With Groanings!

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Thomas

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Rom 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. ESV

I guess, like you, I have read this verse countless times. Up until a few minutes ago I always thought those prayers by the Holy Spirit were expressing my prayers to God because I couldn’t didn’t know how to express them. Well, that thinking got challenged by something Oswald Chambers wrote that makes that scripture much more powerful for me.

Let’s take a step back for a moment and consider another verse we all know well…

1 Cor 6:19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, ESV

We are His temple and He lives in us, and in His house He is making intercession for us “according to the will of God.” Yes, God searches our hearts to know what is the prayer of the Holy Spirit; the prayers that we are not capable of uttering. We are, in fact, God’s Temple in which His Spirit offers His intercession about things of which know noting. Remember that Jesus said, My house shall be called the house of prayer and that is not limited to the Temple or the church building. It’s each and every member of the bride of Christ, and with that comes our requirement to keep His Temple undefiled.

Chambers put it well: “We have to remember that our conscious life, though it is only a tiny bit of our personality, is to be regarded by us as a shrine of the Holy Ghost. He will look after the unconscious part that we know nothing of; but we must see that we guard the conscious part for which we are responsible.”

And that brings us to the second part of what Jesus said: but you have made it a den of thieves. We must ever be mindful of our responsibility to keep our temple cleansed and never disrupt the prayers of The Spirit to The Father. We are the shrine of His intercession.

6 responses to “With Groanings!”

  1. Because he is a Christian, one is not exempt from suffering and groaning. Indeed, the Christian s suffering and groaning is intensified because he is a Christian and because the Spirit of God dwells within. The presence of the Holy Spirit in each believer is the source not just of groaning but the source also of great comfort. This ministry of the Spirit Paul explains in verses 26 and 27.

  2. Christian living must be based upon reality. The reality is that we are fallen creatures living in a fallen world. As such, creation is subject, by divine decree, to corruption and futility. Those who would serve God by walking in the Spirit must come to grips with this matter of our corruption and the futility of life. This is precisely why the power of the Holy Spirit is necessary to live as God requires. But the Spirit does not magically remove all of our suffering and groaning; He undertakes in such a way as to communicate our groanings to God. Walking in the Spirit does not eliminate the fallenness of this world or even of our own flesh. This will be eliminated when Jesus comes again and the sons of God are revealed. Our prayers are often inconsistent with the purposes of God. When our suffering is the greatest, we cannot even articulate the problem or a solution. In these times we must depend upon the Holy Spirit to intercede for us, to communicate to God on our behalf the things of our spirit which are consistent with God s will.

  3. If I consider vss.. 15 and 16, I find that my ability to cry Abba Father is actually the Spirit s witness that, indeed, I am a child of God. It is my cry but also the Spirit s cry. It is the human and the divine converging as one. I think the same applies to the groanings. The divine wraps itself in the human. As I groan under deferred hope, the Spirit more so because He knows God s fullest thoughts and purposes His ultimate intentions for His created world, for me.