Praying in the Power of the Holy Spirit

This morning, we begin our last sermon in the series on prayer. For the past four weeks, we've looked at prayer, systematically understanding some of the deep theological truths about why, as Christians, we can and should pray. We looked at the source of our prayer, that God has revealed Himself to us, that He is a God that we can commune with, even as we do so believingly this morning. We believe God can be spoken to and that God speaks to us. We saw as well that God is a God who has bound Himself to us, that He's not a fickle God.

He's not a God that will listen to us one time and not again another time, but He has entrusted Himself to us through a promise, the covenant. And in the past few weeks, we've looked at the nature of God in the Trinity, that He is Father and Son, and what those aspects of His being or the personality of His being means for us, that we have been adopted as sons and daughters. We can approach God with the humble faith that He will hear us, that He cares about us, that we may approach Him through the Son who has mediated and remedied the distance that we sometimes may believe we have towards Him, that has been bridged. We may approach Him freely. And this morning, we come to the final third person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

And so we ask, how does the Holy Spirit help us in our prayer life? What role does He play in this particular aspect of our Christian life? Bruce Ware, in his book on the Trinity, entitled Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles and Relevance, writes this about the Holy Spirit. It is nothing short of remarkable that the Spirit clearly embraces and in no respect resents the fact that He has eternally what might be called the background position in the Trinity. It would be one thing for someone to accept and embrace a background position for a certain period of time, knowing that eventually he would be brought out into the spotlight and given more central focus and attention.

But here we see something far more amazing, something nearly unbelievable when considered from our perspective as fallen human beings. The Holy Spirit embraces eternally the backstage position in relation to the Father and the Son. If you could argue that the Bible has a focus on the work of the Father and the Son, and we find a subtlety and a backgroundedness of the Holy Spirit, you might be tempted to think that the Spirit is someone that is to be overlooked. You might even practically, in your living out of your faith, ignore the Holy Spirit. Indeed, early heresies in the Christian church have often misunderstood the Holy Spirit when it came to grappling with the doctrine of the Trinity.

But the truth is that as we pray to God the Father, having been brought into His presence through the finished work of Christ the Son, we might be mistaken to overlook the Spirit because He works so quietly amongst us. This morning, however, it is my joy to investigate with you the wonderful role that the third person of the Trinity plays not only in our lives, but specifically in our prayer. This morning, we're going to look at two points concerning the Holy Spirit and prayer, and we're gonna find that in our reading this morning from Romans chapter eight, verses one through to twenty-five. Romans eight, verses one to twenty-five. Paul writes, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

For the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, and it does not submit to God's law.

Indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brothers, we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

For you did not receive the Spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now, hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

So far, our reading, this is the word of the Lord. Two things I say that we find from this passage regarding the Holy Spirit, and especially with a focus on prayer. The first truth we see is that we have new desires and power through the Holy Spirit. All throughout the chapter, the eighth chapter of Romans, we find the Holy Spirit, which may be quite surprising because Romans eight is the pinnacle of the book of Romans. In fact, a few weeks ago at a Bible study I led at the university at Griffith, I said to them, Romans eight is the Mount Everest of the Bible.

It is the apex of the story of God. And understandably, we find Jesus Christ at the centre of that story. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. And so you would rightly assume that Romans eight would be all about Jesus and what He has done for us, and yet the Holy Spirit is all throughout this chapter. You cannot miss Him.

We are told in verse ten that He is the Spirit who gives life, that He is the same being, the same power who raised Christ from the dead, and that He is living in your heart right now. He is in your soul. He is in your body raising you to be with Christ if you are a Christian. Now, the Spirit of God who breathed life into the dead and decaying body of Jesus is the same Spirit who has breathed eternal life into you in your faith. In other words, you have the resurrection power of Christ living in you.

That is the pinnacle of the Christian life, the masterpiece of human history. But ask every or any everyday Christian, when have you last experienced the power of the Spirit? And I think many would struggle to answer. Either they would have too much charismatic baggage associated with that idea, or they may just never have heard much teaching on the Holy Spirit. They might think, I can't remember the last time I saw a miracle, or I had goosebumps of something uncanny happening around me.

So I can't think of the last time the Holy Spirit was active and I saw His power in my life. But here is what Romans eight, the pinnacle of the Bible, teaches you. That your life as a Christian is a miracle in itself, orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. That all the good that you do as a Christian can only be done because the Holy Spirit is working in you every single minute. If you have faith in Christ, you are enjoying the Spirit's life.

If you have faith in Christ, you willingly serve God because you enjoy the Spirit's life. When you find yourself saying no to sin, even just once, you are enjoying the Spirit's life. And when you grieve over your sin, and when you desire to be better, you are enjoying the Spirit's life. So, yes, it's true, and even here, I think Paul would allude to that, you may not be perfect. Your life may not be perfect.

