I Don't Know What To Say

You, like me, have gone at one time to pray and hadn't the foggiest idea what to say, haven’t you?  Or maybe every idea was foggy and that was precisely the issue.  The tangled fray of daily life has produced not a small measure of trial and wile in our hearts and minds.  Weakness rolls in thick and dense and moist. 

“You ought pray about that,” says the dear friend.

“Sheesh.  I wish,” you think to yourself.

Here I was just days ago when I stumbled upon the familiarity of Romans 8:26.  We love this verse when we don’t know what to say to God.  Hear it again for the first time.

“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.”

That word “likewise” ties this passage on prayer into a broader context of our future hope for redemption; final redemption, redemption that never feels further away than when the massive girth of weakness weighs in on us, oppresses us. 

In those moments we don’t know how to pray or what to pray for that may achieve some drip of relief, condensing the fog into a heavy rain at least.  Our words spill out with loads of emotion.  They are sloppily braided together with our brokenness and selfishness.

“Make it stop!” or “Just give me ______________!”  (You've filled in that blank plenty.)

But you need to know, even these words are gilded with a golden faith.  For whom, after all, are we crying out to?  Who is the object of our splattered plea?  Is it not the unseen God?  Him in whom our future hope is eternally placed?

Even in words that ring in angel ears like a shot gun blast, riddling the heavens with our leaded aches and needs and wants, there is the evidence of things “we hope for [but] we do not see.”  Namely the God who apparently notices and cares deeply. 

A faith arrives!  Faith that, in the simple act of opening our mouths toward the heavens, declares God exists, God is present, and God is listening. 

You know what happens next…  That’s not a question.  Because if you've been here before, you know what happens next; and verse 26 supports this curious mystery.  Somehow the Spirit of God in us takes not the words; not the tonal sounds strung together in a mumbled array of what must sound like nonsense to anyone on the other side of eternities curtain, but He takes the faith that it took to open our mouths, and He translates that faith into the language of God the Father’s answer to us. 

Imagine, in that time of utter weakness, before we even utter a syllable, the mere peeling apart of our tired and worn lips in an effort to speak or pray or something to God spins the spiritual into motion. 

The verse says the Spirit uses “groanings to deep for words.”  You and I will never hear an audible tone here.  Frankly we may never even see or experience what we may imagine the outcome will be.  But that’s okay.  Because if we did see it or experience it, or hear it for that matter, it would flatten our hope; a hope that thrives on things not yet seen or experienced. 

The passage continues in verse 27 to align the “mind of the Spirit” with “the will of God,” which ought to drop our jaw in and of itself when we remember that this Spirit is living in the redeemed of God.  But the passage continues further with verse 28 – another verse we love in seasons of weakness – which, for the purpose of this thinking, points to God’s goodness and bolster our faith. 

We’re weak, and from somewhere faith enough arrives to open our mouths and say something to God.

The Spirit of God translates this faith into the language of God’s answer for us.

God then orders events and details such that on the back side of it all there is a goodness.

Don’t know what to say?  What if we start by opening our mouths?