Prayer 4. Praying in the Spirit Rom 8:18-30; Ps 57; John 14:15-26

Audio: https://www.daleappleby.net/index.php/mp3-sermons/51-recent-sermons/963-4-the-spirit-helps-the-weak

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXnWySx2pIs

Introduction

In this series titled, Praying in Unity with God the Trinity, I have emphasised that God is essentially a prayer hearing God because he is a Father who created us in his image as praying beings. Prayer is an integral part of what it means to be human, something fully revealed in the prayer-saturated life of the one fully human person, Jesus. It is through the prayers of Jesus and our union with him that the Father, who loves to hear us pray, is remaking humanity and bringing into being a whole new creation. Tonight, we are touching on the work of the Spirit in prayer.

Only the Holy Spirit can turn prayer from a largely natural reality into an intensely supernatural reality. I can clearly remember praying as a child, but my prayers were wholly selfish and had nothing to do with the kingdom of God and of Christ (Rev 12:12). Only the Spirit, only God going to God/ “Go-Between God” (John V. Taylor), is pure and powerful enough to enable sinful human beings to stand before the Lord of glory. Through Christ this is what the Spirit totally desires to do in us.

Praying in the Spirit is a difficult topic. We can easily imagine Jesus, as a human, in prayer to God as Father, we all carry strong images of fatherhood, but the Spirit is invisible and its hard to conceive how he fits into the family likeness of Father and Son. This is actually how it should be, for the Spirit is present to us at a level far deeper than our mental life. Paul testifies of the Spirit’s profound penetration of the furthest level of what it means to be human, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”” (Gal 4:6), “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:16). When 1 Corinthians teaches, “the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God….we have received…the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God” (1 Cor 2:10, 12), he means that in the Spirit we have a share in God’s own way of knowing. cf. my fiend Jenny who used to say, “I just knew it in my knower.” This way of knowing God is essentially relational and something like, though infinitely greater than, when a child says, “I always knew I was loved by my parents.” (1 Cor 8:3; 13:12; Gal 4:9). Prayer that is heard by our Father as we intercede in union with Jesus, is prayer marvellously inspired and empowered by the Spirit.

Jesus and Prayer in the Spirit

The Spirit was Jesus’ ultimate prayer partner. It was as Christ was praying at his baptism that the Holy Spirit descended on him like a dove (Luke 3:21-22), then “full of the Holy Spirit…he was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” to pray for 40 days (Luke 4:1-2). He returns to Galilee “in the power of the Spirit” goes into the synagogue of Nazareth and declares, “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me…” (Luke 4:14, 18) and commences his public ministry in the Spirit’s power. In explaining to his adversaries the source of his mighty works Jesus points away from his own abilities to the Spirit, “if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt 12:28). The intimacy between Jesus and the Spirit comes out in Luke 10. When the 72 disciples return with good news of healings and the driving out of demons, “ [Jesus] rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will” (v.21). In this tender family scene the Son of God communing with his Father in the joy of the Holy Spirit at the revelation that lost men and women are being liberated from the powers of evil to share in their fellowship of love. In his intimacy with Jesus the Spirit communicated power to Christ to identify with and heal lost humanity.

Jesus was conscious of the complete sufficiency of the Spirit living in him (cf. John 14:17, 23) to perform all of the Father’s purposes through him, “For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. 35 The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.” (John 3:34-35). In his total unselfishness Jesus only ever prayed according to the inspiration of the Spirit. [Just as scripture, which is the God-breathed written testimony of Jesus (John 5:39), only exists through the Spirit. (Matt 23:43; Acts 4:25; 2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:21)] His Spirit-led prayers would ultimately lead to the cross. But first a word about given to us. (Come back to this later.)

Sending of the Spirit

Today’s Gospel reading from John 14 contains a tremendous promise. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth…. the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things” (John 14:16-17). This is a promise that the Father will answer the prayer request of Jesus and give the Holy Spirit to those who follow him. This is no shallow request. The intensity with which Jesus asks the Father to give us the Spirit flows from how much he treasured the Father sending the Spirit into his own life and ministry (cf. Luke 10:22). Jesus’ entire being longed to give us the Spirit. (The Spirit was like a mirror in which Jesus saw all the Father’s purposes reflected into his life. Since the purpose of his life was his imaging of the Father his desire to give the Spirit was total.)

Pentecost was an answer to the prayers of Jesus, as united in love the Father and Son together (cf. John 17:20-26) sent the Spirit to fill the Church. Peter’s preaching on that day gives us insight into what was happening in the heavenly world. “Jesus…Being…exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing.” (Acts 2:32,33). The resurrected and ascended Christ (Acts 2:36) petitioned the Father (in the limitless energy of the Spirit he received at resurrection) and received authority to pour out the Spirit on the Church as his gift (Matt 3:11). And this outpouring from the heart of Christ with the most intense satisfaction, joy and excitement. This is reflected in what Peter teaches later in his first letter, “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with an inexpressible and glorious joy,” (1 Pet 1:8). Many years ago, I was seeking the Lord for more of his presence in my life and knelt by my bed determined not to stop praying until God filled me with his Spirit, he did, and I cried with tears of joy for hours. In a Spirit-filled atmosphere like that released at Pentecost it’s no wonder that the book of Acts is filled with references to prayer (2:42; 3:1; 4:24; 6:4; 12:5; 14:23).

