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Three Reasons the Holy Spirit Prays for Us

Tautges posts on prayer (6)

by Paul Tautges /

The last of three posts on the role of the Trinity in prayer. The first two are here and here.

In the process of prayer, the Holy Spirit plays a role both unique and unexpected. Romans 8:26-27 puts it like this.

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. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Just as creation groans waiting for the fullness of redemption, and just as believers groan waiting for redemption from their earthly bodies (Romans 8:22-23), so the Holy Spirit groans in prayer! Three truths concerning the Spirit’s ministry of prayer for us are here to be uncovered.

The Spirit Prays for Us Because We Are Weak

The Spirit who resides within “helps” us. He comes to our aid, rescues us, makes our prayers acceptable to God the Father, and helps shoulder our heavy burden. This is the ongoing ministry of the Spirit in our “weakness,” our human frailties.

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The Son Understands Our Weaknesses

Tautges posts on prayer (4) by Paul Tautges /

The second of three posts on the role of the Trinity in prayer. The first is here.

Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, is the one whose perfect life and sin-atoning death serves as the only possible bridge between sinful man and a holy God. Accordingly, all our prayers must go “through” him, the believer’s High Priest.

As Our High Priest, Jesus Stands Between Us and the Father

Now that Jesus has ascended back to the Father, his ministry to us continues. The door to God that the Son opened for us through his death, he now keeps open in his role as our High Priest.

Making a sacrificial offering. In ancient Israel the holy place was the exclusive, innermost room of the Temple in Jerusalem. It was open only to the high priest, only once per year, and only on the condition that he enter with the blood of an acceptable offering. As the ultimate High Priest, Jesus would later enter the true holy place in heaven, just once, to offer himself as the sinless sacrifice for his people (Hebrews 9:24-26; 10:1-14). By bringing his own blood to the throne of God, Jesus satisfied God’s holy standard and bore away God’s wrath against our sin (Romans 3:25). He achieved all of this “through his flesh,” that is, by his humanity, the “curtain” torn apart to gain our access to God (Matthew 27:51).

Interceding. In addition to offering sacrifice while in the holy place, the high priest of ancient Israel would also pray for the people, interceding on their behalf before God. Again, this was ultimately a foreshadowing of Jesus. As our “great priest over the house of God,” Jesus Christ is the eternal, living intercessor for God’s household, the church, and is uniquely qualified for this role as the only one who has lived both in flesh as man and in heaven as God. This leads us to the next essential concept.

As the God-Man, Jesus Understands Human Frailty

Just as the high priest in the Temple of ancient Israel could relate to and thus represent his people before God while in the physical holy of holies, our High Priest in the heavens took on flesh and lived on earth in that body for more than 30 years. Therefore, he can relate fully to our struggles.

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:14-16).

In interceding as High Priest on our behalf before the Father, Jesus therefore serves as our Mediator—one who stands in between God and man. He is the only one who can serve in this role.[tweet “Do we ponder enough the connection between the humanity of Jesus and the privilege of prayer?”]

In Jesus, every Christian possesses the acceptable Mediator who has already satisfied the holy wrath of God against our sin. As a result, we may boldly come to the Father “in Jesus’ name”—that is, through the blood and complete worthiness of Jesus. But Jesus our great High Priest did more than complete a task for us; as our mediator he also understands us.

“In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (Hebrews 5:7). Are you not struck by the phrase “with loud cries and tears?” I am. The image of Jesus weeping should stamp upon our minds the reality of his humanity. When he cried out to the Father in anguish in the garden called Gethsemane—his raw emotions wrestling against the fact of his impending death—his bloody sweat was mingled with many tears. This helps us realize just how human Jesus was (and still is). Our theology rightly teaches us that Jesus is both 100% God and 100% man, but do we ponder enough the connection between the humanity of Jesus and the privilege of prayer?

It was in “the days of His flesh” that Jesus prayed. As the virgin-born Son of God, Jesus walked the same human road we walk (with the exception of the guilt of sin). As part of his humanity, the pattern he established at the beginning of his public ministry to rise early in the morning and go to a desolate place to pray continued until the night before his death (Mark 1:35; Matthew 26:36).[tweet “From personal experience Jesus knows exactly how hard life can be in these bodies.”]

