TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (26th October, 2025), starting us off on a journey through the some of the prayers of the Bible.

You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).

---

‘The power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless eternal universe.’

―Stan Lee[i]

READ: ROMANS 8:26-27 (NIV)

[I would encourage you to read the above verses in the context of Romans 8:15-30.]

WHEN WORDS FAIL

I was going to begin by playing a clip from Sesame Street.[ii]

But after reading such a magnificent portion of Scripture, it just seemed too strange a disparity to go straight to Kermit doing the alphabet, even for me.

Although, to be truthful, Kermit’s conversations with children in Sesame Street always remind me of prayer—the openness of it, the intimacy, the ability to come honestly; to be seen and understood, to see and to understand.

Like the children before Kermit, because of Jesus, we are encouraged to boldly enter into God’s presence assured of His glad welcome.[iii]

Prayer is amazing, if we stop to consider it.

It’s amazing that God speaks to us.

It’s equally amazing that we can speak to God.

And so, we’re beginning a new series this morning—a series exploring the prayer life of Scripture, in all its richness and rawness.

We are not the first to call on God, or even to mumble the word help toward Him. The Bible records over six hundred prayers—don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a six-hundred-week series!

But, by taking a sampling of those prayers, I want us to be encouraged by the wonderful array of human emotion and predicament that Scripture displays for us. Some of these prayers are songs, others are shouts. Many are screams. Several are stuttered.

I want us to appreciate that prayer isn’t a special language. It isn’t a religious dialect reserved for the spiritually articulate. Anyone can pray and, as one writer puts it, ‘Virtually everything human is appropriate as material for prayer: reflections and observations, fear and anger, guilt and sin, questions and doubts, needs and desires, praise and gratitude, suffering and death. Nothing human is excluded.’[iv]

When we look at the Bible, we’ll see that whatever prayer is, the one thing it is not is being nice before God. It isn’t about putting on a polite face of pretence. Prayer is more grit than gloss. Prayer isn’t like our laundry at home—the pile we hide out of the way whenever guests come around, acting like we don’t have laundry, even though we all have laundry.

As C. S. Lewis advised, in prayer ‘We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.’[v]

We come as we are, because we can do nothing more.

And the prayers recorded in Scripture encourage this: They give us permission—and vocabulary—to come undone before God.

Having said that, I don’t want to begin this series with vocabulary, as such. The last thing I want us to think is that prayer somehow hangs on our ability to speak, or our ability to be eloquent. It doesn’t.

Thank God!

Maybe I’m only talking about myself, but I find prayer difficult. I know I’m not alone.

There are times when we bow our heads, open our mouths and nothing comes out. Or worse: words do come—maybe a torrent of words, or maybe in spits and spats—but they all just fall flat, they feel hollow, they don’t say what we want to say.

The problem is not that we don’t know how to pray, as such. The problem is not technique, it’s clarity—I don’t know what to pray.

Often, praying feels like trying to remember a tune you once knew, but all you can do is hum a fragment.

Maybe you’ve been there—sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the carpet, wanting to say something to God but only managing a half-formed thought. Your sentences tangle. You stop. Nothing is uttered and a groan stands in for a sentence.

“Ugh”, “ngnnnnnngh”

Most of us, I think, have experienced this—at the hospital bedside; in the dark hours of anxiety; when we witness the events on the news; when we experience the fatigue of ordinary life.

It’s easy to misinterpret the silence that follows and the frustration you feel as failure. That our inability to utter anything to God means we’re somehow doing this thing called prayer wrong. Maybe, you may even hear a condemning whisper from that Old Liar, saying, ‘Call yourself a Child of God! If you really were, you wouldn’t be having this struggle.’

But Paul, in Romans 8, disagrees. In those moments of speech-lessness, something remarkable is happening. Paul writes:

‘In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.’[vi]

Pause with that. Let it sink.

This passage isn’t telling us: ‘Get your act together, find the right words, muster eloquence.’ Quite the opposite. If you feel at a loss for words, you’re in the right place. Our struggle to pray doesn’t repel God—it draws Him near.

In those moments when all you can bring before God is a pocketful of mumbles and a handful of heartache, when you whisper, ‘Lord…’ and nothing else follows, the prompt is not to upskill, but to trust.

If we can grasp this, we will realise that prayer, then, is not the achievement of perfect expression but the surrender to divine presence. And that to pray—to surrender to God’s continued presence when our words fail—is to trust that the relationship matters more than the conversation.

DIVINE DIALOGUE

God is not condemning our incapacity. Never! He delights to help us.

Our incapacity is the Holy Spirit’s desired designated workplace.

