Help in Our Weakness

I invite you to turn with me to the book of Romans and to chapter 8 and to verse 26. You’ll find this reading on page 800 in the church Bibles, and I commend to you the exercise of taking one and turning to it, if you didn’t bring a Bible of your own, and trying to follow along as best as you can.

We pick up Paul’s argument. He’s told us that the creation is groaning, he tells us that the church is groaning, and now, quite remarkably, he tells us that God himself is groaning.

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for”―or, alternatively, “how we ought to pray”―“but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.”

Amen.

Gracious God, we pray now for your help, that the Bible might be alive to us―that you will conduct that divine dialogue with our spirits, by the Holy Spirit, so that beyond the voice of a mere and an ordinary man we might hear from you, the living God. This is our earnest hope and expectation, our humble cry. Hear our prayer. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

During this past week, I enjoyed the privilege, along with a friend, of listening as a young man whom I’d never met before told us how it was that he came to believe in Jesus―told us how it was that he became a Christian. I don’t have time to give you all the details. Perhaps one day he’ll be able to do it for himself. But the striking thing that he said was that the Holy Spirit, essentially took over his life. He didn’t use the exact phrase, but that was generally the area in which he spoke. I found that very interesting, and I made note of it because it struck me as being in the same category as the response of a young Asian girl when I asked her in Harvard Square how it was that she’d become a Christian. And on that occasion she said to me, “I entered through the narrow gate.”[1] And I always remember that because it was such a striking response. And when I asked this young man, “And how did you become a Christian?” he said, “Well, the Holy Spirit invaded my life.”

And actually, it was very helpful for him to do so. Because although the details of how he arrived at that position were his own, the reality about which he spoke is a reality which he shares with every other true believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. And I want to take just a moment this morning to stand back from verses 26 and 27, because it is a month or so since we’ve been in chapter 8, and also because there will be some here this morning who have no prior knowledge of chapter 8 or even perhaps a prior knowledge of the Bible at all.

So I want you to notice that in 8:9, the distinguishing mark, or one of the distinguishing marks, of a Christian is that the Spirit of God lives in them: “You, however,” he says, “are [not controlled] by the sinful nature,” which is the state of being unconverted, which is the normal condition of everyday life. We may not like the sound of that, but what the Bible says is we’re either controlled by the sinful nature, or else we’re controlled by the Spirit of God. By nature, the former is true. By grace, the latter becomes a reality.

He says in verse 15 that we’ve been adopted into God’s family; we’re no longer aliens and strays. And in verse 16, he says the Spirit of God within us actually “testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.”[2] So this is something very different from an individual who says, “I have an interest in theology,” or “I like to read about spiritual things,” or “I am an attender at a local congregation,” all of which is a matter of interest and may be some help. But this is something very, very different from all of that―namely, that the Spirit testifies within us, within the real you and the real me, that we are actually the children of God, that we have become something that we weren’t before. And in the case of this young man, he says, “That’s what happened to me! The Spirit of God invaded my life, and I became his child.”

Well, I wonder, has the Spirit of God invaded your life? And would you be able to testify in the same way?

Now, as we’ve gone through these studies, we’ve seen that the reality of this experience is one that takes us down the same path as that which was walked by Jesus. And in verse 17, “We are children, … heirs of God … co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we [might] … share in his glory.” And you have this juxtaposition between suffering and glory.

Some people have an idea that Christianity exists to take men and women out of the realm of suffering and bring them into the realm of tranquility or of ease―somehow or another to fly above and beyond all of the turbulence of life. And that’s why they seek it out, and when they find that that hasn’t happened, then they turn away from it, and they say, “Well, it’s no use at all. I might as well have got a self-help book from the library and tried to fix myself for all the help that that was. Because I thought I was going to be done with all of these things! And I’ve been listening to some Christians, and it sounds as though their life has become much harder since they became followers of Jesus than it ever was before. How could that be?” Well, because the path of discipleship is the path that Jesus walked. He walked the path of suffering into the realm of glory.

