Title: The Great Intercessor
v26 (read)
Here we begin to see one of the pinnacle roles of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Spirit is our intercessor before God in prayer. Can any of you relate to verse 26? We know we should pray, but we do not know what to pray. We know we have feelings on a certain matter, but we do not know that our feelings are in line with what God has planned.
Let me give you a few examples of times when we know we are to be in prayer, but we are not sure what exactly we are to be praying for:
1. Someone we love is critically ill.
If we pray, “Lord heal them completely!” Are we sure that is what God’s will is? What if God is calling them home at this time, regardless of our feelings as to whether the time is right?
As you might imagine, I run into this a lot with my work at Hospice.
At least once a month I’ll be meeting with a patient and I’ll ask them, “What, specifically, can I pray for you?” And they say, “That I get better.”
It took me a long time to develop this response, but it’s a very effective way to dig deeper into someone’s spiritual life. When someone asks me now to pray that they are healed I respond, “Okay, I’ll be more than happy to pray for that, but what if God is not interested in you getting better, what if God is calling you to the next life, are you okay with that?”
Point: We don’t always understand God’s timing. With the Spirit we can pray two very important things: First, that God’s will be done, and second, that we know it is God’s will and have a peace about it.
2. When praying for ourselves.
It is much easier for most of us to pray for others, for the healing of others, for the blessings of others, than it is to know how to pray for ourselves. We don’t want to seem greedy, or only interested in God if he is willing to bless our lives, so far too often, we, as evangelical believers neglect a key aspect of our personal prayer lives, and that is praying that God would develop us.
We sometimes are shy to even tell God what we want, what our hearts desire is. This is funny because it’s not like God doesn’t know what we desire, but we almost have this attitude that if we say what we want we are being selfish before God.
Point: We don’t always know if our desires are strictly our own, or if they have been placed in our heart because God wants to cultivate that desire into something He will use for His good pleasure. With the intercession of the Holy Spirit we can pray two things; First, that God would remove any desire that is in us that is not God’s will, and second, that He would clarify what we are to pursue.
3. When praying for someone just because, “They are on our heart.”
I’m sure you’ve experience this: you are going about your normal day and, for no reason, someone you know, perhaps well, perhaps only as an acquaintance, is suddenly in your mind and you can’t shake them. You finally determine, for reasons unknown to you, that you need to be lifting that person up in prayer. You don’t know why, you don’t know for how long, you don’t even know if you should try to contact them personally or just pray for them.
When I go before the Lord in these situations I find myself literally speechless. I don’t even know what to begin to say except, “Lord, I can’t stop thinking about this person or situation, I have no idea what I am supposed to be praying for. I just want you to hear and recognize that I believe this person is on my heart for a reason. Hear my prayer.”
Point: God will sometimes call us to engage prayerfully in situations where we know next to nothing about the person or what we are to be praying for. The point here, as it is in all three of our examples, is the same: We are to be in prayer.
In none of these examples is the answer given: Since you don’t know how to pray, just don’t pray. In fact the lesson that Paul is quite the opposite. He’s saying that the great thing about the intercession of the Holy Spirit is that even when we don’t know what or how we ought to be praying, God is hearing and honoring that prayer. Why?
Because of what Paul tells us in verse 27. (Read)
When God searches our hearts the Spirit within us makes perfectly clear and perfectly articulate to God what we are trying to say. In the opposite sense, the Spirit which convicts, chides, and rebukes us is in perfect accordance with the Father, leaving us without excuse. We can never claim, “I did not know what to pray.”
Because the point is abundantly clear, “Just pray. Converse with your God. Have faith that He can hear you, even when you can’t hear yourself.”
There is this entity, the Spirit, that exists between the believer and God. This spirit knows the will of God, he speaks God’s language. And when we can’t understand God, or fear that God won’t understand us, it is this Spirit that acts as the great intercessor to make things clear.
Now, that doesn’t mean the answer is always easy. It doesn’t mean the answer is always clear. I tell my Sunday School class all the time that the easiest decisions in our lives are when we choose between right and wrong, good and bad. But those decisions are few and far between.
Far more often we are struggling between good and possibly better, the status quo and a possibility of much better, but with uncertainty.
In all of these circumstances, what Paul is telling us is that we can, and should continue to pray, because within us is one who does know the will of God.