Daily Manna · Day 129 · May 9
Help for Weakness
“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.”
Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought.
That sentence is the reason hospital corridors are survivable. You get as far as the name and the words run out and you stand there feeling useless.
Paul's word for helpeth is a compound of three parts: to take hold of, together with, on the other side. Two people lifting one beam, one at each end. It is not encouragement shouted from a distance. It is weight taken. And notice what he calls the weakness. Not sin, not thin faith, not a failure of discipline. Ignorance about what to ask for, and he stands inside it with everyone else: we know not.
Read to the end of the next sentence, because that is where the promise finishes. He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God. So the prayer that arrives is not the one you phrased well. It is the one he carried, translated out of groaning and into the will of God somewhere on the way up.
Which means the worst praying you did this week, the kind that was mostly silence and one name repeated, did not fail to arrive. It arrived finished.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 129 is Godly Sorrow (2 Corinthians 7:10).