Now, the word glory is an interesting word, isn’t it? You don’t really find it used very often, except in Christian circles. I know someone would say, “It is a glorious sunset,” or “That was a glorious meal,” but even then, I don’t think it’s used very often, even as an adjective, and certainly not as a noun. And since we’re using it, and since it’s an important word here, we ought to understand what Paul is talking about. And essentially, it is this: that glory is the outward manifestation, or the outward shining, of the invisible God―that God’s glory, or God’s character and his power and his majesty, which are all invisible to us, become visible as he makes himself known.

So, as has been prayed already this morning, there is a glory that attaches to creation—that when you stand, and you look up into the night sky, and you realize the vastness of the solar system there, and you look up into the galaxy that is our Milky Way, you find yourself saying, “This is something far greater than anything we have ever known.” You take a tiny child in your arms, and you look at the way that they are so intricately fashioned, this speaks to God’s glory. Because one of the ways in which God has manifested his glory is in the creation―not just in the creation of our world and our cosmos but in the individual creation of you and me. You have been made in the image of God. And one of the ways that the invisible God becomes visible is in his creation.

The path of discipleship is the path that Jesus walked. He walked the path of suffering into the realm of glory.

“Oh, well,” you say, “but isn’t the creation or the visibility of God somewhat marred in our lives?” Good! The answer is yes! And the Bible tells us why. And if you would like to take a moment, I want to show you how Paul traces this argument here, even in Romans. And you need to go back to Romans 1:21, where Paul is describing the fact that “although [men and women] knew God”… “Knew God.” Atheism is a choice. Atheism is a decision. Atheism is an act of rebellion. No one is born an atheist. Everyone is born with an innate knowledge of God. Men and women choose to deny the existence of God.

Contemporary atheism wants to suggest that we were all born atheistic, and a few crazy individuals have chosen to invent the notion of a Creator. The Bible says no. And here Paul explains: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him”―ingratitude is always a mark of ungodliness―“but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged”―and here’s our word―“exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.”

So what he’s saying is that when God made man, when he made Adam and Eve, he made them in his image. Adam and Eve turn their back on God, they disobey God, and the image of God is now marred in humanity. And at the heart of that is idolatry. It is the worship of someone or something other than the Creator, to whom we are accountable. And these substitute gods are as prevalent in twenty-first-century Western culture as they were in the cultures of Mesopotamia and Assyria and the Amalekites and so on, all the way through the journey that is given to us in the Bible. Misdirected worship is at the heart of it.

When Paul then takes this forward, he says in 3:23 that there’s actually no difference between the gentile person who’s in this predicament or the Jewish person who’s in this predicament. That’s really what he’s been arguing. He argues the gentile situation in Romans 1, and then he says, “But there’s no peculiar advantage to you actually being a Jew, since you, even in your Judaism, substitute gods for the true and living God.” And then he gets to it in verse 23: “There[’s] no difference,” he says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”[3] None of us gives to God the glory that he deserves, despite the fact that as the Scottish Catechism tells us, the chief end of man, the reason for our existence, “is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”[4] Made in his image, we possess a dignity that is distinct from the beasts. As sinners, that dignity is marred. And as a result of that, our reach always exceeds our grasp.

Paul then comes to the solution, and wonderfully so, when he gets to chapter 5. And what he’s been pointing out is that the exchange that we have made―exchanging God’s glory for the shameful substitutes―is an exchange that is more than matched by the exchange of God himself, who has in Jesus exchanged all the glory that he knows in heaven for all the shame and the poverty and the dirtiness and the sinfulness of earth; and that the great exchange that man has made in substituting himself for God has been addressed by the great exchange that God has made in substituting himself for man, so that Jesus takes the place of the sinner on the cross, thereby making a reality acceptance with God for all who are trusting in his provision.

