The Intercession of the Spirit.
I. We have here the reality of prayer confirmed. Paul was a man of truth and soberness, free from superstition and fanatical weakness. He knew of what he was speaking, and he was sure that the Romans would know it too. It was for no inner circle of enthusiasts he was writing here, but for all that were in Rome, called to be saints. The Church in the metropolis, the busy, active society of Rome, is bidden. Mark the care God takes to help the infirmities and educate the spirit of His children. Those prayers of yours, He is saying, are oftentimes the truest and devoutest in which you can say nothing. Feeling and desire in these, as well as in thought and purpose, God can recognise the spirit of the worshipper.
II. The Divine origin of these unutterable longings is here confirmed. Consider the solemn blessedness of these words: "The Spirit helpeth our infirmities." In the solemn hour of prayer, on which our life and activity so much depends; when, as we ask we receive, and if we ask not we receive not; in the solemn hour of prayer, that leaves us refreshed and strengthened, or wearied and yet more perplexed; in the solemn hour of prayer, when we are desiring from God what shall be the bane or blessing of many days, we cannot dispense with the Spirit's intercession.
III. God fully understands the meaning of these longings that are not fully understood by the subject of them. In the unutterable cry for God, He reads a desire for communion with Him fuller than has yet been satisfied. In the struggle of the soul that knows not "what to pray for as we ought," in the shaking sobs of him who is torn by distracting feelings between personal wishes and the feeling that there may be something higher and nobler far than these, He recognises the spirit striving to conquer the weakness of the flesh, the passion for submission, however hard it may be. to submit.
A. Mackennal, Christ's Healing Touch,p. 203.
I. What is prayer? (1) Look upon it as grounded upon the office and work of our adorable Saviour. It is not merely feeling, earnestness, fluency of utterance, confession of sin and want. It is the eye fixed upon the blood and the High Priest. We come boldly to the throne of grace, because we have a great High Priest before the mercy seat. (2) But there is another view of prayer, connected with the work of the Spirit. The quickening power of this Divine agent brings life into the soul and life into our prayer. It is not the exercise of any particular grace, but the combined energy of all. Confidence is linked with humility, contrition, love; all the meek and lowly fruits, so adorning, so necessary to the completeness of Christian consistency, find their place here when the heart is poured out before the mercy seat. And yet what a mass of infirmities! Look at
I.. The matter of our prayers. We know not what to pray for. Left to ourselves we are as likely to be ruined by our prayers as the ungodly by the neglect of prayer. Yet we are not left here in despondency. We are led to mark
I.I. Our assistance in prayer. Great as our infirmities are, our assistance is fully equal to meet them. We have not only an Almighty Surety, but an Almighty Supporter. The blessed Spirit of God condescends to our need, and brings abundant supply, apart from all other sources of encouragement. (1) He excites in us intense desires, groanings unuttered and unutterable perhaps too big for utterance desire venting itself in sighs. Nothing but experience can explain this exercise. It is the warmth, life, and vigour of prayer. It is the breathing of Divine supplication, as if the Spirit of God was joining His own soul with ours. (2) Again we observe this Divine help in moulding these unutterable desires in subjection to the will of God. Never are we likely to receive a blessing unless we are willing to go without it.
IV. The acceptance of prayer. Often we do not thoroughly know it. But not a breath is lost before God. When the fire seems to go out, have we never found the living spark underneath the heap of embers? And so does the great Searcher see under this mass the spark of His own kindling the mind of His own Spirit. So does He spell out the ill-printed letters, the disordered and confused matter, and brings them out to be the desires framed by His own Spirit making intercession moulding them to His own will.
C. Bridges, Family Treasury,Dec, 1861.
The word "likewise" with which my text begins institutes a comparison between what is set forth in the text and what had been said before. To grasp this comparison fully we must go back to the eighteenth verse. The Apostle there sets out with a declaration, the peculiar wording of which is meant to show that he is speaking, not with the exaggeration of eloquent appeal or excited feeling, but with the sobriety of simple and deliberate calculation. "For I reckon that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us hereafter." Yet few men have had richer experience of the sufferings of the present life than Paul. The thought to which the word "likewise" in my text goes back is this. Creation, so far as we are concerned with it, sympathises with us, but its sympathy is unavailing; it cannot aid us: on the contrary, the aid is to come from us to it; it looks to our deliverance as the beginning of its own. We want, therefore, something else. We want a sympathy not merely of weak creature fellow-feeling, but of powerful creative aid, and this sympathy my text sets forth. "Likewise," in like manner, but with far different result, "the Spirit also" not merely sympathises with us, but "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." The effectual, omnipresent sympathy of the third Person in the ever-blessed Trinity is the wondrous fact which these words disclose.