The ability of the Spirit to enable us to pray is unlimited. (After all, he kept Jesus praying in Gethsemane and through the ordeal on the cross.) So we read today from Romans 8, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what/how to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. 27 And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (vv. 26-27). If you belong to Jesus, you are always wrapped up in the intercessory life of the Spirit. We saw last week that Jesus is praying for us, and with the Spirit interceding as well their perfectly united intercessions are heard and answered by the Father. How then can we lack anything in the sphere of prayer? But we do.

Lost Prayer

Decades ago, I was struck by M. Lloyd Jones’ comments that weekly corporate prayer meetings are the spiritual barometer of the church. If this is true, then most of the Church as we know it is headed for extinction. (This includes even denominations that pride themselves in powerful experiences of the Spirit. If real persecution comes to the Australian Church many congregations will simply empty out.) Since the Spirit’s presence is the power of prayer, we have to accept that the absence of prayer is a sign that we have grieved and driven out the fulness of Spirit from the Church (Eph 4:30; Isa 63:10). How have we done this? We are talking about the Holy Spirit of God, and holiness means being separated from worldliness and separated to God at the deepest level of intimacy. God has not set me apart to a smartphone or tablet, to a TV a caravan or a cruise, we are not consecrated to food and drink, nor even in this way to our families or “church” as organised religion. The Spirit sets me apart to Jesus and his Holy Father (John 17:11). All this however can be just a form of words producing no change in us (2 Tim 3:5). To live holy lives founded on prayer we must have a revelation of the cost to the Spirit in taking Jesus to the cross.

Where has the Spirit Gone?

The intimate language of Jesus’ prayers in Gethsemane, “Abba! Father!” (Mark 14:36; cf. Gal 4:6), testify that it was as he suffered that he was most intensely indwelt by the Holy Spirit (cf. Eph 3:17). Hebrews testifies that Jesus offered himself up as a sacrifice “through the eternal Spirit” (Heb 9:14). This is the same Spirit who, as we have already read from Romans 8:26, “helps us in our weakness…. intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words”. The intercession of the Spirit in our hearts moves with the power of his bonding together the Father and the Son in love as Christ suffered for us. This is an intercession marked by bottomless grief. Like these prophetic words from Zechariah about the cross, ““I will pour out …a S/spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look…on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.” (12:10; cf. Rev 1:7; John 19:37). The Spirit entered into the infinite immensity of the Father’s loss of communion with his only Son as he carried our sin on the cross. This grieving of the Spirit as Jesus was dying wasn’t a hopeless mourning (1 Thess 4:13) it was a groaning for the redemption of the resurrection, not only of Jesus, but of the whole creation (Rom 8:18-24 cf. John 19:30). The intercessions of the Spirit for the glorification of the whole creation have been answered in the raising of Christ and will be answered in the perfection of creation.

There are deep mysteries about praying in the Spirit (Eph 6:18; Jude 20). When Jesus cried out as forsaken on the cross, in the natural realm it seemed that he was devoid of the Spirit/Spiritless (Mark 15:34 cf. Jude 19), but in the realm of the deep things of God the Spirit was searching out the infinite love of the Father and the Son (1 Cor 2:10) in their plan to save the world. This is the realm of intercession into which the Spirit would take us. When we feel like God is far away and not listening, when it seems like all hope is lost, that is the time to depend on the Spirit to empower our prayers. Yielding up supreme weakness is God’s way for us to enter the victorious resurrection releasing intercession of the Spirit. There’s more than enough grief and mourning – for ourselves, our children, grandchildren, St Mark’s, Perth…the broken state of the world – if only we would come together in corporate weekly prayer, or in two’s and three’s, to yield this grief to the Father in union with Jesus by the power of the Spirit, to see God’s hand move in resurrection power. My own bears testimony to this dynamic of empowerment through weakness.

Conclusion

My most profound experience of Jesus came at the end of 7 days of prayer when I was so downcast and oppressed that I seriously doubted if I had enough strength to keep praying. I had to prostrate myself on the ground before the Lord and hold onto the carpet I felt so disabled. Then I had a revelation of the ascended Jesus that proved to be a great transforming point in my life, and which has never left me.

Anyone who acknowledges in prayer their weakness to pray and tells the Lord that they want to pray, whatever it takes, will surely become a man and woman who knows how to pray in the Spirit of God in the name of Jesus and to the glory of the Father. May it be so for us all. Amen.