And that’s why in chapter 5 he says, “In light of this”―and this is to summarize four chapters―he says, “therefore, being justified by faith”―not by anything that we have done―“being justified by faith…” Faith in what? Faith in this great exchange, that God has provided in Jesus, a Savior. “Therefore, being justified by faith, we have,” present tense, “peace with God. We have access into this grace in which we stand now,” and here we go: “and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.”[5]

And what he’s actually doing there is he’s setting the scene for that to which he comes back here in chapter 8: not only are we going to see God’s glory, but God’s glory is going to be seen in us. When John writes about this in 1 John, he says, “And we know that when we see him, we will be like him.”[6]

Now, Paul has been addressing this in this chapter 8, and he’s been pointing out to his readers―and we are his readers―that the messed-up nature of our world has to do with the fact that we are messed up. We’ve got a broken-down world because we are broken-down people. The nature of the breakdown is the breakdown in relationships between ourselves and God our creator. Instead of us going to the provision that the Creator has made for us, we go to our own little creations, seeking somehow or another to make sense of our lives, to fill up our days with the adoration of that which is less than what God has intended—and hence the futility and the sense of emptiness that pervades things.

Not only are we going to see God’s glory, but God’s glory is going to be seen in us.

It is then in light of this that he tells us in verse 22 that the creation is groaning; that, in verse 23, the people of God are groaning; and that, in verse 26―and here is the wonder of wonders―beneath our groanings, God himself is groaning. And what he describes in verses 26 and 27 is phenomenal; it is mysterious, it is wonderful, it is almost beyond our ability to grasp― namely, that what we have described for us here is the groaning of God praying to God: God the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, who now lives within the life of a believer, speaking to God the Father in and through the prayers and the cries and the intercessions of those who are his children.

You see how different Christianity is from most notions of spirituality and world religions? Every day we live our lives, the great attempt is to flatten onto one terrain any notion of a God, or gods, or an interest in God, or awareness of God, or whatever else it is. And Christianity stubbornly refuses to be pressed down into that milieu—not on account of arrogance but on account of the inevitability of the fact that the claims of Christianity stand out as being so unbelievable as to almost demand that we would consider them as true.

Now, we’re at verse 26, and I think you’ll be relieved about that, because that’s where we should be. And it is here that we’re told that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness.” He’s been describing life in the Spirit: it is the Spirit that is at work in creation, it is the Spirit that is at work in our lives, and it is the Spirit now who “helps us in our weakness.”

Let’s address this in two ways: first of all, acknowledging this to be true generally, and then acknowledging it to be true specifically in the context that Paul gives us here.

A General Truth

Paul has been very clear concerning the nature of weakness, and classically so in 2 Corinthians and in chapter 12. And again, if you like to turn to that, you will see that as he takes on the false apostles of his time, who are arguing about how strong and wonderful they really are, he decides that he’s going to tell them how unbelievably weak he is. And as he reaches the apex of his argument, he says in 2 Corinthians 12:7, “To keep me from becoming conceited, or from getting a big head—because,” he said, “I’ve had revelations of God that are so unbelievable that I couldn’t even begin to talk about them, and that could give me a sense of dominance and priority and so on. And God, recognizing that, to keep me from getting a big fat head, he gave me a thorn in my flesh.”[7] We don’t know what it is. If we needed to know, we would have been told. We know that it was a torment to him and something that he would like to be rid of.

He’d asked the Lord three times if he would take it away from him, and three times the answer came back no, because, God told him, “my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”[8] “My power is made perfect in weakness.” “Okay,” he says, “therefore”―deduction―“if that’s the case, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest upon me. For,” he says, “when I am weak, then I am strong.”[9]

It’s paradoxical, isn’t it? It’s ironic—especially when you set it within the context of twenty-first-century America. Because the one thing that you’re not supposed to admit to is weakness. Everyone is a winner in America.