One of the major themes of Romans 8 is the wonderful and necessary work of the Holy Spirit within the believer’s life. When Paul starts verse 26, he is continuing to list out and relish in the benefits of the indwelling presence of the third person of the Godhead, and one of those benefits is that the Spirit helps us in our weakness.

When Paul says helps the word he uses is really a sandwich of three words (συναντιλαμβάνομαι, synantilambanomai). And even then, it’s more of a vivid picture than a word sandwich. It literally means to take hold alongside. Picture yourself straining under an impossibly heavy weight—like trying to carry a ten-foot-long table on your own—and someone comes to lift the other end. That’s the Spirit’s posture toward us.

Paul also tells us the Holy Spirit intercedes (ὑπερεντυγχάνω, hyperentygchanō) for us. Again, it’s more of a picture than a word and, like helps, it basically means to act on the behalf of someone else when they are in trouble.

Taken together, both pictures give a non-so-subtle and not-so-flattering description of our incapacity.

Sometimes, there are things we do—like painting a house, mowing the lawn or cleaning out the gutters—that we could do quicker if we had a little help. We don’t need the assistance, we can do it without assistance, but help is welcome and appreciated.

But Paul isn’t talking about prayer like that, or the role of the Spirit like that—as if the Holy Spirit is an optional supplement should we need His help. Neither is Paul describing the Holy Spirit as a reward for those who achieve exceptional experiences in prayer. We are dependent upon the Spirit’s help for everything within our Christian lives, from start to finish, including our prayer life.

We sometimes have this crazy idea that salvation is God’s work and then living the Christian life is all our work; as if God has rescued us from the ditch of sin and death, pulled us back on to road, dusted us off and then left us all alone, to walk this new life in our own strength.

But this is not what Scripture teaches.

In Romans 8, verse 2, Paul writes to these early believers and reminds them that yes, ‘the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed us though Jesus Christ from the power of sin and death.’[vii] But in verse 11, Paul also reminds them, and us, that the ‘The Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead’ now lives in us, too, giving life to us. What a marvel!

In verse 15, Paul goes onto say, it’s only because of the Spirit, speaking deep into our hearts, that we are reassured that we can call God, the Creator of everything, ‘Dad.’ There is a nurturing intimate relationship we are encouraged to delve into and root ourselves into—one that is encouraged and exists because God has given the Holy Spirit to us.

‘Likewise,’ or ‘In the same way,’ Paul adds at verse 23, the Spirit helps us in our weakness—even when we don’t know what to pray. More than this, Paul goes on (in v.27) to make it clear that it is God’s will that we are helped in prayer, by God himself.[viii]

I’m saying this because I want to encourage each of us in our prayer lives. But there’s a real danger as Christians to think about our prayer life solely in the terms of our prayer life. Measuring it solely in the terms of how much time we put in and in how many words we get out.

And yet, Paul is digging away at something fundamental, exposing the very ground to all our prayer.

That, to paraphrase someone else, prayer happens because God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, prays within the believer.[ix]

Everyone prays, I guess. At some point or another.

Someone once joked that even the most ardent atheist will pray when the aeroplane is crashing.

Watch any FA cup final or World Cup final when there is a penalty shootout, and as the camera pans across the tiered seating you will see thousands upon thousands of people with their hands tightly clasped together and their eyes lifted.

Whether it is the plane’s descent or the penalty shootout, there’s this shared idea within these acts—that prayer is a human operated initiative in which we attempt to send some kind of ‘phone’ signal up to God. That it is on us, and us alone, to make contact.

Imagine it: A stadium full of people, all trying to get God on the line before the fans in the other half of the stadium can reach him. All trying to tap in the correct ‘area’ code. All making vows about what they ‘will do’ and ‘will not do’ if only God will pick up the at the other end and grant their request.

I’m not mocking any of this—after all, that’s how S.G came to faith in Jesus.[x]

There’s certainly nothing wrong with us ‘reaching out’ to God. This is great, in fact.

But Christianity has another light to shed on it all: Prayer, as described by Paul in this passage, isn’t primarily about us reaching God—it’s about the triune God reaching into us.

I’m not going to attempt to unravel the mystery of the Trinity, of One God and three persons—sorry it you’re expecting that. All I want to say is that Paul sketches a Trinitarian vision of prayer in Romans 8: God the Father searches hearts; God the Spirit intercedes within us, here on earth; God the Son, as Paul goes on to add in verse 34, intercedes for us, too, in Heaven.

There’s a mystery Paul hints at and leaves us to wonder about—that prayer is not a human initiative in which we try and get God to listen to us, but rather, because of the Holy Spirit, we are pulled into participating in an ongoing conversation within God.

A God-started conversation. A God-sustained conversation.

