Intercession

Rom 8:26  Likewise the Spirit also 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.
Rom 8:27  And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

The Spirit, as an enlightening Spirit, He teaches us what to pray for; as a sanctifying Spirit, He works and stirs up the need and the desire to pray; as a comforting Spirit, He silences our fears, and helps us over all discouragements. The Holy Spirit is the wellspring of all desires toward God, which are often more than words can utter. The Spirit who searches the hearts, can perceive the renewed mind and will of the spirit, and advocates his cause. The Spirit makes intercession to God, in sublime and affecting cries, which cannot be expressed in  language.

Sublime and affecting cries, which cannot be expressed in any articulate language outside the Spirit of God.

We do not know what we ought to pray for.  What shall we say before the our Heavenly Father? With what feelings, with what language, with what arguments shall we unburden our hearts, unveil our sorrows, confess our sins, and make known our requests? How shall we overcome the remembrance of past stumblings,  the convictions of present guilt, the pressure of deep need, and the overwhelming sense of the Divine Majesty? Regularly, all believers feel these uncertainties within themselves -- we can sense that our need is great; but we often do not know quite where to begin, or even how best to approach Him . . . sometimes it almost seems that our prayers are beset in an atmosphere of uncertainty, confusion, and distraction:

    Guilt troubles our conscience;
    doubt vexes our spirits;
    a sense of ignorance invades our soul;
    a crowd of foolish wanderings and evil imaginations distract our thoughts;
    and in the midst of all this -- satan hurls his fiery darts, with their accusations of infidelity, fast and furious in his attempt to raise a cloud of doubt over the Mercy Seat;
    so that amid all this throng and confusion, our thoughts become muddled and our words seem as idle breath, or the imagined fruit of our own impotence.


In this scene of confusion and distraction, when all seems going to the wreck — the Spirit comes, as it were, to the aid of the saint, to teach him how to pray and even what to pray for. He even writes the prayer, so to speak. Do not think that that spiritual petition, which breathed from your lips and rose as an incense-cloud before the mercy-seat, was other than the composition of the Holy Spirit. He inspired that prayer, He created those desires, and He awoke those groanings. The form of your petition may have been ungraceful, your language simple, your sentences broken, yet there was an eloquence and a power in that prayer which reached the heart and moved the arm of God. And whose eloquence and whose power was it? It was the power of God's Holy Spirit – only of His interceding Spirit. He teaches us what to pray for. Many and urgent as our needs are, we only accurately know them as the Spirit makes them known to us. But the Spirit reveals our deepest needs, convinces us of our emptiness, our poverty, and of our longings for God, and teaches us what blessings to ask, what evils to stand against, and what mercies we need to implore.

He puts us at ease with our infirmity in prayer, by showing to our soul the loving character of God. Sealing within our hearts a sense of our Divine adoption, He emboldens us to approach God with the love of a son and with a child-like confidence. He leads us to God as our Father while pleading the shed blood of Yeshua before the Throne to prevent satan's spirits of confusion and confrontation from invading in these times of communion with the Living God. He is always here within us, my friends, to comfort, to intercede, to instruct, and to strengthen. As we seek the Throne in prayer; He gives sight to our spirits, that we may see that blood on the Mercy Seat, and know that He hears us.


When the soul is led by His Spirit in prayer, my beloved,  its petitions are a spiritual sacrifice, pleasing in the eyes of our Lord, and its cries enter the very ears of Heaven; as it written:

And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.

And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask any thing according to His will, He heareth us: And if we know that He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.

amen

Lord, all my desire is before You. My groaning is not hidden from You.