The Massachusetts school system I’m sure is very good in part, but it does some interesting things. In a book called NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children, the authors identify the interesting decision on the part of the Massachusetts school to provide physical education classes in which the children would jump rope without rope. So, they would now come, and, “We’re going to do rope jumping today, children, but we’re not going to be using any ropes. The reason being straightforward: if we actually introduce ropes, then it’s going to prove that some people are completely clumsy, and they will fall over their own feet. And since we could never allow such a thing to happen, we will have to do it without ropes so that everybody will be seen to be equally strong when it comes to jumping rope. And when we finish that, we’re going to go out, and we’re going to play soccer. And when we play soccer, we’re not going to count how many goals anybody gets, because if someone gets more goals than another person gets, then that would seem to suggest that someone is not as good as someone else, and since we can’t possibly allow for that, having embraced egalitarianism as the great shrine at which we worship, therefore, we will not have any goals.”[10]

The book says, “Modern parents [are wanting] to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.”[11] The assumption is that thinking highly of oneself is a prerequisite for high achievement. And that’s why―and some of you have actually started to do this―you put little notes in the lunch box of your children telling them they’re a genius. The fact that they didn’t finish their cereal, that they left their room a royal shambles, and that they’ve been a pain in your neck for the last seven days didn’t stop you, because you’ve imbibed so much of the spirit of the age that you actually believe that this is the key to the well-being and the future of your child.

Let me tell you what is the key to the effectiveness and well-being of your child: the discovery of their own personal inadequacy, and the discovery that in that inadequacy there is the opportunity for growth and for achievement.

Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street, July 2009, she writes, “For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.”[12] We’re not talking about a wrong sense of inadequacy. We’re talking about a proper sense of inadequacy—the proper sense of inadequacy that comes when you jump rope with ropes and you realize you’re a klutz, and you realize that when you saw Sugar Ray Leonard doing that thing, and you tried it, you looked like the village idiot. That’s fine! You’re not Sugar Ray Leonard. You’re not going to be. Relax! He probably can’t do many of the things you do. But you see, the reason I mention this is because if we’re going to read our Bibles and we’re going to allow our Bibles to speak into the world in which we live, then we need to identify the world in which we live and bring it into contrast or confluence with the instruction of Scripture.

John Thornton wrote to Charles Simeon, a very effective pastor in Oxbridge, in an earlier generation, and he wrote to him a word of warning that went like this:

[Charles,] watch continually over your own spirit, and do all in love; we must grow [downward] in humility to soar heavenward.

I should recommend [you] having a watchful eye over yourself, for, generally speaking, as is the minister, so are the people.[13]

And we have on numerous occasions turned to that classic position of expressed weakness in 2 Chronicles 20, which you can turn to for your homework, where Jehoshaphat assembles all of the people in the city square, and he says before God, “We have no power to face this vast army that is [coming upon] us. We do not know what to do.”[14] And people could have stood on the sidelines, said, “You call that leadership?” “We have no power. We don’t know what to do.” “You’ll never get a job with that kind of thing! You have to go in and say, ‘I’m very powerful, and I know how to do everything.’ That’s the kind of person they’re looking for! That’s the kind of girl they need!” Really? “We have no power. We don’t know what to do.” You know what the very next phrase is? “Then the Spirit of [God] came.”[15] “Then the Spirit of [God] came.”

You know when the Spirit of God comes to your life and to a church? When, in your life and in mine, you are prepared to say, “I am weak.” Not “I am inherently sinful,” ’cause that’s “sinful,” but “I am inherently weak.” And when we are prepared to get to that place, then we’re able to identify with the wonder of what we’re told here―namely, that the Spirit of God helps us in our weakness.

So when you wake up in the middle of the night, as I’ve told you before, and the bedclothes have formed up like the Matterhorn in front of you, and you’re fearful, and you’re unhinged, and you’re disappointed, and you’re sad, and you’re empty, and you’re lonely―and that’s just for starters!―and you can only basically say, “Father,” you can only manage to get out of your mouth, “Abba,” here’s the good news: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness.”