Through the disciplined lifestyle of prayer, Jesus admitted the weakness of his—and thus our—humanity. As Henry Thiessen puts it, “If the Son of God needed to pray, how much more do we need to wait upon God.”[1] By calling us to pray, and by opening the door into this fellowship by means of the shed blood of his Son, God reminds us of our human weakness and invites us to ongoing fellowship in his presence.

From personal experience Jesus knows exactly how hard life can be in these bodies, having experienced every kind of temptation we will ever face. Our Savior is both sympathetic and empathetic. This is why we can confidently draw near to him in our time of need. His throne is truly a “throne of grace,” dispensing mercy and help to us whenever we call upon God through him.

* * *

In the third and final post in this series, we will consider three reasons the Holy Spirit prays for us.

This series has been adapted from Chapter One of Brass Heavens: Reasons for Unanswered Prayer, by Paul Tautges.

[1] Henry C. Thiessen, Lectures in Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1949), 228.

Tautges Paul Tautges serves as senior pastor of Cornerstone Community Church in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. Previously, he pastored Immanuel Bible Church in Sheboygan, Wisconsin for 22 years. Paul is a husband, father, and the author of eight books. He also blogs regularly on discipleship and the Christian life at www.counselingoneanother.com.

The Father Delights to Listen

by Paul Tautges /

The first of three posts on the role of the Trinity in prayer.

The first person of the Trinity—the one who freely chose to send his only Son to die for our sins—is aware of our needs, listens to our cries, and delights to give us what is good for us.

The Father Knows Our Needs

While teaching his disciples about prayer, Jesus made this amazing statement: “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8).

Your Father. The first thing to notice here is that Jesus does not call the first person of the Trinity “the Father of heaven and earth,” though that surely is true. Instead he stresses the relational aspect, saying “your Father.”

The believer in Christ has a relationship with God that the unbeliever does not. God is the Father of all in the sense that he is the Creator “from whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:6), but he is Father, relationally, only to believers. This relationship, which is based on grace alone through faith in Christ alone, deepens and thrives when we take our needs to the Father in prayer.

Before you ask. The second part of Jesus’ comment—that our Father “knows what you need before you ask him”—can easily raise an honest question: If God already knows our needs and the always-faithful Father has promised to meet them, why bother to pray? It may seem like an obvious question, perhaps with an obvious answer, but what happens next in the gospel account is striking.

Notice what Jesus didn’t do after telling us about the Father’s foreknowledge: he didn’t just stop talking! If he had, we might conclude prayer is unnecessary—God knows what you need; end of story. But Jesus refused to leave us to our own flawed, finite human logic. Instead, going against our logic, our Lord said essentially the opposite: “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven…’”

Your loving Father knows what you need before you ask him, therefore… ask him? Jesus wants us to see that prayer is more about changing us than it is about informing God or moving him to action.

As a sacrifice of time and energy that could have been used for other things, prayer is an act of worship, one by which our hearts are exercised in faith, not merely in religious ritual. “Ask,” Jesus tells us, “just ask.” Why? Because true prayer cultivates humility. It requires us to acknowledge our helplessness. We ask because Jesus told us to ask. We ask because all that is good comes from God, not from our own efforts.[tweet “Prayer is far more about changing us than it is about informing God or moving him to action.”]

As we build a lifestyle of prayer, this regular acknowledgment of God’s fatherly provision is infinitely more valuable than anything else we may receive. The main thing is not that in the future we might get what we pray for. The main thing is that in the present, as we pray, our greatest need is already being met. That need is the transforming work of God in our hearts, with prayer itself as one of God’s appointed means of meeting that need. When Jesus promised a “reward” for those who pray in secret (Matthew 6:6), perhaps this refining work of God in our hearts is at least partly what he had in mind.

The Father Delights to Give Gifts

Having taken joy in hearing the cries of our needy hearts and knowing our needs better than we do, God delights to give us those things that will be best for us. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). Written by James, the half-brother of Jesus, this verse portrays God in a way that should powerfully motivate us to pray.

Good and perfect gifts. God is the source of all that is good, and he delights in giving good things to his children. Jesus says in Luke 11:13, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” If we as human beings find joy in giving our children what we believe to be good gifts, how much more does an infinitely good God know how to give to his children!

