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Help! I’m Too Weak to Pray!
Romans 8:26-27
Never let them see you sweat. Never let them know your weakness. Always be strong; always be in control. In our culture, if you appear to struggle, you are written off, even through there is not a single person in the world who has it all together, who has risen above struggle. We all have a problem.
Our Problem: We are weak. We Groan.
That is what Romans 8, verses 18 through 25 told us, and we affirmed this in our hearts. Everything is harder than it should be. Even when life seems to be coasting along pretty well, something comes along and halts it all for a moment, if not for good.
We are all going through something right now—I know of some of you who are trying to figure out what to do in your careers. Finding work is not as easy as it once was.
I know of others of you are trying to get through the riggers of everyday life, but are hobbled by nagging physical pain and weakness.
I know others are trying to make ends meet, working more only seems to create more stress, but how can you keep up with your financial demands in any other way?
I know others of you are under the stress of family matters. You’re worried about your children, or you’re anxious about a constant strain of a rough relationship.
Our situations are as numerous as there are people in this room…and each is just as frustrating as the next in many ways. We are weak. We groan for the day when all this will not be the case—a promised day in which we will enter the promised land of hope, eternity in the Kingdom of God, where there will be no more tears, no more struggles, no more frustrations, no more weaknesses.
Our Hope: God gives us hope in the midst of our groaning.
All of creation is groaning, and, over the last few weeks, we discovered that God is eager to point out what this means. He said in Romans 8:18-25 that our groaning and all of creation’s groaning should point us toward the future—the hope of our redemption. Sure, we are weak. Yes, we groan. But it is all to point us toward the promised day of hope, when Jesus Christ will return and all will be made right again.
But what about the here and now? Is there a hope for our present struggles? What happens when I am so debilitated in my frustration that I cannot even know that I am praying to God is a way that is in accordance with his will? What happens when I am so weak that my prayers are inept? Sometimes I feel so weak that I almost picture myself crouched down in a corner, drooling out of my mouth—unable to say a thing.
That is what today’s passage is about. God wants us to know that believers are and will always be weak, but that the Holy Spirit meets us right there in that weakness. The Holy Spirit empathizes with our groaning, and he takes our inept prayers and intercedes for us and prays our groans to the Father in perfect accordance with God’s will!
For we have a problem:
1. Our Problem: We are weak (v. 26a)
“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” (Romans 8:26)
In the same way as the hope of eternity with God can get us through the hard times, the Holy Spirit helps us as well!
And what is “our weakness?” According to the verse, our need for “help” is because “We do not know what we ought to pray for.” As you grow in spiritual maturity, you become closer to God, and you are better able to pray what God wants you to pray. But the simple fact of the matter is that on this side of eternity, none of us will be perfect—there is not one saint among us who is perfectly conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. We are always “in process.” So, we will always need help, for we will always struggle to know what to pray for.
Isn’t that liberating? We beat ourselves up all the time in feeling inadequate in our prayer lives. We feel inept in our decision-making. We feel ill-equipped to live life. And this passage of the Bible says, “EXACTLY! You need help! And God gives you the help you need!”
By the way, this is not talking about how we pray, but what we pray. Some of us are afraid to pray because we feel we don’t know how to do it. That’s not God’s primary concern for you. God wants you to pray—and that simply means he wants to be in a constant conversation with you. Nobody needs to teach you how to talk with your spouse or friends or kids or parents. You just do it. God wants us to get past the religiosity of it all and just do it! And as you grow closer to God, your prayers will better and better reflect his will. You will begin to no longer be conformed to this world, but your mind will develop into one that is conformed closer to God’s mind.
But the point of this passage is that even the greatest, most mature Christians are still WEAK! There will come a day when we will know God’s will perfectly, but now we see but a poor reflection of his will like through a foggy mirror (1 Cor. 13:12). That goes for you and me and Billy Graham and the Pope
or anyone we can think of...
This is why we often say in our prayers, “if it is your will, Lord.” For we rarely have perfect understanding of what God wants in any given situation. This does not mean, of course, that we should not strive to understand God’s will for the circumstances we face, or that it is wrong to make requests of God—it just means that we cannot ever presume that our prayers are in his will!
This weakness, this inability to know for sure God’s will, cannot be overcome until our future redemption. It is a part of our current fallen condition. So what does Paul tells us to do about it? Does he tell us to seek a special revelation from God? Does he tell us to set out a “fleece” to discern God’s will as to what job to take? Does he say, “Hey, quit being so weak and grow up and be a better Christian?”
No. Look at the verse again!
“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” (Romans 8:26)
The point is this: You can’t do anything about your weakness, but God can. The very Spirit of God intercedes for us! And that is our hope.
