young dad everyone had one. They were a useful reminder that if we carry Jesus’ name, we should behave the way he would want us to.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what Jesus would do, though. It’s a complicated world, and in our relationships, our voting, our finances and our personal behavior it seems so often that there aren’t good answers.

That’s true, but I’m feeling this morning like that’s not really an excuse. There is a way to know with some certainty what Jesus would do. He made sure of it.

John 16:7 and 12-15 tell us this: “But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. . . . But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.”

We have an advocate, someone who counsels us, but this advocate is someone special, the Advocate with a capital A. This one tells us exactly what Jesus would tell us; in fact, Jesus explained in great detail that the Spirit would be sent directly by him just for that purpose. We can consider what we hear from the Spirit to be exactly what Jesus would say; we can know by listening carefully what Jesus would do.

It’s one of the mysteries of the Trinity, these separate persons of the single God we serve. I think the truth is even more complex, so much so that I’d never grasp it. This is God’s way of dumbing down reality to a point we can understand it. So the fact that Jesus is ascended but God is with us we see to be true because the Holy Spirit never leaves us.

And the Spirit never steers us wrong. Never ever, not once in the history of all humankind has it given the wrong counsel. All we have to do to get it right is to ask, listen and do.