Sometimes we think God withholds things from us because he does not love us. The opposite is true. Sometimes God’s withholding of our requests proves his love. He did exactly this for the apostle Paul to keep his pride in check (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). God loves us too much to let us go down a harmful path, even if we see it as the path of blessing.[tweet “God’s not answering prayer often proves his love: Paul’s thorn in the flesh checked his pride.”]

Father of lights. All of these undeserved gifts come down from the “Father of lights,” the creator of the sun, moon, and stars (Genesis 1:14). These heavenly bodies testify to God’s glory in part by offering a visual representation of God’s “light”—his holiness and purity (1 John 1:5). Men, however, are not light—we naturally love darkness because we love sin (John 3:19). But it is impossible for God to be involved in darkness in any way whatsoever. There is “no variation or shadow due to change” in God for he is pure light—unchanging and unchangeable. Unlike the sun, moon, and stars, the light of God’s holiness never surges or fades. It always burns with the same infinite intensity. Therefore it is impossible for God to tempt us toward evil. If we ask him for a fish, he will not give us a serpent (Luke 11:11).

* * *

Of course, the Father is not the only member of the three-in-one God. The perfect work of the sinless Son of God opened the door to the grace-saturated throne of our prayer-answering Father. The next post in this series will address the role of the Son in prayer.

This series has been adapted from Chapter One of Brass Heavens: Reasons for Unanswered Prayer, by Paul Tautges.

Eight Quotes about Luther from ‘A World Upside Down’

8 quotes about luther by Kevin/

“Luther found peace with God through being justified by faith alone. Yet in finding peace, he discovered he was at war with the world. The irony—that the sweet and pure good news from heaven would bring such enormous warfare and destruction—was not missed by Luther. In his later years, he would reflect on how the world has ever been at war with the gospel, going back even to Paradise and the murder of Abel by Cain. He perceived this rage against the promise of grace continuing on through history, up to his own time. ‘Yet I am compelled to forget my shame and be quite shameless in view of the horrible profanation and abomination which have always raged in the Church of God, and still rage to-day, against this one solid rock which we call the doctrine of justification.’”¹ (Page 35)

“Luther [recognized] that the law and gospel are two entirely distinct categories: law is not gospel, gospel is not law. The beauty and power of each vanish when they are blended together. The perfection and majesty of the law is compromised, and the announcement of the good news that Christ kept the law for us and suffered the curse of the law for us is entirely lost. Blending the two leads one into suffocating moralism, anguished guilt, or a lofty legalism that destroys everything and everyone in its wake.” (Page 47)

“Luther grasped the fact that sinners were declared righteous by God apart from any of their works, whereas the [Roman] Church in Luther’s day taught that sinners were made righteous in actual conduct as they cooperated with God’s grace. This actual righteousness, the Church taught, was the means by which a person was justified before God. Luther understood the subtle yet damning error in this teaching, for while it acknowledged God’s grace as helping the sinner to obey, it placed salvation back into the efforts of man and removed the objective peace of God that rested entirely in Christ alone.” (Page 51)

Three Problems with Free Will

“Salvation by works. Luther understood free will as being at the very heart of the gospel. He realized that if man’s will is truly free, then man is capable of keeping God’s law perfectly and thus earning a right standing with God.
Remember that Luther had tried himself to behave perfectly before God, and failed. Every monk he had ever known had failed. Every Jew in the Old Testament— indeed, every person in the Bible, except Jesus, had failed. To Luther, Scripture itself explained why free will was a false notion, and therefore why every person other than Jesus has always failed and will always fail to behave in a way that God finds acceptable.

“In other words, Luther realized that if man’s will is free, he can save himself through works, without any help from the perfect life and sacrificial death of Christ on the cross.

“Salvation by decision. Luther also recognized a second, separate, fundamental problem: if man has free will he can choose to believe. This means that a person with free will can—indeed, he must—contribute to his own salvation. Such a choice thus becomes a necessary element of every Christian’s salvation. A person’s eternal destiny thus comes to rest in his or her own decision, rather than in the sovereign decree of the Triune God.

“Shared glory. Finally, Luther noted that if one held to the doctrine of free will, glory does not go to God alone. It is shared with man who has chosen God.

