When You Don't Know How to Pray

Most of us know the feeling. You sit down to pray and nothing comes. The need is too deep, or the heart is too tired, or the situation is too tangled to put into words. In those moments it is tempting to believe we have failed at prayer.

Paul speaks directly to that place of weakness:

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.

Read that slowly. Paul does not say if we are weak, as though it were the exception. He simply assumes it. We do not know what to pray for as we ought. That is true of all of us, more often than we admit.

You are not praying alone

Here is the comfort. When you cannot find the words, the Spirit of God is already at work within you, carrying to the Father what your heart cannot express. Your halting, wordless prayer is not lost. It is taken up by God himself and brought before the throne.

And the verse goes on: the Father "who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit." Nothing is misunderstood. Even your sighs are perfectly translated.

A quieter kind of faith

This frees us from thinking prayer has to be eloquent or even coherent to count. On the days you can only manage to sit before God and breathe out one honest word, that is prayer, and it is heard.

So if you are in a season where you do not know how to pray, do not stay away. Come as you are, weakness and all. You will find that the Spirit was praying through you the whole time.

This is sample devotional content for the site. Clark and Kathy's own writing will appear here.