So, that is why God brings into our lives—especially those of us who are smart alecks, or “smart Alexis”—those things which will show us our ineffectual dimensions, not so that we can be beaten down but so that we can discover the wonder of what he delights to do in the lives of those whom he has made his children.

We can justifiably recognize that as a Father, he watches over us, and he provides for us, and he gives us all things richly to enjoy,[16] including the experiences of pain, and illness, and marital unsettlement, and child-rearing challenges, and business eventualities, in order that we might make the discovery of Romans 8:26.

It’s Andraé Crouch. I almost said, “It’s Andre Thornton.” It’s Andraé Crouch, you know, when he says,

’Cause if I never had a problem,
I’d never know that God could solve them.
So…

How’s that… Oh, it’s coming back to me now:

So I thank him for the mountains,
And I thank him for the valleys,
And I thank him for the things he’s brought me through,
’Cause if I never had a problem,
I’d never know that God could solve them;
I’d never know what faith in him could do.[17]

See, in shunning trials we miss blessings. In telling everybody how strong we are, we miss the opportunity of discovering how wonderful is the strength that God provides. In suggesting to people that our marriage is entirely intact and there hasn’t been a better marriage since 1915, we tell lies, and we fail to make the discovery of God pouring his grace into the fragile nature of our relationships and fulfilling the promise that is here.

A Specific Truth

Well, we could go on, “generally,” and we daren’t, because we need to deal with this specifically. And what is he speaking about specifically? Well, he’s speaking about prayer. He’s speaking about prayer.

And I hope this is as much an encouragement to you as it has been to me. Because if there is one area of life that shows how weak we really are, especially in our Christian life, is it not prayer? Would anybody stand up and say, “You know, when it comes to prayer, I’ve got prayer… I’ve got it buttoned down. I mean, I pray all the time. I pray… I pray five times a day. I pray to the north, I pray to the south, I pray to the east, I pray to the west, I pray sitting, I pray standing,” and so on. No, you’re not going to do that. If you do, you’re just silly. No, you’re going to be honest with me, and you’re going to say, “Yes, I find prayer really hard.”

Well, here’s the encouragement: God understands that, and he’s made a provision for it. In fact, he’s made two provisions for it. In verse 34, we’ll come to the fact that he has provided in the Lord Jesus one who intercedes for us in heaven, and here, in verse 26 and 27, he tells us that he has provided for us the Holy Spirit, who does for us in our hearts what Jesus does for us in heaven. So, there you are. Verse 26, sentence two: “We do not know.” That’s where we start! “We do not know.” Until we know what we don’t know, we’re in trouble. “We do not know how we ought to pray, or what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes.”

In telling everybody how strong we are, we miss the opportunity of discovering how wonderful is the strength that God provides.

And when you take this apart, you realize that the Spirit of God prays for us, he prays in us, and he prays through us. It’s very hard to get your head around this. Says Warfield, the desires are ours and the groans are ours, “but not apart from the Spirit. They are His; wrought in us by Him.”[18]

Now, I could read that to myself three times slowly and still find myself saying, “You what?” And I think what Warfield is saying is that the Spirit of God―when I say what I’m saying, when I think what I’m thinking, when I come before God, when I’m driving in my car, or when I’m sitting in my home, or in my chair, or wherever it is, or I’m kneeling in my study, and you say, “This is hopeless! I can’t pray”―the Spirit of God is at work saying, “What Begg is trying to say is this. What Begg is on about—he doesn’t even know what he’s on about himself! But I’ll tell you what he’s on about, Father.” That’s a great encouragement to me! And I hope it is to you. Because the Spirit of God helps us in our weakness, not just generally but specifically in the realm of prayer. He prays through us. Says Calvin, the guarantee of the answer to our prayer is found in the nature of their origin.

