The Holy Spirit in Prayer

For eleven years Mojisola led the Thursday morning women’s prayer meeting at her church in Surulere. She was the one people called when a child was sick or a contract was in trouble. Her prayers were strong and full of Scripture. She could pray for an hour without notes, moving from thanksgiving to intercession to declaration, and the women around her would find their own faith rising as she prayed.

Then one Tuesday evening a lorry with failed brakes crossed the central reservation on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and struck her husband’s car. By midnight he was in theatre at the teaching hospital in Idi-Araba, and Mojisola was sitting alone on a plastic chair in a corridor that smelt of disinfectant, with her handbag on her lap and her phone buzzing every few minutes.

The phone was full of prayers. The women from Thursday mornings were sending voice notes, long and fervent, quoting Psalm 91 and binding the spirit of death. Mojisola listened to a few and put the phone face down. She opened her mouth to pray, and nothing came.

She tried again. She prayed in tongues for a while, quietly, and then even that seemed to run out. She sat with her Bible open on her knees and found that she could not read it. The words would not stay still. In the end all she could do was rock slightly and say, under her breath, “Father. Father. Father.” Then she stopped saying even that, and simply wept.

Around four in the morning her pastor’s wife arrived, still in her headscarf from bed. She sat down beside Mojisola and held her hand. After a long time, Mojisola said the thing that had been tormenting her for hours. “I am the prayer leader,” she whispered. “And I cannot pray.”

Punchline

The older woman took the Bible from Mojisola’s lap, turned to Romans 8, and put her finger on verse 26. “Read it,” she said.

When words run out

Every believer who lives long enough will meet a moment when words fail. It may come in a hospital corridor, at a graveside, in the long months of a marriage in trouble, or on an ordinary night when anxiety presses so hard that the mind cannot hold a sentence together. The psalmist knew it: “Thou holdest mine eyes waking: I am so troubled that I cannot speak” (Psalm 77:4).

Scripture does not treat such moments as spiritual failure. One of the most moving prayers in the Old Testament had no audible words at all. Hannah, childless and provoked year after year, went up to the house of the Lord at Shiloh:

And it came to pass, as she continued praying before the LORD , that Eli marked her mouth. Now Hannah, she spake in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard: therefore Eli thought she had been drunken.

Eli the priest looked at her moving lips and assumed she was drunk. He had seen many prayers, and he did not recognise this one. But God did. Hannah was pouring out her soul, and the Lord heard her.

The Lord Jesus Himself prayed in agony. In Gethsemane, Luke tells us, “being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Hebrews describes those days as a time of “prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears” (Hebrews 5:7). At the tomb of Lazarus, before He said a word, Jesus “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled” (John 11:33). The Son of God knew what it was to pray with groans and tears.

So when Mojisola could only weep, far from being outside the company of praying people, she was in very good company. But she needed to know more than that. She needed to know that she was not alone in that corridor, and that Someone was praying with her and for her. That is exactly what Romans 8 tells us.

The sufferings of this present time

The verse her pastor’s wife pointed to does not stand alone. It belongs to a long passage in which Paul is facing suffering honestly and setting it in the light of hope. If we lift Romans 8:26 out of that setting, we can make it into a technique. Read in context, it is a comfort:

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

Paul begins with a comparison: “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” He does not say the sufferings are small. He says the glory is greater. Both are real. The phrase this present time tells us that Paul sees suffering as belonging to a particular age, the age between Christ’s resurrection and the resurrection of His people. It is real, and it will end.

Then he widens the lens to include the whole created order. Creation itself is waiting, “the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.” The phrase earnest expectation pictures someone craning the neck, straining forward to see what is coming. Creation “was made subject to vanity,” to futility and frustration, not by its own choice. Paul is thinking of the curse that followed human sin in Genesis 3. Thorns and decay, sickness and death, lorries with failed brakes, are all part of a world that is not yet what God intends.

But creation was subjected “in hope.” It will be “delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” The future of the world is bound up with the future of God’s children. When the sons of God are revealed in resurrection glory, creation itself will be set free.

This is the setting of the Spirit’s help in prayer. Paul is describing a believer caught up in a groaning world, waiting for redemption, and finding that ordinary language cannot hold the weight.

