Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Day 11
"We
do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us
through wordless groans."
Romans 8:26
Long
before you woke up this morning and long after you go to sleep tonight, the
Spirit of God was interceding for you with wordless groans. He has been circling you since the day you
were conceived and He’ll circle you till the day you die. He is praying hard for you with ultrasonic
groans that cannot be formulated into words and those unutterable intercessions
should fill you with an unspeakable confidence. God isn’t just for you in some passive
sense. God is for you in the most active
sense imaginable: intercession.
And it's not just the Holy Spirit
who is circling you in prayer. A few
verses later in Romans 8:34 it says that Jesus is at the right of the Father
interceding for us. You are double
circled today! The Spirit and the Son
are both interceding on your behalf to the Father.
I think 99% of our prayers are
self-centered. They focus on our needs,
our problems, our situations. And those
are things we need to pray about. But we
also need to follow the example set by the Holy Spirit and intercede for
others! Intercession is grabbing hold of
the horns of the altar and representing someone else's need to the Father. It's very different than conversational
prayer.
During our early morning prayer time
today, we formed a prayer circle and interceded for Hannah (24) who works at
the State Department. She had chest
pains a month ago and doctors discovered a tumor that fills 75% of her chest
cavity. Like Aaron and Hur who held up
the arms of Moses during battle, we are lifting up Hannah to the Lord. We are praying that God would put His glory
on display! We are praying that God
would mystify the doctors. We are
interceding for a miracle!
The viability of our prayers is not
contingent upon scrabbling the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet into
the right combinations like abracadabra.
God already knows the last punctuation mark before we pronounce the
first syllable. The viability of our
prayers has more to do with intensity than vocabulary. That is modeled by the Holy Spirit Himself,
who has been intensely and unceasingly interceding for you your entire life.
And while we don't pray that way all the time, there are moments that we need to
pray with blood, sweat, and tears. There
are moments when we need to fall on our face and cry out to God. There are moments when we need to pray like
the Spirit, in the Spirit, and intercede with with wordless groans.
Mark
Batterson-Circle Maker
