Somebody Is Speaking For Me

It has been fourteen months and she has not said one word to God.

Not one. She wants to be precise about this, in her own head, because precision is what she has instead of peace. She has sat in church. She has said amen when other people prayed, out of politeness, and even that felt like something she was not entitled to do. She has stood with the choir and moved her mouth on the words. Twice she has gone as far as kneeling by the bed, out of habit, and got as far as Lord and then stopped, because the next word felt like a woman walking into a room she had been asked to leave.

Wanda is forty-seven. Everybody who knows her thinks she is doing better than she was, because outwardly she is: she goes to work, she has stopped the thing, she is steady.

What nobody knows is that the person who used to talk to God all day, in the car, at the sink, out loud in the kitchen, has gone completely silent, and that the silence is not sulking and it is not anger. It is a ruling. She looked at what she did on that night in the spring and she concluded, with the seriousness of a woman who does not do things by halves, that she had forfeited standing. Not salvation, necessarily. Standing. The right to open her mouth to Him.

So she took herself off the line. And every day since, the not-talking has hardened, the way anything does when you leave it.

If you have gone quiet, hear the question. You stopped speaking. Do you know that somebody has been speaking for you the whole time?

Because there is one verse that was written for exactly this and it comes with an office attached to it.

He writes the standard and then names the provision

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 2:1

Read both halves and refuse to let go of either, because Wanda would spot a message that only used one.

These things write I unto you, that ye sin not. John does not lower the bar. The whole letter is aimed at holiness and he says so in the same breath. Nothing here is casual about what happened in the spring, and if it were, Wanda would put this down and be right to.

And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father. And then, immediately, before anybody can spiral, he provides for the case. Not if any man sin, he must first re-establish himself. Not if any man sin, let him wait. He has an advocate. Present tense. Currently.

You have an advocate with the Father right now, and it is already His office and not something you apply for, and He was named in the verse before you ever failed. I am not making it easy on a woman who takes it seriously. It is written in 1 John 2:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a provision written for exactly her case and carries it out to a front step in the evening.

What an advocate does when the client says nothing

Now here is the thing about that word, and it is why this verse is the right one for a woman who has gone silent.

An advocate speaks for somebody. That is the entire function. And the situations where an advocate matters most are the ones where the person cannot speak for themselves: because they do not know the language, because they are too frightened, because they would say the wrong thing, or because they have decided they have no right to open their mouth.

Wanda thinks her silence has ended the conversation. It has not, because she was never the only voice in it. Fourteen months of her saying nothing is fourteen months of Jesus Christ the righteous continuing to speak for her, and the whole time she has been carefully not walking into the room, He has been in there on her behalf.

You are being represented right now, and the representation is already going on, and it did not pause when you did. Scripture says He ever lives to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25), and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a silent woman what has been happening in the room she stopped entering.

Standing is not a thing you hold

And here is the specific correction, because Wanda's ruling was made on a false premise and she is precise enough to want it named.

She decided she had forfeited standing. But standing is not something a person accumulates by conduct and loses by failure. If it were, then everyone's standing would be a moving number and nobody could pray on a bad day, and the people most in need of God would be the ones least entitled to speak to Him, which is a nonsense the whole gospel exists to end.

Her standing is a legal position she was placed in, and it was not placed by her, and the verse names who maintains it: Jesus Christ the righteous. His righteousness, in the sentence, is the qualification. It is mentioned there precisely because hers is not the thing under discussion.

You are standing in His righteousness, and it is already the qualification named in the verse, and it did not fluctuate in the spring. It is written that we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that legal fact do for a woman what fourteen months of silence never could.