Creation groans, and so do we

Paul continues: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). The image is childbirth. The groans of creation are labour pains, the kind that hurt terribly and also announce that something new is coming.

Then he includes believers: “And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23). This is an important verse for anyone who thinks the Spirit-filled life means a life without groaning. Paul says that precisely those who have the Spirit groan. The Spirit is the firstfruits, the first portion of the harvest that guarantees the rest is coming. Having tasted the first portion, we long for the whole. The gap between what we have tasted and what we still await is felt as groaning.

We already belong to God’s family. Paul has just said so in the verses before. Yet we wait for “the adoption” in its full public sense, “the redemption of our body.” A husband lying in theatre with broken bones is a believer whose body has not yet been redeemed. His wife weeping in the corridor is a believer living in the gap.

Then comes hope: “For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Romans 8:24-25). Christian hope is confident expectation of what we cannot yet see. It is carried with patience, which means steady endurance under weight.

Paul says something similar to the Corinthians: “For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened” (2 Corinthians 5:4). A tent is a temporary dwelling, and the body in this age is a tent. It aches, it tires, it breaks. Believers who carry chronic illness, disability or grief know this groaning well. Paul does not tell them to pretend otherwise. He tells them where the groaning is heading: towards a body that mortality can no longer touch.

Notice that nothing in these verses condemns the groaning believer. Groaning is what faith sounds like while it is still waiting.

Nugget

Groaning is not unbelief. It is what faith sounds like while it is still waiting, and the Spirit Himself joins His groans to ours.

The Spirit helps our infirmities

And then, in the middle of all this groaning, Paul brings the Holy Spirit in:

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

“Likewise.” Creation groans. We groan. And likewise the Spirit also. The Spirit enters the groaning with us.

“The Spirit also helpeth our infirmities.” The word translated helpeth is a rich one. It is made of three parts that together suggest taking hold of something together with someone, on their behalf. It appears in only one other place in the New Testament, when Martha, overwhelmed in the kitchen, says to Jesus, “bid her therefore that she help me” (Luke 10:40). Martha wanted Mary to pick up the other end of the load. That is the picture Paul uses for the Spirit. He takes hold of the other end of what we cannot carry.

Our infirmities are our weaknesses, and Paul names a particular one: “we know not what we should pray for as we ought.” This is honest. Even mature believers often do not know exactly what to ask. Should Mojisola pray for her husband’s full recovery by morning, for skill for the surgeons, for strength to bear whatever came? She wanted all of it and could not order her thoughts. Paul does not scold that kind of uncertainty. He says the Spirit helps exactly there.

How? “The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Bible teachers have understood this phrase in a few ways. Many take it to describe the Spirit’s own intercession, unheard by us, before the Father. Others understand it as the Spirit prompting and carrying the believer’s own groans, so that sighs too deep for words become real prayer. Some Pentecostal teachers have connected it with praying in tongues. Most careful readers, including many Pentecostals, note that cannot be uttered points most naturally to something wordless, and that Paul is speaking of a help available to every believer in weakness. What all these readings share is the heart of the matter. When you cannot pray as you ought, the Spirit of God is praying for you.

The Father who searches hearts

Then Paul tells us what happens to those wordless groans: “And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27).

The Father searches the heart. He does not need our sentences to be tidy before He can understand them. Lamentations has a lovely line: “Thou hast heard my voice: hide not thine ear at my breathing, at my cry” (Lamentations 3:56). God hears breathing. He hears the inarticulate cry. And the Father “knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit,” because the Father and the Spirit are perfectly one. The Spirit’s intercession is always “according to the will of God.” When you do not know what to ask for, the Spirit does, and He never prays against the Father’s purpose.

There is something else here for the believer whose only prayer is one word. In this same chapter Paul writes that we have received “the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15). To the Galatians he says that God “hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:6). When Mojisola could say nothing but “Father, Father,” far from falling below the level of real prayer, she was saying the very word the Spirit of the Son delights to cry in the hearts of God’s children. The shortest prayer she prayed that night was the most deeply Spirit-given one.

