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There is a courtroom you enter every day, whether you meant to or not, and your own conscience has already taken the stand against you. You know the charge. You have known it for years, even if you have never said it out loud. The question this morning is not whether you will stand trial — you already are. The question is who will stand beside you.

We are not sinners in the soft, apologetic sense our culture has taught us to be comfortable with — we are criminals against a holy God, and criminals need more than sympathy in the courtroom. They need an advocate whose own record cannot be turned against him. Hebrews 7:26 gives us five words for the High Priest we need, and this first message dwells on two of them: holy and harmless. Christ's holiness was never achieved the way ours is achieved, through failure, repentance, and slow recovery. It was simply who He was, from the cradle to the cross, and it is that unearned, unbroken record He now clothes us in. We are not standing before the Father on the strength of this morning's devotion or last night's failure. We are standing in Him.

The second word cuts just as deep in the other direction. Holy describes His relationship to the Father; harmless describes His relationship to us. Here is a Priest who holds absolute power over every secret you have ever kept, and who has never once closed His fist. He did not call down twelve legions of angels. He did not expose what He knows. He met the adulterous woman and the weeping sinner in Simon's house with the same word: go in peace. If someone with authority over you has ever used it as a weapon instead of a shelter, do not judge Christ by those hands. He is not in the room to hurt you. He is in the room to rescue you — and He has already spent His power doing it.

In This Episode

• Why the difference between calling yourself a sinner and admitting you are a criminal against God matters more than it sounds
• How Christ's holiness differs from ours — not grown through repentance and recovery, but complete from the beginning
• Why the Father can look at you and call you His holy child, and how that is not wishful thinking but the actual mechanics of the Gospel
• What it means that Christ is harmless — not weak, but powerful and refusing to use that power against you
• Why the pain and hardship in your life is not evidence that God has turned against you
• How Christ dealt with the woman caught in adultery and the sinful woman in Simon's house, and what that says about how He deals with you

Wherever you have been keeping score this morning, stop — and look instead to the Priest who has already settled the account.