“The moment we get tired in our journey, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. The Spirit does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our what in our hearts, on our minds, and he keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.” (Romans 8:26-28)
Food For Thought: If you are like me, and so many people I have talked to, prayer can be a real struggle. Sometimes we feel so personally inadequate to come before a holy God in prayer. Sometimes we’ve witnessed prayer warriors interceding with such ease and we feel so intimated because know we could never pray like that. Sometimes we try to pray but we quickly run out of words, or our mind starts to wander and before you know it we’re going down our mental to do list or writing out our grocery list or planning our vacation instead of praying. Sometimes when it comes to prayer, as Ringo Star once sang, “it don’t come easy.”
Guess what! That’s okay! When I don’t know how to pray or what to pray or feel so incredibly inadequate to pray, the Holy Spirit dwelling within me does the praying for me. He takes my inarticulate, jumbled thoughts and raises them to the Father above, making perfect sense of the things that are running through my mind and burdening my heart. My prayers don’t have to be smooth, they don’t have to have perfect grammatical structure, they don’t even have to make sense. They just need to come from a heart that is crying out for the Father’s best in my life, and the indwelling Spirit does the rest.
That reminds me of the story of a father, who one night heard his young daughter speaking, although she was alone in her room. The door was cracked just enough so that he could see that she was kneeling beside her bed in prayer.
Interested to hear what she was asking God for, he paused outside her door and listened. And he was puzzled to hear her reciting the alphabet: “A, B, C, D, E, F, G …”
She just kept repeating it. He didn’t want to interrupt her, but soon curiosity got the best of him and he broke into her prayer. “Honey, what are you doing?”
“I’m praying, Daddy.”
He asked, “Why are you praying the alphabet?”
She said, “I started my prayers, but I wasn’t sure what to pray. I decided to just say all the letters of the alphabet and let God put them together however he thinks best.”
That’s what Paul is describing. We offer what is in our hearts to God—whether eloquent or inarticulate—and he turns them into what glorifies him and is for our good.
That’s not a bad way to pray…and sometimes, that’s the best way to pray, according to Paul. So the next time you’re stumped in prayer, just honestly, simply, and from the heart tell God what’s going on, and let the Holy Spirit form your thoughts and your words and present them before the Father. When the Holy Spirit gets through with them, your prayer will be mountain moving prayer.
Prayer: Holy Spirit, take my inarticulate thoughts, my unclear mind, my insecurity about being good enough in prayer, perfect them and lift them to the Father above. Turn my feeble efforts to pray into mountain moving prayers. As I offer what’s in my heart to you, I will thank you in advance for turning them into that which glorifies God and is for my good.
One more thing… “Pray, and let God worry.” –Martin Luther, in a letter to his wife Kate
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