This is why the next verse follows as it does. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). That promise does not call every event good, and a lorry crossing the central reservation is not good. It assures us that God is working His good purpose through and beyond every event for those who love Him, and that purpose is to conform them to the image of His Son.

And there is more. A few verses later Paul says that Christ, risen and at the right hand of God, “also maketh intercession for us” (Romans 8:34). Hebrews says He “ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). The Spirit intercedes within us. The Son intercedes for us at the Father’s right hand. When Mojisola sat in that corridor unable to form a sentence, she was being prayed for by the Holy Spirit and by the Lord Jesus Christ, before a Father who searched her heart and loved her. She had never been more surrounded by prayer in her life.

Praying always in the Spirit

Paul speaks of prayer in the Spirit in another letter, at the end of his description of the armour of God. He has told the Ephesians to stand, wearing truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, and taking “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17). Then:

Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints.

The armour is not complete without prayer. Notice the word all, which appears again and again. “Praying always with all prayer... with all perseverance and supplication for all saints.” Every kind of prayer, at every time, with steady endurance, for the whole people of God.

What does in the Spirit mean here? At the very least it means prayer that the Spirit prompts, guides and enables. It is the opposite of prayer offered in our own strength or in mechanical repetition. Jesus warned against “vain repetitions” from people who “think that they shall be heard for their much speaking” (Matthew 6:7). Prayer in the Spirit is measured by dependence on Him, never by length or volume. Many Pentecostal and charismatic believers, including me, understand it to include praying in tongues, while not limiting it to that. It certainly includes prayer in your own language, prayer in silence and prayer with groans.

Paul adds, “watching thereunto.” Prayer in the Spirit is alert. It keeps its eyes open to what is happening in one’s own heart, in the church and in the world, and it keeps returning to God about it. The soldier in full armour stays awake at his post. That alertness is the calm attentiveness of someone who knows the battle is real and the Lord is near.

Notice too that Paul immediately asks for prayer for himself, “that utterance may be given unto me” (Ephesians 6:19). The great apostle needed others to pray. He wrote to the Romans, “that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God for me” (Romans 15:30). There is no shame in being the one who needs to be carried. Moses needed Aaron and Hur to hold up his hands when they grew heavy (Exodus 17:12). In that corridor, Mojisola’s women were holding up her hands, even though she could not listen to their voice notes.

Building yourselves up, praying in the Holy Ghost

Jude’s short letter was written to believers facing false teachers who were “sensual, having not the Spirit” (Jude 19). Against that background he gives his readers a pattern for keeping steady:

But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.

Look at the four movements. Building up yourselves on your most holy faith. The faith here is the content of the gospel, the apostolic truth once delivered to the saints. We build on it by learning it, remembering it and living it. Praying in the Holy Ghost. Prayer is part of how believers are strengthened in the truth. Keep yourselves in the love of God. God’s love is His to give. Our part is to remain where it can be enjoyed, the way a person stays in the sunshine. Looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. Hope again, looking forward to the day of resurrection.

Praying in the Holy Ghost, in Jude’s sense, belongs alongside the Scripture, alongside love and alongside hope. It is part of the ordinary equipment of a steady believer.

Here many believers will ask about speaking in tongues in prayer. Paul writes about this directly:

For if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful. What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.

“My spirit prayeth.” Paul describes a kind of prayer in which the believer’s spirit speaks to God beyond the reach of the understanding. Earlier in the same chapter he says that the one who “speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God... in the spirit he speaketh mysteries” (1 Corinthians 14:2), and that such a person “edifieth himself” (1 Corinthians 14:4). Paul valued this gift highly. “I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all” (1 Corinthians 14:18). And he joined it with prayer in his own language: “I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also.”

Believers hold different views here, and those views deserve respect. Some believe the gift of tongues ceased with the apostolic age. Others believe it continues but is given only to some. My own conviction, held gladly, is that praying in tongues is a gift the Spirit still gives today, and that a great many believers experience it as a precious help in prayer, especially in seasons when their own words run out. If you pray in tongues, keep doing so, and pray with your understanding also. If you have not, you may ask the Father for this gift, since He gives good gifts to His children.

