The Prayer She Stopped Praying

She used to say it every morning for about six years.

The same words, more or less. She was not a woman for long prayers and it took maybe forty seconds, and she said it in the same chair, and there were mornings when she meant it so hard her hands shook.

She has not said it since the autumn.

Not once. She still prays. She prays for other people, at length, and she is the one people ask, and there are three women in that hall who would tell you she has carried them.

She simply cannot say her own one.

She tried in January. She got about four words in and stopped, and sat there, and then made the bed.

Here is what she has concluded about herself, and it is the reason she has not told anybody.

She thinks her faith has failed.

Not in a dramatic way. She has not stopped believing anything. But she has quietly worked out that a woman who cannot ask God for the thing she most wants is a woman whose faith has run out somewhere, and she has been carrying that verdict since about November, on top of everything else.

If there is something you have stopped asking for, come and sit down over here. Nobody is going to ask you to say it.

Paul says the Spirit does the praying, and he says it about people who cannot

There is a passage that was written for exactly this and almost nobody hears it in time.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Read who is in trouble in that sentence. We are. We do not know what to pray for as we ought. Paul includes himself, without embarrassment, in a letter he is writing to instruct a whole church.

And read what happens about it. Not a correction. Not an instruction to try harder or to learn the right words. The Spirit steps in and does the praying, and the praying He does is described as groanings which cannot be uttered, which is to say it does not have words in it either.

You have not stopped praying, and the praying has not stopped happening. Romans 8:26 puts the interceding in the Holy Spirit's hands precisely where a person's own words run out, which means the chair you sat in during January was not an empty room.

The silence is a symptom, and it is not the verdict you gave it

Now the conclusion you reached in November, because it is the thing doing the actual damage.

You decided that a woman who cannot ask for the thing she most wants has a faith that has failed.

That is a reasonable inference and it is wrong, and it is wrong for a specific reason.

You are not silent because you stopped believing He could. You are silent because saying the words puts you back at the front of the wanting. Romans 8:26 says likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, and it is written of exactly the place where the words will not come, and the Spirit named there has been at the front of the wanting on your behalf for six years.

That is not unbelief. That is a wound doing what wounds do when they are touched.

You are not being assessed on what you can get out of your mouth in a chair. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred makes the heart sick and stops there, without one word of correction attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that clause in that order rather than a more encouraging one, which means the state you are in is a condition the word names rather than a charge it brings.

And nobody is going to hand you the rest of the proverb this morning. It exists and it is true and rushing you into it would be doing the thing that has been done to you every time somebody meant well.

I am also not going to tell you to start saying it again. Not as a test, not as a discipline, and not as evidence of anything. If it comes back it will come back the way these things do, sideways, in a car, unplanned.

You are held in exactly the place you are, for as long as that is where you are. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed He does not break and smoking flax He does not quench, and it is His Spirit who carries a word at the temperature a person can actually take, which means nobody here is hurrying you out of the chair.

God is the one holding you, and He has been holding you since the autumn, including through every morning you could not begin.