My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:1-2).

We all know that two wrongs don’t make a right, but do two rights make a wrong? Maybe. 

If we think that doing more good will compensate for the wrong in our lives, then we are trusting a mistaken math to make us right with God.

 The Bible says our best works are only filthy rags to a holy God, and Jesus said when we have done all the good that we should, we are still unworthy of heaven. There is too much of our sinful self in our best works for them to make us right with God.

Does that math make our situation hopeless? Not at all. We simply must turn from our math to our Advocate. True repentance is not simply about shifting from doing bad things to doing good things. True repentance is humbly acknowledging that we could never make things right with God by our math, so we trust his grace alone for our pardon.

We turn entirely from our solutions and turn entirely toward God’s provision. That means we ask for God’s forgiveness and trust Jesus to be our Advocate. We accept that his sacrifice on the cross paid the penalty for our sin (that’s what a propitiation does) and we rely on his work alone to compensate for all our wrongs.

He rights our wrongs – not us. That’s the math of grace that makes living for the Savior add up right.  

Prayer:
Lord, thank you for making Jesus the Advocate that I need to do the spiritual math I could not complete. Give me confidence that his righteousness will cancel my worst wrongs, since it’s sufficient for the whole world.