“ We do not know what we should pray for as we ought…” (Rom 8:26)

Sometimes our prayers can be like a peach: we look at a situation – whether we are praying for ourselves or for someone else – and we pray. We see the peach, we take a bite, and we wait for the Lord’s answer. Nothing changes. We pray again, taking another bite. Third bite: ask and keep on asking; knock and keep on knocking. But the door still doesn’t open to us. We keep praying, trusting God’s faithfulness, until we have devoured all the peach. God still hasn’t answered, and we are left holding a damp red peach stone. So we stop praying, believing that our prayers weren’t in God’s will, and we throw away the peach stone.

But what we’ve done is throw away the answer to our prayers. We have prayed for what we have seen – the flesh of the peach- but that doesn’t mean we have prayed for what God sees. In fact Isaiah tells us:

“He shall not judge by the sight of His eyes,
Nor decide by the hearing of His ears”. (Isaiah 11: 3)

The starting place for God’s creative acts is not in what is seen, but what is unseen:

“By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.” (Heb 11:3)

The life that the peach carries is not in the flesh, and not even in the stone: it is in the kernel that is hidden inside the stone. Paul writes:

“I shall pray with my spirit, and I shall pray also with my understanding.” (1 Cor 14:15)

The New Living Translation renders this as “I will pray in the spirit, and I will also pray in words I understand,” which I  think is how it is generally understood. The Greek word used for understanding is “nous” – the word for human intellect and reason. In fact we use it in English colloquially, in phrases like – “anyone with a bit of nous can see that…”  But I think we can see it another way as well. I think it could also mean that we look at a situation and pray about it with our “nous,” but we also pray in the Spirit about the same situation. The two are connected.  In other words, we understand that, for example, the marriage of a certain couple in leadership is in trouble, so we start to pray about it according to what we know and can see, which is praying about it with our understanding; but when we start to pray in the Spirit we receive revelation about how God wants us to pray, our understanding is then enlightened, and we are then praying according to the will of God:

“The Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” (Rom 8: 26-27)

Let’s remember that when we have prayed through all that we can see, including all the scriptures that we understand to be relevant to the need, we may have devoured the flesh with our understanding, but that is just the beginning of the prayer: it is only by the Holy Spirit that we see the kernel hidden inside the stone, where God’s answer is waiting to bring forth Life.