2. Our Hope: The Holy Spirit intercedes for us (v. 26b)
The Holy Spirit is with us as we struggle in life. He experiences those struggles with us, for our spirit is connected to God’s Spirit if we are indwelt by God through our faith in Christ. The Holy Spirit intercedes, saying “May I help? May I bear that burden for you? You’re in anguish about your children. You’re confused over your job. You do not know how to turn your marriage around. You have no idea how to make that important decision. You hurt. You are at the end of your rope. You’re lonely. You’re tempted. You’re sinful. You need to pray. May I take it from here?”
The Spirit “intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” We have seen this word, “groaning,” earlier in this chapter. We have seen that all creation “groans” (v. 22) because of the current situation it is in due to the Fall. All creation knows it is not what it was meant to be, and waits for it all to be made right again. We have also seen that we “groan” as well, awaiting our redemption, the hope of eternity given to God’s children (v. 23). Now we are told that the Holy Spirit groans. The Holy Spirit is perfect, he is not groaning because he is suffering due to the Fall. So, what we have here is something very wonderful. He empathizes with our struggle! He identifies with our groans, with the pain of the world, and he too is longing for the final freedom that is promised. We and he groan together!
This is not referring to the Gift of speaking in tongues, for the Holy Spirit intercedes with groans “that words cannot express.” The word is
alaletos, which literally means, “without words.” These are wordless groanings, like ours and all of creations—the deep, wordless longings for redemption that we all feel. The gift of tongues is, I believe, a valid gift for today. But that is covered in other passages.
Our assurance that we will always be connected with God is because we have the High Priest, Jesus Christ, interceding for us in heaven, and the indwelling Holy Spirit interceding for us in our hearts! Wow! That’s a lot of intercession!
3. Why it works: The Father knows the mind of the Spirit for the sake of the Children (v. 27)
A few weeks ago, we read this remarkable passage:
“For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.”
(Romans 8:15-16)
The Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity that makes us God’s children! We can cry to the God who created all things, the God who most of us tremble if we were to actually take seriously the notion that one day “I’m going to meet my maker,” not in fear of destruction but with the love of a child to his or her Father.
By him, that is by the Holy Spirit, we cry to him, “Dad!” (Abba, Father!)
And by him we cry, “Ughh! I am at the end of my rope!”
And look there in verse 27!
“And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.”
(Romans 8:27)
This is why it works! There is perfect accord between the Father, the one “who searches our hearts,” and the “the mind of the Spirit” who dwells in our hearts!
By the Holy Spirit we cry inwardly, “Abba Father! I have no clue what to pray!”
And the Holy Spirit meets us THERE, interceding for us, because that is God’s will!
4. Some Keys about prayer and life from this passage:
(1) Authentic prayer is not about having the right words to say.
Most of us get nervous when we are in a situation where we might have to pray out loud in front of people. We’ve heard people who seem to have all the right words to say, and it intimidates us. But God is less interested in your eloquence than your heart. You do not have to have the right words to pray meaningfully to God.
If you feel in your heart a yearning for God’s salvation, for his help, for his guidance, for his glory, for his all-satisfying presence, then your prayer may be nothing more than that inner-groan. God’s people are assured that this inner-yearning is met by the very Spirit of God, who feels those with you, and intercedes those yearnings to the Father in perfect accordance with God’s will.
(2) The Christian life, from beginning to end, is always about trusting God’s power and admitting our weakness.
Conversion comes by trusting God (that is, by having “faith”).
Maturity comes by trusting God as well. Maturity is not as the world defines it—as what you look like, or act like. Having it all together is not a sure mark of spiritual maturity, it more likely a mark of pretense—putting on a mask that makes you a pretender. And pretenders never mature.
Our spiritual life begins to blossom when we increase in faith where our understanding is lacking, especially through the hard times. We know we are growing spiritually when we are able to admit our inadequacy. The more one matures, the more one is willing and able to admit that he or she is weak.
We never graduate out of weakness! Even in our prayer lives, we must admit our weakness. The genuine Christian is not one who has all the answers and always knows what to do and always is able to pray. The genuine Christian is one who has the Holy Spirit helping him or her in the weakness of being human.
And God may have to take you to the end of your rope at times so that you will learn to trust in him rather than in yourself. He may have to take you beyond your capability to understand. He may have to take you to the point of asking, “Where is God in this?” And it is only at that point where we learn to trust God, to really trust God (and not just give lip-service to it).
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding…” (Proverbs 3:5)
It is at that point that God shows us that the genuine Christian life is not living by explanations and coping devices; it is living by faith! We want 3 easy steps for every life-situation we face, as if God is out there somewhere and our methods are down here within our reach.
"This I declare of the LORD:
He alone is my refuge, my place of safety;
he is my God, and I am trusting him." (Psalm 91:2)
(3) So, when you are at the end of your rope, and you are wondering which way is up, know that the God meets you right there.
God not only knows you, he understands you. We do not understand ourselves; we do not understand our circumstances in life. But the promise of this passage is that we do not need to understand it all in order to pray, because God does understand. Prayer is our brokenness; it is our yearning for God’s glory to be revealed to us—especially in the hard times. No clever answers, no human remedies, no pride, nothing but need. And that is where God meets us.
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