As I have been engaged in studying Romans 8:26-27 over the better part of a month I have often found myself confused by the commentators trying to explain the ‘groanings’ of v. 26.
- Romans 8:26 ¶ Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
However complex and beyond me the exact answer to the riddles may be, one truth stands out gloriously. As we pray, the Spirit helps in ways that we cannot comprehend.
In prayer our words, through the intercession of the Spirit, are, as it were, brought to the very ears of the Father. And he doesn’t always hear things the way we speak them. He hears them the way they should have been spoken, for in prayer not only do we speak to the Father by the Spirit, but the Spirit speaks to the Father through us and in our behalf.
A young man, a professing Christian, once came to me and confessed with great grief that he had not prayed in months. He simply didn’t know how to. His sins drove him away from prayer because he was ashamed. His inability to discern who God is, and what his will was for him at that particular time, drove him away. I saw a broken, confused young man who had forsaken the one thing he needed more than anything – communion with God through prayer.
Oh, what peace we often forfeit,
Oh, what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer!
The fact of the matter is that none of us really know how to pray. We have some sense of it, but we are always afraid that we are cut off from God on the one hand, or just getting it wrong on the other. That’s where the Spirit’s help comes in. I wish I could have shared this quote with that young man, but I had never read it. One of my pastors shared it years ago and I’ve always treasured it. In the book Praying: Finding our Way through Duty to Delight, by Carolyn Nystrom and J.I. Packer, Ms. Nystrom basically gives the best summary application of Romans 8:26 I have seen:
Some people get so entangled in the various dos and don’ts of prayer, so transfixed by the problem of sorting out what is our part and what is God’s part, so bogged down fretting over whether they, as mere flawed humans, should ask anything of a holy, almighty God, or conversely whether there is any point in asking since God will do what he wants anyway that they become paralyzed about praying…Don’t fret; just pray. God fixes our prayers on the way up! If he does not answer the prayer we made, he will answer the prayer we should have made. That is all anyone needs to know (pp. 174-175).
Don’t get into that position where you are paralyzed, like that young man, and you can’t pray. If you don’t have confidence in your own prayers, have confidence in the intercession of the Spirit. Have confidence that he will ‘fix your prayers on the way up.’ What greater comfort could he give us?
We have an advocate in heaven, Jesus Christ, our great Mediator; and we have an advocate on earth, yet more than on earth, dwelling within us, the Holy Spirit. We are covered from the bottom up. They are not speech writers always giving us the exact words to say. But they are editors presenting prayer to the Father as cleansed with the Savior’s blood and purified with the Spirit. Through the active obedience of Christ, we are counted as though we never uttered an imperfect prayer.
True prayers are like those carrier pigeons which find their way so well – they cannot fail to go to Heaven, for it is from heaven that they come – they are only going home! (Spurgeon, Hindrances to Prayer).
Great thoughts on the verse. I think we are use to thinking about this verse when we cry out to God in anguish and pain without words (I’ve had my share of those lately). But the verse is true even when we “think” we know what we should pray. Very good thoughts. Thanks.
You’re welcome Timothy, thank you.
Where does it say in Scripture that God “fixes” our prayers on the way up?
Notice that this post is a brief exposition of Romans 8:26.