NOTE:
This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.
ENGAGE
How many of you here this morning are 100% satisfied with your prayer life?
[Wait for answers]
Me neither.
TENSION
For most of us, when it comes to praying, I think there are two common problems that most of us deal with.
The first problem is a lack of a consistent prayer life when it comes to the things we know how to pray for.
There are some things in life that we know how to pray for because God has revealed those things to us in His Word.
• We know to pray for God to help us read the Bible on a consistent basis because we see how important that is throughout the Bible.
• We know to pray and confess our sins because the Bible instructs us to do that
• We know to pray and ask God for our daily needs because Jesus instructed His disciples to do that.
• We know to pray and ask God to help us resist temptation because Jesus told His disciples to pray for that.
• As husbands, we know to pray and ask God to help us love our wives as Christ loves the church.
• As fathers, we know to pray and ask God to help us bring our children up in the training and instruction of the Lord and to do that without exasperating them.
Even though I think we all have good intentions when it comes to praying for these things, our prayer life isn’t always as consistent as it should be. And ultimately, that is because for whatever reason, we just don’t give our prayer life the priority it deserves. And so we let the busyness of life distract us from praying about these matters.
I think all of us go through seasons like that. We just need to make sure that we don’t get stuck there.
But this morning, I want to address another way that we all struggle in our prayer life, and that is the issue of how to pray when we don’t know what to pray. There are some areas, particularly when it comes to the trials and difficulties that impact our lives, where it’s hard to pray because we don’t really know what to pray.
• When someone gets a terminal illness, do I pray for healing, or do I pray for God to be with that person in their journey to be with Him?
• When I’m having financial problems, do I pray for God to provide more resources, or do I pray for Him to help our family live within the means He has already provided?
• When I’m in a difficult situation at work, do I pray for God to provide a new job for me or do I pray for God to help me be a witness for Him in my present job?
There are a at least a couple of reasons that we just don’t know what to pray in these situations:
• First, I don’t know the future. I don’t know how these circumstances are going to affect me and others.
• Second, and probably more relevant, is the fact that I don’t really know what is best in these situations. I might know what I would prefer, but I’m just not in a position to know if that is God’s best.
TRUTH
Fortunately for us, this morning, we’re going to get some really practical guidance from Paul about how to pray when we don’t know what to pray.
We left off last week with verse 25 in Romans chapter 8. We’re right in the middle of a section of Paul’s letter where he is addressing the idea of what it means to suffer with Jesus.
Although we’re only going to cover 2 verses this morning, there is much for us to learn here. Will you go ahead and read the passage out loud with me this morning.
[Read Romans 8:26-27]
As I began to study this passage this week, I began by just writing down a long list of questions that it brought to my mind. And as I began to think about those questions and read some commentaries and other sermons, I found that there are a lot of differing ideas out there about how to answer a lot of those questions. So if all those people who are way smarter than I am can’t agree on the answers, I’m certainly in no position to claim that I have it all figured out.
Perhaps that is because there is a certain degree of mystery present here merely because we are dealing with the relationship between God the Father and God the Holy Spirit – a relationship that far exceeds our ability to understand fully with our finite human minds.
But what I can say with confidence is that, while there might be some differences of opinion when it comes to the details, the overall message here is pretty clear:
When you don’t know what to pray…
keep praying
Since we’re going to be talking a lot this morning about the relationship between the Holy Spirit and God the Father, let’s take a moment to be reminded of the concept of the trinity. Although the word itself is never used in the Bible, the idea is found consistently throughout the Scriptures, including the passage we’re studying today, so we know that it is true, even though it is an idea that we can’t fully explain or understand.
God is one God who consists of three distinct persons – God the Father, God the Son - Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit, each of whom has a unique personality and role and yet who are co-equal with the same power and glory. And, as we see in today’s passage, they exist and operate in perfect harmony with each other.
That means that the Holy Spirit is a person, not just some impersonal force. And we’ll see this morning, what a tremendous difference that makes in our prayer life, especially during those times when we don’t know what to pray.
When it comes to the kind of prayer that we’re going to be talking about today, the role of each person of the Godhead can be summarized like this:
God the Father
Hears the prayers of God the Spirit
On the basis of the finished work of God the Son
It would be easy to read this passage and come to the conclusion that since the Holy Spirit is already praying to God on my behalf, there is really no need for me to pray. After all, the Holy Spirit, as we’ll see this morning, knows perfectly and precisely exactly what I need, even when I don’t. So why even risk messing up His intercession on my behalf by praying the wrong thing? Wouldn’t it be better just to not pray at all? Let’s see if we can’t answer that question as we use this passage to help us consider…
APPLICATION
WHY I NEED TO KEEP PRAYING
1. I need help
Paul tells us that we need to pray because of our weakness. It’s important to note that he uses the word “weakness” in its singular form here. Although Paul uses that word in the midst of a section that is addressing our suffering here on earth due to the corruption of God’s creation as a result of man’s sin, and he uses the same word in his other letters to describe physical infirmities, I think he has something else in mind here.