Where does prayer come from? Prayer actually comes from heaven. God is the originator of prayer. That’s the thing. We don’t pray! People don’t pray, except for God. People do everything except pray. Oh, the plane drops a thousand or fifteen hundred feet in extreme turbulence over the Alps; they start praying then, crying out in all kinds of ways. But by and large, as soon as it all settles down, we’re back to where we were before. No, prayer has its origination in heaven.

And that’s why God answers prayer. You say, “This is even more alarming than I thought before. This is so hard to understand!” “God thoroughly approves”—this is still Calvin—“our desires as the thoughts of his own Spirit. Our heavenly Father will not refuse to satisfy yearnings which by his own Spirit he has put within you.”

You see, apart from the Spirit of God, we don’t know to pray, “Your will be done.” Apart from the Spirit of God, we don’t pray, “Hallowed be your name.” Apart from the Spirit of God, we wouldn’t pray, “Your kingdom come.”[19]

Now, what if people start doing that and actually meaning it? “What’s happened to you,” says the husband to the wife, “that you’re saying these prayers and you’re writing these things in your journal? What the world has happened to you? What do you think you’re trying to do with all of this?” And the husband is alarmed―and justifiably so! And especially when you tell him, “The Spirit of God has come to live in me.”

“What? I mean, it was bad enough that you started to go to church, but now you’re telling me that God lives in you, that he actually indwells you?”

“Yes!”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know what to do with that,” he says.

Well, “we do not know,” verse 26. Verse 27: but he knows. We do not know; he knows. You’ve got it all there, don’t you? “He who searches our hearts.” It’s an interesting description of God, isn’t it? It’s one of the favorite descriptions of God, especially in the Old Testament. You remember when Samuel is going to look for the one who will be anointed king, and God says to Samuel, “You look on the outward appearance, but I look on the heart.”[20] When Solomon is praying for the dedication of the temple, he says, “O God, you are the one who searches the hearts of all men.”[21] When the psalmist writes in Psalm 139, he says, “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit down and when I stand up; you know the words of my mouth before I even speak them.”[22] This doesn’t render prayer irrelevant. This makes prayer effectual. The same God who inspires it and answers it is the God who asks us to do it. He doesn’t send us on a fool’s errand. Don’t fall foul of the notion that because God knows the end from the beginning, prayer is irrelevant. The same God who has ordained the end is the same God who has ordained prayer as a means to bring about the end. And if you have nothing hard to think about, think about that for a little while this afternoon. But God is sovereign over all these things. We don’t know; he knows.

And I searched in vain during the week for a meaningful analogy. I can’t come up with an analogy for this. Even the closest thing that I can come to, it is still no good. For example, mother with tiny child. You meet little tiny child. Tiny child is in the bucket. You kneel down to say hello to aforementioned child, and the child says, “Hey, [gibberish].” And the mother says, “Oh, she’s saying she just loves to see you and be out here in the park.” You’re like, “What? How do you know that? Sounds like gibberish to me!” Yeah, but you’re not her mother. But even then, the mother doesn’t inspire that. But there is something there. There’s no doubt there is.

Or what about the spouse whose husband has had a major, significant stroke and is paralyzed all down one side? And when you go to visit, as the pastor, and to pray, you’re confronted by that saddest of scenes: that that once vibrant, strong body is now debilitated as a result of the ravages of the neurological impact of these things. And his wife says, “He says that he’s glad that you’ve come. And he says he would like you to read the Bible and pray with him.” And you say to yourself, “There has to be some strange organic intimacy between that couple for her to be able legitimately to make sense of that inarticulate noise.” And when your prayers and mine sound like that, the Spirit of God intercedes in them, through them, for us. And that is our confidence.

