Where Prayer Becomes RealSample

Day Two

God Does Even More than We Expect

The difficulty with prayer is that many of our beliefs about what prayer is, the good things we learn in church, studies on prayer, and even through our own times in prayer, rarely provide us with comfort in our struggles. It seems easy to forget the truth when prayer becomes difficult. We affirm all that God has done to save us, and yet in prayer we forget what He has done, and assume He just wants us to be good and to get our acts together. We need more than good reminders here – we need directions for living in the truth. 

We have already seen that part of the good news about prayer is that God meets us in the truth by reminding us that we don’t know how to pray. We can take a deep breath and a sigh of relief. God knows. God understands. We can even affirm that He has given us a high priest in Jesus who brings us before the Father, so we do not stand alone in His presence, but we are covered and carried by the one through whose life, death and resurrection we receive God’s presence. But God goes even further. 

When I struggle in prayer, I find that even though I know these truths, even though I can affirm all sorts of good things about prayer, it often feels like I’m alone doing all the work. Prayer is something I do. Maybe for you, even that is a struggle. Maybe prayer is more like something you should do, but don’t often get around to. Even here I think we discover our problem. When prayer is something we think we need to get done, or an activity we generate, we discover quickly that it isn’t something we tend to do. But what if I told you that isn’t what prayer is? What if I told you that prayer is something you enter? Part of the good news of prayer is that before you utter a word you are being invited into something already happening for your sake. Even in our struggle to make time to pray, God meets us in our weakness. 

As mentioned in yesterday's devotional, Paul tells us that the Spirit has been sent into our souls. It is there, Paul proclaims, that “the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” The Spirit intercedes for you from the depths of your heart. The Spirit sees all the places you struggle to care. The Spirit knows your deepest pain, brokenness and despair. The Spirit doesn’t look at these from afar, but the Spirit has descended into these places, and knows them even more than you do. The Spirit is present to you in your deepest places. 

We are told something similar about the son. The Son “always lives to make intercession” for us in the presence of the Father. Before we utter a word in prayer, the Spirit is groaning for us from our deepest places, and the Son stands before the Father on our behalf and prays for us. Our own words are caught up in theirs. Our own praying is carried along by their prayers. When we pray, we are entering the intercession of the Son and the Spirit on our behalf, as our prayers rise up to the Father. 

How does the Son and Spirit’s intercession change how you pray? If God already has prayed those words you are afraid to, if the Father really knows all we need even before we ask (Matthew 6:8), then why do we struggle to bring things to Him? What might it look like to just “present ourselves” (Rom. 6:13) to God, trusting in His work, and even trusting that His prayers are enough?