Notice the connecting word “for” right after the word “weakness”. That word indicates that Paul is about to give us a further explanation about why we need help. And the reason that we need help is that we don’t know what to pray for.
That is almost always the situation when we’re going through suffering isn’t it? I’ve already shared a few examples of times when it’s really hard to know how to pray and most of you could probably give me many more examples from your own lives of times when you just didn’t know how to pray.
Unfortunately, when that happens, our natural tendency is often to just quit praying. But actually that is when we need to keep praying the most.
There are certainly some things in this passage that are difficult for our finite human minds to understand. But what is evident here is that there is an incredible synergy at work when I am engaged in prayer and my human spirit is communicating with the Holy Spirit, who is in turn communicating with God the Father.
Obviously the Holy Spirit is not dependent on anything that I do in order to intercede on my behalf with God the Father. But when I choose to end my participation in the process by refusing to keep praying, the process does not operate as God intends.
So the fact that I need help ought to encourage me to keep praying even when I don’t know what to pray.
2. The Holy Spirit shares my burden as I pray
In verse 26, Paul writes that the Holy Spirit “helps” us in our “weakness”. The verb translated “helps” is used only one other time in the New Testament in Luke 10 when Martha asks Jesus to tell Mary to help her. In Greek, this is a big long compound word made up of three root words that I wouldn’t even begin to try and pronounce. It conveys the idea of helping another carry a burden. In today’s language, we might translate it “lend a helping hand”.
The implication here is that the Holy Spirit doesn’t just take the burden off of us completely and carry it Himself. Instead He offers to bear the burden with us and lighten our load. So that means that the Holy Spirit doesn’t just do everything while we just sit back passively and do nothing.
This is not like the road crews that I would often see when they were widening Tangerine Road where one guy was doing all the work while the rest of the crew sat around watching him work.
So while the Holy Spirit is doing His part, I need to do my part and continue to pray, even when I don’t know what to pray.
3. As I pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes for me
Twice in these two verses Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit “intercedes” for us. What is difficult to see in our English translations is that Paul uses a different Greek word in verse 26 than he uses in verse 27. In verse 27, he uses a common word that means “to petition someone in authority on behalf of someone else.” It is the same word used later in the chapter and also in Hebrews 7 to describe how Jesus is at the right hand of the Father interceding on our behalf:
Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.
(Romans 8:34 ESV)
Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.
(Hebrews 7:25 ESV)
But in verse 26, Paul does as he is often prone to do and he coins his own compound word by adding the prefix “hyper” to the normal word for intercede to greatly intensify it. Not surprisingly, this is the only place in the Bible we find that particular word. We can get a better sense of the meaning by breaking that word into its components:
hyper = “on behalf of” “for the protection of”
+
en = “to rest in or on”
+
tugchano = “to fall in with people”, “to meet”
Intercession is the idea of the Holy Spirit meeting us where we are to provide protection and rest. He gives us help with our burden and then surrounds us with His protection so that the burden won’t fall back on us
4. As I pray, the Holy Spirit directs my heart
As I mentioned last week, Paul refers to groaning three times here in Romans 8. We saw the first two instances last week – the groaning of the creation that has been subjected to futility as a result of man’s sin and the inward groaning of disciples of Jesus because of their sin and the impact of sin on creation. Before we look at the third reference to groaning, we need to make a couple of observations that will help us understand it properly.
Neither the groaning of creation or the inward groaning from the children of God is an audible groan. Obviously when it comes to creation groaning, Paul uses that term in a metaphorical sense. And the groaning that comes from Christians is “inward” – it is not an audible sound.
There are those that suggest that the groanings in verse 26 are a description of speaking in tongues or some kind of other verbal utterance that they also refer to as “praying in the Spirit”. That particular phrase is used three other times in the New Testament:
• In 1 Corinthians 14:15, where Paul is writing about praying with his human spirit.
• In Ephesians 6 in the same sentence where Paul has just described the Word of God as the sword of the Spirit
• In Jude 20 where Jude is calling on believers to persevere in their faith as they wait for the return of Jesus.
We don’t have time to look at those passages this morning, but if we were to study them, we would discover that praying in the Spirit simply means praying according to the will of God. We’ll talk more about that in just a moment.
Paul can’t possibly be referring to speaking in tongues or anything like that here since he states that these groanings are “too deep for words”. In Greek, that is just a single word that literally means “unable to be uttered” This is certainly consistent with how Paul has previously used the idea of groaning earlier in this chapter.
While I can confidently tell you what these groanings are not, it’s a bit harder to be that dogmatic about what they are, or even who is doing the groaning.