And let me finish in this way: think about this in relationship to prayer and preaching. You remember the apostles in Acts 6? They said, “We will give ourselves to prayer and to the preaching of the Word.”[23] Prayer and preaching. A congregation like this, for good reasons and for ill, may be tempted to think that the real issue is the preaching—for after all, God has pledged to use this strange means to open up the truth of his Word. Fine. God gives gifts to pastors and to teachers, as he’s done within the framework of our pastoral team. But actually, prayer is that which renders preaching effective. And when you read, for example, the words of Jesus in John 16, he says that it is the work of the Spirit of God to bring conviction, and it is the work of the Spirit of God to bring illumination.[24] Conviction and illumination.

Now, I spoke early on, didn’t I, about how God’s glory is marred in us; how by nature we’re distanced from God; how he has made a great exchange in the gift of Jesus. Some of you are distanced from God. You’ll be honest enough to admit that. You’ve never come to trust in Jesus. You come to church, you’re involved in different things, but you have never—you couldn’t speak in terms of a divine invasion. You wouldn’t speak in those terms.

Well, let me ask you, would you today? Would you be willing, before you leave today, to admit that you’re a sinner and that there is no other possibility of reconciliation with God apart from the work of Jesus on the cross? Have you, as you’ve listened to me today, had any inclination that actually, the truth of this book is really the truth? Then, if either of the answers to those questions are positive, let me tell you why that is: not because of my ability to speak but because of the willingness of God’s people to pray.

And so I urge you to trust in Christ. And those of you who do trust in Christ, I urge you to pray that others will trust in Christ. For your pastors may preach the exact same sermons to vastly different results, not as a result of a more effective means of articulation but as a result of intercession―your intercession, my intercession. But you say, “I don’t even know how to pray or what to pray.” That’s okay! The Spirit of God fills in your weaknesses.

Here’s a closing thought: maybe Parkside has yet to see what will happen in reaching our communities with the gospel when not only the pastors take up the challenge of proclamation but when every member of the congregation takes up the challenge of intercession. Because then, you see, it’s team. We’re all in this together, committed under God to seeing unbelieving people become his committed followers.

Well, we stop now, and I look forward to seeing you this evening.

Gracious God, open our blind eyes to who Jesus is and what he’s done, unstop our ears, defeat our stubborn wills, and come and help us in our weakness.

And may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God our Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with all who believe, now and forevermore. Amen.

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[1] See Matthew 7:13.

[2] Romans 8:16 (NIV 1984).

[3] Romans 3:22–23 (NIV 1984).

[4] The Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 1.

[5] Romans 5:1‒2 (paraphrased).

[6] 1 John 3:2 (paraphrased).

[7] 2 Corinthians 12:7 (paraphrased).

[8] 2 Corinthians 12:9 (NIV 1984).

[9] 2 Corinthians 12:9‒10 (paraphrased).

[10] c (New York: Twelve, 2009), 18. Paraphrased.

[11] George F. Will, “Slaying Myths of Modern Parenting,” review of NutureShock: New Thinking about Children, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, New York Post, March 6, 2010, https://nypost.com/2010/03/06/slaying-myths-of-modern-parenting.

[12] Peggy Noonan, “A Farewell to Harms,” Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124716984620819351.

[13] John Thornton to Charles Simeon, Clapham, November 13, 1782, in “Simeon, Thornton, and Newton,” The Churchman (February 1880): 372.

[14] 2 Chronicles 20:12 (NIV 1984).

[15] 2 Chronicles 20:14 (NIV 1984).

[16] See 1 Timothy 6:17.

[17] Andraé Crouch, “Through It All” (1971). Lyrics lightly altered.

[18] Benjamin B. Warfield, Faith and Life: ‘Conferences’ in the Oratory of Princeton Seminary (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916), 200.

[19] Matthew 6:9–10 (NIV 1984).

[20] 1 Samuel 16:7 (paraphrased).

[21] 1 Chronicles 28:9 (paraphrased).

[22] Psalm 139:1‒2, 4 (paraphrased).

[23] Acts 6:4 (paraphrased).

[24] See John 16:8, 13.