He has been sitting in the chair by the window for eleven minutes and he has opened his mouth twice.
The room is the right room. It is the one he comes to, the front room, late afternoon, the chair that faces the garden, and the book is on the arm where it always is, and the light is doing the thing the light does at this hour across the carpet. He has been coming in here since before the children were born. This is not a man who does not pray.
But there is one specific thing tonight. One thing, quite small, that has been sitting on him since Tuesday, and it is not the sort of thing the book has a page for, and he wants to say it out loud, in his own words, to God, the way you would say it to a person.
So he opens his mouth.
And what happens next is not a blank. It is a queue. Something in him starts assembling. It says: not like that, you have not addressed Him yet. It says: you cannot ask before you have thanked. It says: you have missed the confession, and anyway that is not the right word for what you mean, and if that is not the right word then the whole sentence is going to come out crooked. And by the time he has taken the sentence apart to fix the beginning of it, the thing he actually wanted to say has gone quiet somewhere at the back, and the moment has that particular flatness a moment gets when it has been managed instead of lived.
So he closes his mouth and reaches for the book, and reads a prayer somebody else wrote four hundred years ago, and it is beautiful and it is true and he means every word of it. And it does not say the thing.
That is Tuesday. It was also Thursday. It has, in one form or another, been most days for about nine years.
You know that queue.
I am not going to tell you where it came from, because I do not know and it is not mine to guess. I can tell you what it is: a rule. Not a bad man's rule and not a stupid rule, either. It has the shape of reverence, which is exactly why nobody has ever asked it to produce a source. And I want to say straight away, before anything else, that I am not here to take your book off you. The forms you love are not the rule. They are some of the best sentences human beings have ever managed and they have carried people through nights they could not have crossed on their own words. Nothing here touches them.
What I want lifted is one sentence you have never seen written down anywhere: that God is waiting for the right words in the right order before He can hear the thing you actually came to say.
Paul assumed you would not know how
Here is the verse, and I want you to notice who it is written to and who it includes.
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
We. Not you. Not the beginners at the back. Paul, writing the deepest chapter in his deepest letter, says of himself and of every believer in Rome and of the whole church since: we do not know what we should pray for as we ought.
Sit with that for a second, because it changes the ground under your chair. The not-knowing is not the fault in the system. The not-knowing is the condition the whole arrangement was built around. God did not set up prayer for people who would know how, and then make quiet allowances for people who would not. He set it up knowing that nobody would, and then He put His own Spirit inside the gap.
That is not my reassurance. It is Paul's own sentence in Romans 8, and the Holy Spirit he is describing is the one who is in the front room with you while you fail to begin. You have never once been the exception in that verse, and the not-knowing was assumed before you got here.
Now look at what the Spirit's own praying sounds like, because this is the part that quietly demolishes the whole queue. Groanings which cannot be uttered. Not eloquent groanings. Not well-ordered ones. Unutterable: without words at all. The most effective intercession happening in the universe on your behalf, at this moment, contains no vocabulary whatsoever, which means it cannot be in any order, which means order was never the currency.
Hear the shape of the verse itself: the not-knowing comes first and the help comes second, in Romans 8, and the Spirit who wrote that down through Paul is the one holding the second half open for you tonight. It is already done, this business of getting your meaning to God properly, and it is being done by Someone who does not need the words.
The forms were never the rule
Now let me protect what you love, because a lifted rule is not a bonfire and I am not going to leave you with less than you came with.
Jesus taught a form. He said, after this manner therefore pray ye, and then He gave His disciples words in an order, and the church has said them ever since (Matthew 6:9). The Psalms are a prayer book. A hundred and fifty of them, arranged, memorized, sung in order, and God wrote them Himself. Nothing in this article says a written prayer is second class, and any teaching that mocks a man for loving old words has not understood what he was doing with them.
So notice carefully what Jesus said. After this manner. A manner is a direction of travel. It is a shape you learn so you know roughly where north is. He did not say: in this exact sequence, or the door does not open.
And look at who He praised for praying. A man at the back of the temple who could not lift his eyes, hitting his own chest, with seven words and no structure at all: God be merciful to me a sinner (Luke 18:13). Jesus said that man went home right with God, and the man in the front with the well-built prayer did not. And look at Nehemiah, standing in front of a king who has just asked him a direct question, with no time at all: so I prayed to the God of heaven, and then answered the king (Nehemiah 2:4). A prayer with no beginning, in the half second between a question and an answer, and God moved a whole empire behind it.
His word puts no grammar test in front of a man who wants to speak, and His Spirit is not correcting a draft before He agrees to carry it. You are as heard in the middle of a sentence as you are at the end of a well-made one, and that is not a lowering of the standard, it is the standard, and it always was.
One plain thing, folded in here because I would rather say it than leave it out. If the thing you cannot get out of your mouth is heavier than you have let on, and the evenings have been going somewhere dark, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger in it, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Saying it out loud to a person is one of the ordinary things a free man does.
So here is what has actually been happening in that chair by the window, and it is gentler than the queue has led you to believe.
Nothing has been refused. Nothing has been sent back for corrections. A rule that nobody wrote and nobody signed has been standing between a man and one specific sentence for nine years, and God has not been enforcing it for a single one of them. He has been in the room, and His Spirit has been interceding underneath the whole time, in groanings with no grammar in them at all.
This is yours, in that chair, tonight: the right to start in the middle. Romans 8 says the Spirit helps our weakness and prays in what cannot be uttered, Luke 18 shows seven unarranged words going home justified, and His Spirit is the one making both of those a present fact in a front room at half past five.
And the book stays on the arm of the chair. Read it tomorrow and mean every word. A man who has been handed his own voice back does not have to give up anybody else's.
Declare this over yourself
Say these three out loud, in the middle of whatever you are doing. The standing to say them was handed to you and not worked up: you are in Christ, and an ambassador speaks the word of the King who sent him, not a word he composed and polished on his own. Every line rests on Scripture and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it, so a sentence that comes out crooked is sentence enough. Jesus told ordinary people to speak to the mountain, and the mountain here is not the book on the chair arm, which is a good thing and stays; it is a rule with no author standing in a doorway it was never given the keys to. What God does with the thing you finally say He does in His own way and however He answers, and I put no clock on Him. That He hears you is not up for debate.
- Quiet room where my mouth keeps closing, you are not a courtroom, and I am speaking in you tonight. It is written that we do not know what to pray for as we ought and that the Spirit Himself intercedes with groanings which cannot be uttered, so the ordering was never mine to get right. I am starting in the middle, out loud, where you can hear me.
- Belief that I cannot reach God unaided, you have no ground under you, and in the name of Jesus you are not the doorkeeper of my mouth. Luke 18 puts seven unarranged words in a man's mouth at the back of the temple and sends him home right with God. I am that man tonight, and the words are going up as they come.
- Lord, You never once asked me for the right order, and Your Spirit has been praying underneath this room for nine years while I sat here composing. I thank You that the deepest intercession in this house has no words in it at all. The cup is in my hand, and I am telling You the thing.
Romans 8:26
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.