There is certainly some ambiguity in the language here. While the text does say that the Holy Spirit intercedes “with groanings”, there is not verb there that would make it clear that it is the Holy Spirit who is doing the groaning. It only says that he intercedes by using groanings, but it doesn’t clearly indicate who is doing the groaning.
There are three possible options here:
• It is the Holy Spirit who is doing the groaning. There are quite a few commentators that object to that idea because if this is the Holy Spirit communicating with God the Father, there would be no need for any kind of groaning since they are already in perfect fellowship and communication with each other.
• It is the groaning of individuals who don’t know what to pray. While this seems possible, it’s not clear why the Holy Spirit would need to use our human groanings in order to intercede on our behalf.
• The third possibility, and the one I favor, is that these are our human groanings which are also the groanings of the Holy Spirit in the sense that He inspires and directs them in us. I’ll readily admit that is a process that I can’t explain fully, but one which does seem to fit with the groanings of God’s children that Paul described in verse 23 and which also fits with the idea of the Holy Spirit actively interceding on our behalf.
If this is fact the case, then that means that the Holy Spirit not only prays for us – He also prays with us. God doesn’t just give us a book with instructions on how to pray. He gives us a person to pray right alongside us as we pray.
And as He does that, the Holy Spirit not only intercedes to ask God for what we really need, even when we don’t know what that is, but He also has access to our hearts to guide them and to bring them into harmony with God’s will for our lives since, as God, His intercession is always 100% with God’s will.
This idea also seems to be confirmed by the reference to “he who searches hearts” in verse 27. At first glance Paul’s statement there seems a bit superfluous. Of course God the Father, the one who searches hearts, knows the mind of the Spirit, since they are one. But that statement makes a lot more sense in light of this mysterious three way communication between us, God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
In order for this synergistic process to work as God intends, I need to keep praying, even when I don’t have the words, even when I don’t know what God’s will is and even when I have no idea what to pray. I just need to keep praying and trust that God the Father and God the Holy Spirit are using the process to change my heart as the Holy Spirit intercedes on my behalf for what I really need even when I don’t know what that is.
Hopefully you can now understand why we began by saying…
When you don’t know what to pray…
keep praying
As we’ve seen repeatedly this morning, there is a lot of mystery in this process, but I imagine that it operates something like this:
Let’s suppose that you’re in a difficult job situation. Your boss is difficult to work with and really doesn’t appreciate your hard work. And you do what most of us would do in that situation – you begin to pray for God to provide a new job, or at least a new boss.
But as you’re praying the Holy Spirit intercedes and prays something like this to God the Father:
“Father, he thinks he wants a new job, but I know that you want to teach him the value of perseverance and to help him learn to depend on you more completely. So Father, don’t give him the new job right now. Instead will you give him the strength to bear up under the pressure. Will you help him to deepen his relationship with You? And would you also send him another disciple of Jesus who can encourage him.”
And because the Holy Spirit always prays in a way that is consistent with God’s will, that prayer gets answered. And in the process, not immediately, but over time, as the Holy Spirit communicates with my human spirit, my heart is changed, and I recognize that my character is more important than my comfort and I develop perseverance and a deeper relationship with God. And who knows, once God does that, perhaps He will provide another job somewhere down the road.
ACTION
As we think about how to put what we’ve learned this morning into practice, the obvious application for all of us is to just keep praying even when we don’t know what to pray. And one of the things that will help us do that is to pray and thank God for two important truths that we have learned today that should encourage us to keep on praying.
THANK GOD THAT…
1. the Holy Spirit is praying for me, not against me.
2. God’s work in my life is not limited to what I can understand or express in words.
So would you take a moment right now to pray and thank God for those two things.
[Prayer]
INSPIRATION
This week I ran across this prayer from an unknown Confederate soldier that reminds us of what we’ve learned today:
PRAYER OF AN UNKNOWN CONFEDERATE SOLDIER
I asked God for strength, that I might achieve.
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health, that I might do greater things.
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.
I asked for riches, that I might be happy.
I was given poverty, that I might be wise.
I asked for power that I might have the praise of men.
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God.
I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life.
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for but got everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am, among all people, most richly blessed.
Discussion Questions for Bible Roundtable
1. If God has determined His sovereign will, does prayer really change things? If so, how? If not, why pray?
2. How would you explain the idea of “praying in the Spirit”? What is it and what is it not?
3. We’ve seen today that both the Holy Spirit and Jesus intercede for us. How does their intercession differ? How is it the same? What difference does their intercession make in our lives?
4. We’ve seen today that there is a lot of mystery in the process of the Holy Spirit interceding for us. Why do you think that is? How should we handle it?
5. Think of a time in your life when you didn’t know what to pray. How do you think the Holy Spirit interceded for you? What was the result?
