“And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭8‬:‭26‬-‭27‬ ‭NLT‬‬

The Greek word for “helps”, 

syn-anti-lambanomai…(I’ve broken the word up into syllables on purpose), is a strange combination of opposites. “Syn” means “together with”, “anti” means “against” and “lambonai” means “to take hold of in turn” Taking hold of together with against in turn? That sounds like Greek to me!

Now let’s examine the players in this muddle. There is the Father…to whom we pray. There are we…who are praying. There is the Holy Spirit… who is interceding for us…standing alongside us and  representing us to the Father. What does the Spirit do? He takes the Father and us, who are “syn” and “anti”, opposite each other…the Father who knows everything and we who know nothing, and brings us together in turn…first the Father, then us, and He does it with wordless groans. 

How awesome is that! 

 Look how intimately the Holy Spirit is involved in our prayers! We, in our ignorance, have no idea what to pray. We babble…we talk too much…sometimes we even talk nonsense! The Holy Spirit patiently disentangles our words from our hearts and conveys them to the Father through “stenadzo”, meaning “sighs”, “murmurs”, or “inaudible prayers”. This seems to convey the idea that the Holy Spirit calms our noise down to a whisper and makes sense of our ignorant and noisy words…and He does it without words!

Does this mean that the Father needs the Spirit to make sense of our senselessness? No! I think it means that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, working together, put our human inefficiencies into perfect order to ensure that our prayers are powerful and effective…

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.”

‭‭James‬ ‭5‬:‭16‬-‭18‬ ‭NIV‬‬

…when we iron out all our wrinkles inside ourselves, and with each other, and the holy Trinity irons our wrinkles with them…all our ignorant thinking and our wordy words…the outcome will be beyond amazing. 

Don’t you just love them for that!

To be continued