Groanings Which Cannot Be Uttered Is a Category of Prayer

A woman told me she had stopped praying about the thing, and it turned out she had not stopped at all.

What had happened is that she had run out of words.

She said she used to have a whole prayer about it. Structured, specific, the same shape most weeks, and she had prayed it for about six years. And then at some point in the seventh year the words stopped arriving, and what she had instead was a sound she makes when she thinks about it, and she had concluded that the sound was not prayer.

So on her own account she had stopped, and she was carrying guilt about having stopped, on top of everything else.

And I asked her whether the sound is aimed at God, and she said yes without thinking about it, and then she heard herself say it.

Paul names it as a category

There is a sentence in Romans that I do not think most people have ever had explained to them, and it names something as prayer that nobody would have thought to call prayer.

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, King James Version)

Read the middle clause. We know not what we should pray for as we ought.

That is not describing a lapse. That is Paul saying, about all of us, that there is a standing condition in which a person does not know what to ask for, and he is not scolding anybody about it.

And then the answer he gives is not that we should study harder or pray better. The answer is that Somebody else is praying underneath.

Groanings which cannot be uttered. The word means inarticulate. It is not that the words are hard to find. It is that there are no words in this and there were never going to be.

You have a kind of praying that Scripture names and describes and never once treats as a lesser version (Romans 8:26), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who is doing that praying rather than a person failing at the other kind.

Who is doing it

The next verse says something about the arrangement that is worth having, because it answers the obvious objection.

And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:27)

He that searcheth the hearts knoweth. So the communication does not depend on the words being adequate. It runs between the Spirit and the Father, and both ends of it are God.

Which means a person with no words is not making a poor transmission. They are present at something that was never depending on their vocabulary in the first place.

You are not the transmitter, and the intercession in that passage runs between the Spirit and the One who searches hearts (Romans 8:27), and it is His work rather than yours that carries what you cannot say.

And the psalms are full of the sound rather than the sentence. David describes his own praying in terms that are not verbal at all.

I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears. (Psalm 6:6)

I am weary with my groaning. He is describing exhaustion from a sound, and he calls it prayer by putting it in a psalm.

And that psalm was collected and sung by the assembly. Somebody read it, decided it belonged in the songbook, and handed it to a nation to use.

You have a sound that the people of God put into their own hymnbook, and Psalm 6 keeps the groaning rather than the recovery. That work is the Spirit's, and He preserved it there for somebody who would need permission.

Why running out feels like giving up

I want to name why this particular loss produces guilt, because the guilt is what does the real damage.

Words are how a person checks that they are still doing something. A prayer with a shape can be assessed. It has a beginning and an end and it can be finished, and finishing it feels like faithfulness.

The sound cannot be assessed. It does not finish. It arrives and it goes and there is nothing to inspect afterward, and a conscientious person reads that absence of evidence as an absence of activity.

And there is a second thing. Running out of words very often happens at the same time as running out of hope, and the two get fused, and a person concludes that the wordlessness is the unbelief showing.

It is not. Six years of words and a seventh year of sound is a description of exhaustion, and exhaustion is not a moral condition.

You are not showing unbelief by running out of language, and there is a verse that states outright that we do not know what to ask (Romans 8:26), and the Holy Spirit is the one who steps into exactly that gap rather than standing outside it disappointed.

And this belongs here plainly, because this category reaches people in real danger. If what you carry has taken you to the place where being here at all has come into question, do not hold it alone tonight. Tell a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.