Help in Prayer

By way of a pastor I much respect I stumbled upon this perfect morsel of bread, beggar that I am, from Octavius Winslow, a descendant of the Puritan Edward Winslow (who came over on the Mayflower in 1620).

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Octavius-Winslow/313427671822 is the Facebook site where you may subscribe to a "morning and evening" devotional featuring his writings. This is heart-rending stuff.

“And the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. For we don’t even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words.” Romans 8:26

The Holy Spirit is here represented in the character of a pleader or advocate for the saints. To form a vivid conception of this truth, we have but to imagine an anxious and embarrassed client prosecuting some important suit, or, perchance, battling for his life in a court of justice. At his side stands his counselor, thoroughly acquainted with the nature of his case, and deeply versed in the bearings of the law. He is there to instruct his client how to shape his course, with what arguments to support, with what pleas to urge, with what words to clothe his suit. Such is the advocacy and such the aid of the Spirit in the matter of prayer. We stand in the presence of the Lord–it may be to deprecate a deserved punishment, or to plead for a needed blessing.

“We don’t even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray.” How shall we order our cause before the Great Judge? With what feelings, with what language, with what arguments shall we unburden our heart, unveil our sorrow, confess our sin, and make known our request? How shall I overcome the remembrance of past ingratitude, and the conviction of present guilt, and the pressure of deep need, and the overwhelming sense of the Divine Majesty? How shall I wake the heart to feeling; rouse the dull, sluggish emotions of the soul; recall the truant affections; and concentrate the mind upon the holy and solemn engagement? But our counselor is there! “The Holy Spirit prays for us.” And how does He this?

He indites the prayer. 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 inditing 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, your accents tremulous, yet there was an eloquence and a power in that prayer which reached the heart and moved the arm of God. It overcame the Angel of the Covenant. And whose eloquence and whose power was it?–the interceding Spirit’s.

He also teaches us what to pray for. Many and urgent as our needs are, we only accurately know them as the Spirit makes them known. Alas! what profound ignorance of ourselves must we cherish, when we know not what we should ask God for as we ought! But the Spirit reveals our deep necessity, convinces us of our emptiness, poverty, and need, and teaches us what blessings to ask, what evils to deprecate, what mercies to implore.

He sympathizes, too, with our infirmity in prayer, by portraying to our view the parental character of God. Sealing on our hearts a sense of adoption, he emboldens us to approach God with filial love and child-like confidence. He leads us to God as a Father. Nor must we overlook the skill with which the Spirit enables us to urge in our approaches to God the sinner’s great plea–the atoning blood of Jesus. This is no small part of the Divine aid we receive in our infirmity. Satan, the accuser of the saints, even follows the believer to the throne of grace to confront and confound him there. When Joshua stood before the Angel of the Lord, Satan stood at his right hand to resist him. But the Spirit, too, is there! He is there in the character, and to discharge the office, of the praying soul’s Intercessor. He instructs the accused suppliant what arguments to use, what pleas to urge, and how to resist the devil. He strengthens the visual organ of the soul, so that it clearly discerns the blood upon the mercy-seat within the veil, on which it fixes the eye in simple faith. Oh, it is the delight of the Spirit to take of the things of Jesus–His love, His work, His sympathy, His grace, His power–and show them to the soul prostrate in prayer before the throne of grace.