And hear this clearly. A believer who has not spoken in tongues is not a second-class Christian, and his prayers are not second-class prayers. Paul asked, “do all speak with tongues?” (1 Corinthians 12:30), expecting the answer no. Romans 8:26 is promised to every believer, without any requirement of one outward experience. The Spirit helps all the weak, and that is all of us.

Help for the weary pray-er

What can you do when you cannot pray?

First, stop measuring your prayer by its fluency. God is not impressed by long sentences, and He is not disappointed by short ones. “Father” is a complete prayer when it is the only word you have. So is a groan. So is silence before Him with your Bible open.

Second, borrow words from Scripture. The Psalms were given for exactly this. Read one aloud, slowly, and let it say what you cannot. “Pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us” (Psalm 62:8). The Lord’s Prayer is another gift for weary days. Its simple petitions hold the whole of what we need.

Punchline

Third, let others carry you. Tell a trusted believer, “I cannot pray right now. Will you pray for me?” That is the body of Christ working as it should.

Fourth, if you pray in tongues, use the gift without pressure. Many believers find that praying quietly in the Spirit steadies them when their own language fails. But do not turn it into a measure of how spiritual you are being that day.

Fifth, rest in the truth of Romans 8. The Spirit is helping. The Son is interceding. The Father is searching your heart with love. Your prayer life does not hold you up. God does.

And one guard-rail. Seasons of wordlessness can be part of grief, trauma or depression. If the heaviness does not lift, if you cannot sleep or eat, or if you have thoughts of harming yourself, please speak to your pastor and to a doctor. Receiving medical and professional help is fully compatible with trusting the Spirit who helps our infirmities.

Mojisola read Romans 8:26 three times in that corridor. Then her pastor’s wife said quietly, “You think you are not praying. But the Spirit is praying in you, with groans you cannot say. And the Father knows exactly what He means.”

Mojisola told me she did not feel better immediately. But something in her chest loosened. She stopped trying to produce a prayer. She held the Bible open on her knees, and for the next two hours, until the surgeon came out, she simply sat in the Father’s presence and let herself be prayed for.

Her husband survived two operations. His recovery took more than a year, and he still walks with a stick. They have had hard conversations about money, pain and patience. She does not tell their story as a neat miracle. She tells it as a long walk through a groaning world with a God who did not let go.

She still leads the Thursday morning prayer meeting. But she prays differently now, and she teaches differently. She tells the women that a groan can be a prayer. She tells them that tongues are a gift to be treasured, and that the Spirit helps every one of them, whatever gifts they have. One of the older women in the group, a widow who had never spoken in tongues, came to her afterwards in tears. “All these years,” she said, “I thought my prayers counted for less.”

Mojisola took her hand. “Mama,” she said, “the Spirit was praying in you the whole time.”

That is the help God offers you in your weakness. When you do not know what to pray for as you ought, the Spirit takes hold of the other end of the load. The Father searches your heart. The Son intercedes at His right hand. You are not praying alone.

For reflection, practice and prayer

Teaching Companion

For Reflection

• Can you remember a time when words failed you in prayer? What did you believe about God in that moment?
• How does reading Romans 8:26-27 within its setting of suffering and hope change the way you understand the Spirit’s help?
• What does it mean to you that the Spirit “helpeth our infirmities” in the sense of taking hold of the other end of the load?
• How do the four movements of Jude 20-21 work together in your own life?
• Who could you ask to pray for you when you are weary, and whom could you carry in prayer this week?

This Week

Each day this week, spend ten minutes in prayer with Romans 8:18-28 open before you. Begin by reading the passage aloud. Then bring one burden to God in as few words as you need, even a single word. Sit quietly for a few minutes, trusting that the Spirit is interceding for you according to God’s will. If you pray in tongues, do so for part of the time, and then pray with your understanding. End each day by praying for one other believer who is carrying a heavy load.

A Prayer

Father, thank You that You search my heart and understand even the prayers I cannot put into words. Holy Spirit, thank You that You help my weakness and intercede for me with groanings which cannot be uttered. Lord Jesus, thank You that You ever live to make intercession for me. When I do not know what to pray for as I ought, teach me to rest in Your help. Build me up on my most holy faith, keep me in Your love, and fill me with hope for the day when all things are made new. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.