“For all these reasons, Luther thought the concept of free will established man as judge and arbiter over God. He keenly observed that Erasmus’s thoughts started with man and not with God. Therefore, in writing to Erasmus he stated, ‘Your thoughts of God are too human.’”² (Page 61)[tweet “Luther: if man’s will is free, he can save himself through works, without Christ.”]

“Luther’s definition of the words repentance and faith reveal a third integral aspect of his understanding of the gospel. He stood against the Roman Catholic Church’s definition of these words that undercut the free gospel of grace. Incorrect definitions of these terms would ruin the entire gospel message. In our day, as well, the gospel is often lost because we have vague definitions of these terms—definitions that insert works and human effort back into the gospel. Therefore it is crucial to be clear on what repentance and faith actually mean.” (Page 55)

“The promise of the gospel—specifically, being justified by faith alone and not by works—was what Luther considered to be the difference between the true and living God and all other gods, which were merely idols. In his lectures on Psalm 51, Luther noted that all other gods besides the true and living God, no matter their name, are simply one and the same god—a god who masquerades as Jehovah, but is in fact merely a god without mercy, knowing only justice and wrath. He is a god without the promise of grace, a god before whom we could never be justified. To encounter God without his offer of grace is to destroy ourselves.

“Luther’s distinction between god the absolute (the false gods who relate to us by works) and the God of promise was a brilliant observation. All the religions of the world that seek justification through law (no matter what form this law may take) are worshiping a false god. Even those who may belong to a Protestant church but are still seeking to be justified by works are worshiping the ‘absolute god’ (to use Luther’s phrase), who is really no god at all but rather an idol. Only in true Christianity can the living and true God—the God of promise—be found. Only before the God of promise can we stand justified by faith alone. Only by the promise of the gospel can we have goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our life and know the sweetness and joy of God’s abiding love. In other words, only in Jesus Christ is the promise of grace found, given, and enjoyed.” (Page 54)[tweet “Only in true Christianity can the living and true God, the God of promise, be found.”]

“Am I of the Elect?”

“Luther knew that the teaching of the bondage of the will, along with predestination (that before the creation of the universe God had already selected specific individuals to be saved) should be handled pastorally. For those who wondered if they were of the elect (that is, predestined), he warned against trying to answer this question by looking at predestination; if one did this, he would be driven to endless despair and caught in a firestorm of anguish and doubt. Rather, look at Christ and the gospel promise. Hear the good news and believe!

“It’s actually not complicated: if you want Christ and the gospel, you are one of his elect. This is how you will know if you are God’s child. To start instead with predestination would be to try to climb into heaven and see the hidden counsel of God, which will crush a person. One should not build his or her assurance on the hidden counsel of God—that is, by starting with the question, Am I elect? Rather, Luther counseled to begin with Christ and his being freely offered and known by the promise of the gospel. It would be disastrous and absurd to build one’s faith and assurance on the secret counsel of God’s predestination. Rather, build on the foundation: Christ. Here the Lord is freely offered and freely known. Only by starting with Christ the foundation can one move on to knowing that one is predestined.” (Page 63)[tweet “It’s actually not complicated: if you want Christ and the gospel, you are one of his elect.”]

“Each Lord’s Day, Christ, the Bread of Life, is to be freely offered through the preaching of the gospel for the forgiveness of sins. Through the forgiveness of sins the Christian is sanctified: ‘[God] imparts, increases, and strengthens faith through the same Word [the preached Word of the gospel] and the forgiveness of sins.’³ Thus, preaching is not so much a matter of training people for spiritual heroics. Rather, for Luther, preaching offers weak and sinful people what they truly need: Christ. Preaching also includes proclaiming God’s law so that a church may be first humbled and then filled with joy in believing the gospel as a result. Then, as men, women, and children return home with Christ alone in their hearts, they go out rejoicing and advanced in their sanctification.” (Page 90)

These quotes were taken from A World Upside Down: Four Essays on the Life and Theology of Martin Luther, by Charles E. Fry, with a Foreword by Jerry Bridges. Subscribe today and it will be the first book you receive.

1. Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (Middleton version [1535], Logos Bible Software), 16.
2. J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston (eds.), Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will 1525 (Westwood, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1957), 87.
3. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 439.

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