I Don’t Know What to Pray For

Romans 8:26

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

Have you ever been punched in the gut so much that you’ve just had the wind knocked out of you? I used to play a lot of basketball when I was a kid, and I was rather tall and big for my age. And so I was the big center underneath the hoop and on more than a couple occasions, I mean, it was a very physical game and elbows would be thrown and, so you’d be hit in the stomach. And when we knocked out of you for a little bit, you be struggling to breathe and you start to panic a little bit and just need some time to rest and recuperate.

Well, there’s a lot of things that can knock the wind out of us when it comes to a spiritual and an emotional standpoint. Maybe it’s a diagnosis that you have received or that a loved one in your life has received and you’re just not ready to deal with it and the ramifications of it. And the wind just gets knocked out of you.

Maybe there’s an exam that you had to take that you really need to do well on to pass the class or to get into that grad program you really wanted to be admitted to, and yet the score wasn’t quite up to match.

Maybe you’ve been applying for job after job after job because you want to provide for your family, make sure that there’s ample food on the table, and yet you’re getting rejection notice after rejection notice and well, the wind’s been knocked out of you again.

And a lot of times when we get into those situations, it’s very easy to panic, is very easy to worry and feel anxious about the future. And when we get in this situation, we get so disoriented that, well, we don’t know what to do, we don’t know what to say and when we don’t know what to say one thing we also don’t know what to do is to how to pray. What words to offer up to our Heavenly Father?

Well, Christians have been granted a wonderful gift through our baptism. We have received the full and free forgiveness of our sins. The blood of Jesus Christ has been applied to us. So we have been made clean through the blood. And because we’ve been made clean, because we’ve been declared holy by God, the Holy Spirit dwells within us. And even later on in First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul tells us that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. And our text gives us a lot of comfort whenever we have the wind knocked out of us in Romans Chapter eight, in verse 26. The Apostle Paul writes,

In the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we should pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that are not expressed in words. (Romans 8:26)

And so the Holy Spirit dwells within you. And whenever you become so disoriented that you have no idea what on earth you should pray for, what you should tell God. The Holy Spirit who lives in you, takes your concerns, takes your anxieties, and then he brings them before the throne of God. He translates them into a prayer that is more articulate, more comprehensive, and more to the point than anything that you and I could ever imagine to say. And we know that it’s a wonderful, perfect prayer because the Holy Spirit is God. And he knows our situation far better than we know it ourselves. So he knows what to pray for.

So whenever we feel disoriented, whenever we don’t know what to pray. Trust in the Holy Spirit. Trust in his presence in you because he is praying for you. He is interceding for you. And he loves you more than anything else. Amen.