You may need more work, but the incredible truth is that when you have placed your trust in Christ, the Spirit of God comes to live in you and you will now start doing the things that please God. I think of it a little bit in a way like those drawings that you see from five year olds when they go to kindergarten or whatever, and they come home and they've drawn a weird picture of a horse that looks more like a dog. And they've drawn a big love heart, and this picture is a gift that they've given you. They've drawn this and they've spent all of fifteen minutes drawing this to give it to you as Dad or as Mom. Objectively, you can look at that picture and go, this is awful.

I have no idea what's going on here. You will have friends coming to your house and they see it stuck on the fridge and they go, that is not art. But because you know it's been done with love and all their ability and all their colour choices, you know that that is a precious gift and it pleases you. It is a similar thing, I think, that because of the Spirit in us, we have a desire to please God, to give Him our gifts, to offer Him that workmanship that He has made us to do. Because our hearts desire to delight our Father in heaven, He delights in us.

And so for this reason, the Holy Spirit is central to our prayer life. Arguably, He is the reason we pray in the first place. We have that impulse to please our Father. We have that impulse to give Him our gifts as fragile and as broken as they may be because we have the Spirit in us that drives that desire. So when you pray, you pray through the Spirit because He has given you a new desire and a new power and ability to pray.

The second thing we see here is that we have deep groans expressed by the Spirit. Romans eight continues teaching us about the Spirit by saying in verse fifteen, for you did not receive the Spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. Skip a few verses to verse twenty-two, and we read this, for we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. We know that as Christians, we have not been plucked out of this world. And Paul writes, he says, we know that creation groans. He says it as if everyone will understand, whether you are a Christian or not. It's obvious, the whole of creation groans under pain.

Christians have not been plucked out of this pain, and yet we are also told that there is a plan and a purpose for our existence here. God has chosen for us to be here. But because we are on earth, we experience along with everyone and everything else, both the wonders and the suffering of the world. Romans eight paints the picture of the whole of creation being in the pains of childbirth as it waits for God to make everything new again. Now, I think you could argue that the instinct we see around us when people talk about the utopian society that we may have, and we fight in politics about this desire to create the perfect state, the perfect existence where no one is poor, where everyone is educated and where everyone is healthy.

The fact that our entire nation has a desire to walk towards something perfect shows that we all know that our existence is not perfect. And we may also debate with non-Christians about what their vision of perfection is, what this so-called utopia looks like, what constitute perfection is often skewed, but the fact that they realise what's around us isn't perfect shows evidence of this childbirth pain. But as Christians, we aren't immune from that pain. In fact, you could say that we probably feel it more acutely. We groan in this life.

And yet Paul says we do so with hope. We groan with an expectation and therefore we groan with patience. Why? Paul says because we are children. Did you think that would be the reason?

We groan because we are children. We groan patiently because we are sons and daughters of God. The Spirit, he says, witnesses to our spirit that we are children of God, and because we are children, it means we have a home, and home is where your family is. So at this time, we don't see creation yet liberated. Our bodies are not yet redeemed, even though our souls are.

When we experience pain now as Christians, we experience it with the same sense of longing for what is to come, for what is better. And so in every Christian, you will find a profound sense of nostalgia for something that existed in a time we never existed. We long for something that we don't actually know, we've never tasted. Perhaps we have tasted it, but we have never fully known it. When we go through pain as Christians, we groan under the weight of that pain, but it is not a groan of hopeless frustration because Paul links it back to this phrase, we can cry, Abba Father.

Some time ago, I remember being at a park and I saw a two year old who's very happily walking and, you know, running around trying to play on all the things. Very cute, very friendly, but all of a sudden, a little black Scottish terrier, smaller than even this two year old, was also very happily playing around in the play park. But when that little terrier came up to that two year old, everything changed. The dog who was too excited, and the little boy became too scared. And even of this little cute puppy, the instinct in the baby was to see this dog as a threat.

And this cute little puppy became an overwhelming reality of fear, so that the baby turned to their mum, threw up their arms and said, mummy, even having been so independent and happy go lucky all that time. Paul links the cry of Abba Father to that same compulsion. All of creation groans, but only Christians groan with the words Father, Dad, Abba. And it is the Holy Spirit that causes us to say those words, to feel that desire. That's why Paul sums it up in verse twenty-six by saying, likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness.

For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. Now, I think there's enough evidence in Romans eight to suggest that the Holy Spirit doesn't only intercede for us with deep groanings during our pain and our suffering alone. Those deep desires to please God, to live according to the law of the Spirit, those will evoke in us emotions of joy and thankfulness as well. If you've been a Christian for a while, you may have experienced those moments of deep and lasting peace, that moment of joy that you cannot articulate or explain why you have it, but you know you have it.

We are told that the Spirit in all of those instances knows exactly what's going on. And because the Spirit knows, God the Father knows. It means that every one of our prayers is laced with the interceding work of the Holy Spirit. He speaks on our behalf. He corrects our faltering motives.