When I pray—regardless of whether I have words, or not; regardless of whether I use liturgy or spontaneity; regardless of whether I use language, known or unknown, or merely groans—there is more happening than my ability or lack thereof: We are invited to eavesdrop, I suppose, on the “prayer life” of the Godhead and to feel God’s pulsing heartbeat for our world and for our life.

The psalmist, contemplating this ability to converse with God, once insightfully remarked, ‘Ears you have dug for me.’[xi]

We tend to soften and sanitise the psalmist’s visual image by toning it down to our ears being ‘opened’, like a packet of crisps. But the psalmist knows what he meant. The Hebrew is dug—like taking a pickaxe to a hardened rockface to make an entrance.

In prayer, God is pick-axing our ears and hearts, so we become sensorially aware of His heart.

There is, what I would call, a ‘symphony of Divine sympathy’ that we are drawn into, and that begins to beat within us.

HELPFUL SKETCHES?

Paul tells us that Spirit helps us with inexpressible groans. The phrase in Greek (στεναγμός ἀλάλητος, stenagmois alalētois) literally means wordless groanings, inarticulate sighs. Paul is not talking about languages—known or unknown. And many have wondered over what Paul is describing.

I think this ‘symphony of Divine sympathy’ helps us grasp Paul’s meaning.

Sometimes, we can think that the Spirit’s help is in the form of taking our imperfect prayers, spell checking them, correcting them, adding to them, and then presenting them to the Father in a form that is acceptable and up to standard.

But there’s no Scriptural support for that. And such thinking gives off the stinky idea that God only accepts perfect prayers.

I’m not entirely sure what a “perfect” prayer is.

As we go through this series, we are not looking at “perfect” prayers—we are going to encounter many imperfect people in many imperfect situations calling out to a gracious God.

To use a flimsy analogy: My kids, when they were little, never once drew a bad picture.

They would come home with their stick drawings of me and Steph, or some animals, or some machine—and each and everyone was a masterpiece that I was more than happy to stick on our fridge and say to visitors, ‘my son drew that.’ I still have many of their drawings. I still cherish them.

What I did not do was pass their pictures to some other third party to polish up—‘can you make that look more like the Mona Lisa.’

I delighted in whatever my children brought to me.

How much more does our Heavenly Father delight in our ‘stick men’ prayers.

The Spirit’s help is not a matter of translating your messy prayers into something God can tolerate.

God understands—nothing is lost in translation, Paul assures us. God searches all hearts and knows all hearts. Even when you or I can’t get our words right, or can’t even get our words out, God still knows exactly what we mean—even when we can’t understand ourselves! The effectiveness of our prayers are not dependent upon the clarity of our speech but on the clarity of God’s hearing.

Even before we ask, Jesus himself tells us, twice in Matthew 6, God knows exactly what we need.[xii]

The Spirit’s not correcting your grammar. Rather, He’s expressing divine compassion in your groans. He’s not fixing your speech—He’s sharing your pain. The Spirit’s sighs are God’s own compassion breathing in us.

Paul has already mentioned this groaning.

Earlier in the same chapter, Paul says creation itself groans (v. 22), and that we ourselves groan inwardly (v. 23). Now, even the Spirit groans. God groans with us.

We live in a world that isn’t as it ought to be.

One day, as Paul has been writing, creation itself will be restored. As another New Testament writer says it, there will be a day when death and decay will be no more, when all sorrows will cease, when our tears will be wiped away—a day when we will not feel the strain or shadows of our current experience of reality.[xiii] But for now, we still suffer. We still know pain and heartache.

We live in this tension of the ‘already’ and ‘not yet’ of God’s Kingdom reign.

Paul has stated that what we suffer now is incomparable to the glory we will experience then[xiv], but it’s still a matter of then, and not now. That future glory is still something that we cannot begin to imagine and comprehend.

Yes, because of the indwelling of God’s Spirit, we have a foretaste of the then—but, as with all foretastes, it whets our appetite and so sharpens the contrast between what is and what will be.

It’s like catching the aroma of a cooking meal when you’re hungry. The aroma both excites our expectation and hope—food is on its way! But with the aroma, the hunger pangs deepen, and the rumbling becomes more vocal.

The foretaste gives us hope, but it also expands the longing.

This is the ‘weakness’ Paul is speaking about—our current situation as we wait, as in labour pains, for all to be as it ought to be.

It’s one of the reasons—maybe the reason—I often don’t know what to pray for. I struggle to conceive what that future life will be like—I only know this experience of it. And so all my prayers are based on what I feel now, on what is immediate to my current situation.

I think I know the solutions to my cravings, but, as with Esau’s hunger when he got a whiff of the stew Jacob was preparing, I’m only thinking about the short-term, confusing release for redemption—and more often than not, totally indifferent to the difference.[xv]

I respond to everything through the filter of my hunger, my mortality—my weakness, my weary-ness, my wounded-ness.