I. This is, perhaps, one of the deepest, as it is surely one of the most comforting passages in Holy Writ. It takes us at once into those dark mysteries of self-consciousness, hidden from all others, half hidden even from ourselves, clear to none but our Creator, which go down to the foundations of our being, nay, to the very depths of the Being and operation of God Himself. For we can, indeed, easily conceive the impossibility of clearly knowing at every instant what we ought to pray for other than in the most general terms. We can also, and still more easily, conceive the impossibility of knowing how to pray as we ought; we all experience it. The wandering of the mind, the listlessness, the absolute blank of thought and feeling which sometimes seems to engulf it when we kneel down to pray; the mere unconnected rhapsodical ejaculations in which the most fervent prayer, like the celebrated ecstasy of Pascal, so often loses itself. All these are so many instances of the not knowing how to pray. The mind sinks in the attempt to rise to God. And so, too, with our ignorance of what we ought to ask. Prayer is the desire of man laid before his Maker. But what shall we desire? Knowledge of His truth in this world, in the world to come life everlasting, seem pretty nearly to exhaust all we are sure we ought to ask. Yet, were our prayers always limited to these two simple but sublime petitions, should we not feel as though much was omitted? True, we can have no knowledge of God's truth unless we have the will to do it: a pure heart is therefore implicitly involved in this petition: and a pure heart, again, involves a right conscience in all the affairs of life; but these things, however sweeping, are things we have or seek to have in common; they are general, not individual needs. Each of us has his own station, his own position, his own character and constitution, mental and bodily; each one of us has, more or less, abused that position, that character, that constitution; each, therefore, has his own burden, known, beyond himself, to God alone. All these differences demand different treatment in each individual case; each has, in consequence, his own individual difficulties. The effort of prayer must be made much in the dark. We know not what to pray for any more than we know how. And here comes in the full comfort of my text. For, strange and paradoxical as it may sound, it is here that the Divine and human seem to touch; on this borderland of ignorance and powerlessness they meet. For though the Spirit Himself helpeth our infirmities by interceding for us when we know neither what to ask nor how, it is only by groans or sighs inarticulate and unutterable, beyond all language to express, beyond all thought distinctly to conceive.
II. Many, perhaps I ought to say most, Christians do not really believe the presence of the Holy Spirit in themselves, because of the imperfections of which they are conscious. They cannot take to themselves the things of God in all their fulness because they intimate things so far transcending their own condition and feeling, that they think it impossible they should really apply to them in their literal sense. The comfort which this deep and wondrous passage is meant to give resides not merely in the statement that the Spirit does actually help our infirmities by pleading for us, but in the assurance that the imperfection of our present state and progress, of our religious experience, in a word, need be no bar to our thankfully believing that we, too, have the Spirit, since the Spirit dwelling in each shares, so to speak, our imperfection; limits Himself by the capacities of each, accommodates Himself to the character of each. Let us not deny the Christ that liveth in us, because that life is hid even from ourselves with Christ in God. Let us not ignore the Spirit that dwelleth in us, because we do not as yet see all things conquered by Him, all our thoughts pervaded by Him; remember that if there is but one good aspiration, one wish to do and be that which is right and pleasing to God; one upward look, one sign of the heart and mind to that infinite and eternal Good which alone can satisfy, we have evidence of the Divine existing in us, since it is of His alone that we can give unto Him; since without His Spirit we could neither desire nor conceive beyond the circle of those earthly things within which our earthly life is banned and confined. Solemnise, then, and purify, as well as cheer, your hearts and minds with these thoughts. It would seem that in all God's universe there is no being, after God, so august as man, because no other being's nature did God take in the person of His Son, in no other being does God vouchsafe to dwell by His Spirit. Lift up your hearts, then, to that state, that place, that presence which alone are adequate to the wants and desires we feel within us; and as you lift them up to the Eternal and to that heaven of heavens which yet cannot contain Him, take courage, and learn endurance from the thought that the Spirit Himself helpeth our infirmities, ever making intercession for us out of the depths of His own being with sighs and plaints that cannot indeed be uttered, and must for ever remain unknown to us, but which are perfectly understood by Him to whom they ascend, because it is according to His own will that the Spirit thus maketh intercession for all who are dedicated unto Him.
C. P. Reichel, Oxford and Cambridge Journal,p. 883.
The Intercession of the Spirit in Prayer.
I. The necessity for a Divine inspirer of prayer. (1) To ask rightly we must realise the solemnity of asking. We utter our little thought to the Everlasting thought our poor cry to the Sustainer of the worlds. To feel this is profoundly difficult. We are such slaves to the visible and the apparent. But when touched by the Divine Spirit, we rouse all the powers of our being to realise the Divine presence as an overwhelming reality not a cold faith in the mere existence of the Deity, but the conviction that He is the sublime reality before which all visible things are shadows that He is a presence nearer to us than friend or brother a presence in actual contact with our spirits. (2) To ask rightly we must ask with persevering earnestness. We ought always to pray and not to faint. Do we verily believe God will hear us, and do we pray as though He were hearing? When we possess the abiding spirit of prayer, when the whole aspect of the spirit's life is seeking,then will our direct petitions have a power that amid all hindrances shall persevere.
II. The manner of the Spirit's inspiration. (1) The awakening of inexpressible emotion "with groanings that cannot be uttered." All deep emotions are too large for language they outsoar the narrow range of human speech. (2) The certainty of Divine response. We dare not ask absolutely for any particular blessing, but the Spirit inspires the cry "Thy will be done," and the right blessings are given. God alters not His order, and because He alters it not we win blessings by spiritual prayer which would not have been bestowed without it.
E. L. Hull, Sermons,3rd series, p. 1.
References: Romans 8:26; Romans 8:27. M. Rainsford, No Condemnation,p. 197. Romans 8:27. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxx., p. 145.