Sermon Tone Analysis

In the movie The Karate Kid, Daniel unknowingly learns good karate technique as his instructor, Mr. Miyagi, has him painstakingly wash and wax a dozen classic American cars.

It should not surprise us Christians if we find out later that God has been doing something similar in our lives all along, if the circumstances and details of our lives which seem irrelevant and unnecessary are actually part of the divine plan working together for our good.

Verse 26 begins with the word likewise, or similarly.

The subject is the Holy Spirit and the help the Spirit gives to believers.

But what is the comparison being made?

The comparison I think goes back to what it was the Spirit was last seen doing.

Back in verse 16, “the Spirit himself,” Paul said, is active within us assuring us that we are God’s children in spite of the suffering we are called to endure.

So now Paul can say, that in addition to his assuring presence, we also have the Holy Spirit’s assisting power.

The Holy Spirit is both our comforter as well as our Helper.

He is present to assure us of who we are and also to assist us with what we are doing.

Paul shows us in these verses how the Holy Spirit assists us to see God’s eternal purpose achieved through our lives.

In other words, the Holy Spirit, the abiding presence of God with his people now that the Kingdom of God has come, now that sins have been forgiven, now that Israel’s exile has ended, is a great gift to comfort us when the doubts arise because of suffering.

But he is also a great gift to empower us as we are called to act in this day when the kingdom has already come but has not yet fully come.

It is this responsibility that we all have as God’s redeemed people that is now in view in these five verses.

You and I have a vocation, a sacred calling, to be to “the praise of his glory,” to make known the excellencies of the one true God.

Now how are we to do that?

Or better, in what way does the Spirit help us do this?

Paul shows us here that the Holy Spirit helps our prayers be effective.

He helps us find encouragement in divine providence.

And he helps us be energized by God’s purpose.

Effective prayers, encouraging providence, energizing purpose—this is how the Holy Spirit helps us.

The Holy Spirit Helps Us Pray Effective Prayers

The first way the Holy Spirit helps us to live as citizens in God’s kingdom is through prayer.

The Spirit helps us in prayer.

This is what is in view in verses 26-27 which begin, “Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness.”

Too Weak to Pray

What is this weakness?

This is a general term meaning the lack of strength.

It could be physical weakness, like an illness, or a mental weakness, like a lack of confidence.

But Paul seems to have some sort of spiritual weakness in view here.[1]

The weakness he is dealing with is described in the next phrase, “For we do not know what to pray for as we ought.”

How spiritually weak are we Christians?

Paul says, “We don’t even know the answer to the question, ‘Now what exactly ought we to be praying about?’”[2]

I’m guessing you resonate with that.

Even if we know the time in which we live as Christians, now on the other side of the revealing of the Messiah to the world, even if we know we now have access to God himself, able to approach him as Abba, Father, we still find ourselves failing to pray.

And part of the reason is because we don’t know what we should say to him.

We don’t know how to pray, if we’re honest.

What exactly should we ask him to do? Forget the question, “What should I do today?”

We don’t even know what to ask God about what we should do today.

Every Christian knows how difficult prayer is.

No doubt much (or most) of the difficulty is due to our own spiritual immaturity, even to our own doubts and unbelief.

But even the most seasoned prayer warriors should be humbled by what we find in verse 26.

May we find more and more courage to admit our spiritual weakness and cry out to God like Israel’s king Jehoshaphat, “We don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chron 20:12).

Shallow Prayers

Of course, there are ways to pray.

We do well to learn from the wisdom of our spiritual ancestors.

And our Lord himself gave us a model prayer to follow.

We all can and should seek to improve our praying.

Parents should both be modeling how to pray to their children.

But, parents, also let your children pray out loud and give them instruction on how to do it.

The pastoral prayer on Sunday mornings has similar aims and purposes.

But let us not think ourselves so strong in prayer that we deceive ourselves or miss out on the good help the Spirit gives to us.

“The Spirit himself intercedes for us,” verse 26 says.

This is not to discourage us from praying, as if the Spirit prays in our place.

An intercessor comes alongside the petitioner and prayer with him or her.

Our spiritual weakness is not a reason to remain in ignorance but rather the recognition that as yet

No eye has seen, nor ear heard,

Nor the heart of man imagined,

What God has prepared for those who love him (1 Cor 2:9).

In other words, all of us pray prayers that are way too shallow.

We simply can’t even imagine the world the way God intends for it to be.

We are, to use C.S. Lewis’s famous analogy, like little children content with mud pies, not knowing we could be enjoying a vacation at sea.

Struggling in Prayer

If we could see what God sees, oh how differently we would pray!

So strive we should to see as God sees.

But the Spirit will help us with our weakness, our inability to see and pray with the perspective of God.

That is what Paul means when he says the Spirit intercedes for us “with groaning too deep for words.”

These groanings clearly are meant to echo the groaning of all creation in verse 22, and our own inward groans mentioned in verse 23.

The Spirit himself, God’s own Holy Spirit, is not far away from us in our groaning.

He is right here, crying out to God with us and for us.

We only have to take a quick scan of the Psalter to see some examples of Spirit-inspired groans.

And we only have to remind ourselves of Israel’s groans in Egypt, and God’s true-to-his-covenant response to take heart: “God saw the people of Israel—and God knew” (Exod 2:25).

Don’t you see, believers, what is happening when we pray?

Something mysterious is happening as God’s own Holy Spirit intercedes for us.

He sees our trouble and knows how bad it really is.

This gives him an ability you and I could never have, to communicate clearly to God what it is we truly need day by day.

The mystery is expounded in verse 27, where a distinctively Jewish way of speaking of God—“the one who searches hearts” (see 1 Sam 16:7; 1 Chron 28:9; Jer 17:10)—is said to recognize the “mindset of the Spirit,” the phrase we saw back in verse 6.

The Old Testament speaks of God’s Spirit as the searching presence of God, already an Old Testament mystery of some sort of interaction between God and his own Spirit.[3]

As the mystery of God himself goes, so also goes the mystery of prayer.

There is much we do not understand about this ancient practice, much even in its use we do not know what is happening.

But that’s because God himself is active in it in a way where he is both the intercessor as well as the one to whom we pray.

And with God’s own Spirit praying with us, “according to the will of God” as verse 27 says, we can be confident that our prayers matter, and that they are heard.

The Holy Spirit Helps Us Find Encouragement in Providence

It is with this mystery and its strong encouragement in mind that we come to the familiar words of verse 28.

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

This is the second way the Holy Spirit helps us live as citizens in God’s kingdom.

He helps us find encouragement in the providence of God.

This verse makes quite the claim.

It is all encompassing: “all things.”

It is positive: all things work together “for good” rather than for evil.

And it is a clear claim for the power of God’s absolute providence.[4]

The circumstances of our lives are not random, not the meaningless happenings of chance, but rather are pieces of a puzzle that are made to fit together for the purposes of God’s good will.

The question is, how is it that we know this?

The Logic of God’s Providence

One answer is because of the Jewish worldview that Paul maintains, a worldview that logically leads to the conclusion of Romans 8:28.

That God is sovereign just like this, not just ordaining all things that come to pass but preserving and governing every creature and every action to the perfect achievement of his will is the assumed perspective of the entire Old Testament.

For example, we read in Job 37:

By the breath of God ice is given,

and the broad waters are frozen fast.

He loads the thick cloud with moisture;