And God, in his goodness and grace, doesn’t tell me to just get over it, or to merely ‘whistle and look on the bright side of life,’[xvi]—God sits with me.

The Spirit groans with us.

There is something beautifully scandalous about this. He enters the mess. He inhabits our silence, our confusion, our groaning. He doesn’t look away. God does not stand apart from the pain and weakness we feel, but comes and dwells with us in the midst of it.[xvii]

The Spirit’s groan is the language of loving sympathy in the middle of the world’s brokenness.

The Spirit’s groans are the grammar of grace.

The Spirit is not a detached helper standing by with a clipboard; the Spirit groans with creation, with us — partaking and stimulating the shared pain of love that longs for God’s new world.

To paraphrase something Augustine of Hippo wrote back in the late fourth century, the Spirit stirs us to pray with deep, wordless longing for the future we’ve yet to see.[xviii]

The Spirit does not permit us to fall silent in our grief and despair; He excites us to pray even when we are speechless, giving our groans a divine voice.

Thankfully, our hope doesn’t depend upon our ability to express and describe it. God is preparing a feast that will meet the world’s deepest hunger. And as Paul closes the passage of Romans 8, he is keen to remind us that it’s the faithful love shown to us in Jesus Christ that secures this.

BEYOND SPEECH

Most of us come to this passage not as theologians but as weary pray-ers.

I want you to know that prayer isn’t just what we do—it’s what happens in the triune God.

When your vocabulary collapses and vanishes, the presence of God doesn’t.

When your faith is down to a whisper and you fall silent, know that heaven is not silent: the Godhead continues to converse about you and this world, and for you and for this world.

God remains faithful to his purpose.

At the heart of Romans 8:26–27 lies an invitation to faith beyond speech.

God doesn’t require you to be eloquent. The door to God’s presence is not guarded by perfect words or polished prayers. It is open to the humble sigh, the groaning heart, the wordless longing.

So this week, when you feel you don’t know what to pray for, or cannot pray as you’d wish, or your words are stuck — don’t retreat. Sit. Be still. Trust that the Spirit intercedes. Trust that God searches hearts. Trust that he welcomes you. Trust that God is faithful to complete what He has begun. He delights in you, and even in your frailty he is at work.

---

‘Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.’

― attributed to Martin Luther

---

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

[i] The Watcher in The Avengers #14, by Stan Lee, Essential Avengers, Vol. 1 (Marvel Comics, First published January 10, 1966)

[ii] The clip in question? See here: https://youtu.be/lYIRO97dhII?si=6v9FESgXJ0nvy9Ly

[iii] Hebrews 4:16; Ephesians 3:12

[iv] Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, UK, 2006), p. 105

[v] C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer (Collins, Fontana Books, London and Glasgow, 1966), p. 24

[vi] Romans 8:26-27, NIV

[vii] Romans 8:2 (NLT)

[viii] As per Martyn Lloyd-Jones, when Paul writes ‘according to the will of God’, ‘Paul does not mean solely that the petitions which the Spirit gives us are petitions with which God agrees. That thought is included, but the Apostle would not have troubled to tell us so, because it is quite obvious. As the Spirit is the Third Person of the blessed Holy Trinity anything He does is obviously certain to be in agreement with the mind of the Father. No, the Apostle is saying something much more striking and wonderful. He is assuring us that the Spirit comes alongside us, takes up our burden and begins to act as our advocate within us, because it is God who has sent Him to do so. He is doing this ‘according to the will of God’; it is a part of God’s plan, a part of God’s way of saving His people.’ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 8:17–39 – The Final Perseverance of the Saints (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1975), p. 141

[ix] Leander E. Keck, Romans, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 10 (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2002), pp. 111-112.

[x] S.G. is a member of our MCC family, who came to faith in Jesus due to the result of a football match.

[xi] Psalm 40:6

[xii] Matthew 6:8, 32

[xiii] Revelation 21:3-4

[xiv] Romans 8:18

[xv] Esau’s hunger, and Jacob’s wrong manipulation of it, can be read Genesis 25:27-34

[xvi] To quote the amazing Monty Python song

[xvii] Tom Wright notes, ‘The church is not to be apart from the pain of the world; now we discover that God himself does not stand apart from the pain both of the world and of the church, but comes to dwell in the middle of it in the person and power of the spirit [sic].’ Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part One (SPCK, London, 2012), p. 154

[xviii] Augustine’s words are, ‘He therefore makes the saints intercede with groanings which cannot be uttered, when He inspires them with longings for that great blessing, as yet unknown, for which we patiently wait.’ St. Augustine of Hippo, Letter 130 to Proba, chapter 15, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff (Christian Literature Publishing Co., Buffalo, 1887).