He corrects and improves our failing words. Because you have the Holy Spirit inside of you, you have the unshakeable hope that when you speak, God hears. The wonderful thing about our Triune God is how intimately He works with us. He has sent Himself into our hearts. That is why when I said this morning, when we worship, it's not in any way some sort of distant thing, an abstract thing of a God far out there, a deity that we sort of yell at from down here.

That's why it doesn't matter where we worship. He is with us all the time. Our relationship with this God is an incredibly intimate and even circular process. The urges, the desires, the longings, the emotions, the thoughts, the feelings inside of us are real. And with our minds, we know where to direct them.

We direct them to God. Yet it is the Spirit working in us to both create those impulses and then to communicate them to God as well. But then get this, we are also told that the Spirit of God speaks God's word and promises back to us. So there's not simply a one way speaking to God in prayer. It is in some way speaking back to us.

First Corinthians two verse ten, we have this incredible insight into the dynamic of our Christian walk. First Corinthians two verse ten. These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him?

So also, no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And so while the Spirit's groanings may be wordless, the Father knows what the Spirit has in mind. And what the Spirit has in mind perfectly matches the will of the Father.

And so your groan, taken up by the Spirit, presented to the Father, is returned to you in a way that matches the Father's purpose in transforming you and shaping you into what? The likeness of the Son. There is a Trinitarian process every time we pray. The long and the short of it is this, that the Holy Spirit transforms our groans so they become part of the means by which God achieves His purposes in our lives. And God's greatest purpose is to make us like His glorious, beautiful Son.

When it comes back to the reasons why Christians pray, the Holy Spirit is absolutely central to that process. We can't pray without the Spirit. People pray. Other religions pray all the time, but that is not prayer in the most meaningful way. In fact, the Bible would say it is meaningless.

The Spirit of the living God is the power behind our prayer. He is the reason we want to pray. You wanna think about this in sort of redemption historical framework, I've always thought that the fact that Jesus gave the very first step to His apostles in what they were to do when He gave them the Great Commission. He tells His disciples in Luke 24, do nothing until the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you can think, with millions of people waiting to hear the gospel, He instructed the only ones who knew anything about what has just happened to wait until they receive something mysterious that they have no idea of identifying.

So they are sent away not to write any letters, not to go and speak and try and persuade anyone of the veracity of Christ's resurrection. They are not to go and plan what their next steps are. They were to do nothing until the Spirit of God would come. Why? Because until the Spirit came, they couldn't do anything of value anyway.

Jesus is the one who promised to build His church. And so He would accomplish much more in that one moment of His Spirit coming than they could accomplish in all of their efforts combined. So the next time you pray, remember to thank the Spirit for His interceding work in giving life to your words. Every time you pray, try to remember that God is there with you through His Spirit and that your words are going straight to the mind of God. And the great peace and joy and thankfulness that you can experience is something laced with the supernatural heavenly power of God Himself, who through the Spirit is sharing with you the mind of Christ.

So that in that moment of prayer, you feel and you sense, in some way, the Spirit of fellowship and communion with God. Friends, if that is the hope that we have in our prayer life, we have every reason to pray and to pray often. Through the Spirit, we have new desires and a new power to pray. We pray through groans and longings laced by the interceding presence of the Spirit. And so this morning, as we finish, let's pray through Him to say thanks.

Let's pray. Our heavenly, present, active, living God, this morning in our time of communion with You, we thank You that we may experience and sense emotions, thoughts and feelings that are divine. We thank You that the joy and the peace we may be feeling, the concentration of our minds to place them on heavenly and supernatural things, abstract things even, our hearts that are warmed, our consciences that simply know that this is true. God, in all these ways, we know that You are with us through Your Spirit.

Holy Spirit, we thank You for Your quiet ministry to us. Thank You that because of You, we are never alone. Thank You that You help us in our deepest needs, that You pray on our behalf through us, that You call us and draw us and reunite us with our God. Thank You that You are the power that causes our hearts to cry out to our Father in heaven. And so Holy Spirit, sovereignly, powerfully, irresistibly, You are the one that evokes all our prayer and worship.

Who would we be without You? And so, Lord, help us to keep in step with You, our Holy Spirit. Help us to not frustrate Him. Help us not to quench Him. And Lord, through our lives to pursue the things that are of the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit.

Help us to live as a church in the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. Lord, for the areas in our life where we may have ignored You, Spirit, where we may have baggage that has warped our understanding of who You are and diminished You to simply be a power, something that we plug into, something that we can claim for ourselves, Lord. Forgive us in all those various ways of having reduced You.

It is because You are so humble and quiet and subtle that we have misunderstood. Renew our thinking. We thank You that You can do that and we say to You, please, Lord, do that. We ask this through the working of the Spirit, by the enabling of the Son, to the glory and the purpose of our Father in heaven. Amen.