[AI translation] My brother! In one of my Bible studies in recent weeks, I have asked the brethren - and I am doing the same for those of you here - that if you have a problem of faith, a spiritual problem, or if you come across a Word in your reading of the Word that you would like to hear answered in the form of a sermon, write it down on a piece of paper and bring it to the pastor's office, even if you do not want to be named. From time to time, on Sundays, we would take one of these questions and try to find an answer in the light of God's Word. Because, you know, what is a problem for one person is usually a problem for several other people. A sermon on a specific issue usually becomes relevant for several people at the same time.Well, we have already received some of these questions, dear Brothers and Sisters, and this Sunday I would like to answer one of them. This is how this question reads. What can I ask God for and what can I not ask God for? How should we understand Jesus' saying that whatever you ask in my name, your heavenly Father will give it to you? For example, a man asks for his relative to be healed and he is not healed. Or can a man only ask for his prayers for salvation in agony? Because it is in accordance with the will of God? And can he ask for the rest only so that it may not be as I will, but as You will?" So, Brethren, this is the question.
Surely it is not only the question of the one soul who asked it, but most certainly it is the problem of many others. So now I do not want to preach about prayer in general, but only about the one question that is raised here: what is it that we can ask and what is it that we cannot ask? So what we can ask and how we can ask God in our prayers. And I think, Brothers and Sisters, that every serious praying person has run into this problem. I do not say that he has encountered it, but he has. The problem of what and how. As we have heard in the Word, the Apostle Paul was familiar with this question. For here he says, "What we ought to ask, we cannot ask as we ought". Quite simply, Paul says that we do not know. Perhaps it is a poor consolation, but let me say at the outset, brothers and sisters, that it is still much better than knowing so very well. It is always suspicious when someone prays so easily, so fluently. It is always suspicious when someone feels that they can pray very well. It's always suspicious when someone's lips just flow with the anointed words of prayer. It's terrible. And it's always suspicious when someone can say the Lord's Prayer, or any other prayer, almost without blinking.
I believe that a real praying person feels much more what the Apostle Paul said and obviously felt, that what we should ask, we cannot ask. We neither know what, nor how. We simply do not know. Let me try to mention just a few of these "we do not know" before you. For example, right away the very first problem we don't know: we can't really concentrate ourselves on prayer. But that should be the basic attitude of prayer. To focus our whole attention and our whole soul on God. One man once said to his pastor, when it came to this, that it really wasn't that big a deal after that! And the pastor said to him, "My dear brother, if you can only think about God for two minutes, I'll give you my horse. In those days, pastors rode horses. The man sat down and started thinking about God. But after a minute he jumped up, went to the pastor and said, "Well, can I have the saddle with the horse? Well, Brothers and Sisters, that's how we can think about God. Our mind immediately wanders to other things, to the saddle and other things. We resent, for example, the apostle Peter, and James, and John, for not being able to spend a single hour with Jesus on that agonizing night of Gethsemane. How could they not have been able to keep a single hour of vigil in prayer while their Master was in torment? But do you know, Brothers, how long an hour is? Try to pray for an hour tonight. We cannot. We don't even know that! But it is the easiest thing. Or imagine, for example, that your little daughter gets sick, calls you in on a feverish night and says: "Father, or Mother, I feel that I am very ill, I may even die, pray with me. And then you stand there, confused, and you feel that you cannot pray. You don't even know how to begin, how to pray in such a situation.
A believing man once came to me and told me that his wife was in terrible physical pain, suffering from an incurable disease, and he said, "I don't really know what to ask God for her. Whether to be taken by God or to keep her alive. I don't know what to ask. You know that feeling when you have a heart full of conflicting thoughts, conflicting feelings, and you don't know what is the right thing to do. What it would be to ask for now in this situation. The apostle Paul's soul was once in such a situation when he wrote in one of his letters: 'I am pressed between these two, desiring to move, for that is better, but to remain in this body for your sake is more necessary. He himself did not know which of the two to ask.
A believing mother told me that her daughter had met someone and it seemed to be getting serious. And then she went on to say. Should I ask for a marriage or should I ask for the party to break up? I don't know. As the Apostle Paul said: what we should ask, as we should ask, we do not know. We don't know how, we don't know what. And oh, so often we don't know! We read in the Bible that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears it. Well, that is very clear and plain speaking, but there is the big problem, what is His will? How do I really know what His will is? We can be so infinitely perplexed as to the will of God, so confused in our hearts between our own thoughts and our own will and the will of God, that we cannot distinguish one from the other. We do not know which is now the thought of my heart and which is the thought of God. We would rather God go our way with us, and God wants us to go His way with Him. Well, all right, but which is God's way? We don't know! And we also read in the Bible in one place - just in connection with prayer - that you don't get it because you don't ask for it right! Well, how can you ask well? What is it when we ask for something right? Is it that we do not ask hotly enough, that we do not ask fervently enough, that we do not ask with insistence, with painstaking, with demanding? Or perhaps we do not pray well just when we think we are praying very hotly and very demandingly? Because it can happen! A Roman centurion once said to Jesus, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should come into my tabernacle" - and that was quite enough. And everything was completely put right. In fact, even when we know what we want to ask God for, that is, when we go to God with a very specific request, it is still, oh, so often the case that we ask for exactly the opposite of what we should. We ask for something that is not good. What would be downright harmful to us if we were to receive it. It's such a strange thing that man can't even really see through his own troubles, his own needs. How many times do we think what is not the worst is the worst. Man knows so much nowadays. He is beginning to fathom the secrets of the universe, but he cannot see the secrets of his own soul. He does not know himself. He has no idea what he really needs. What his real misery is. We don't know! We don't know!
Isn't it a terrible thing, dear Brothers and Sisters, that we need prayer more than anything else, and that is what we are unable to do? We cannot pray! I cannot pray, and that is just as terrible as if someone were to say that I cannot breathe. And every asthmatic knows how terrible that is. So it is prayer - which is the only solution to all our problems and all our questions, the only possibility for us - that becomes problematic and difficult for us. What we ask for, as we should, we do not know. We cannot pray! You know, Brothers and Sisters, there is something very good in this realisation that we cannot pray. Yet there is something very great. And I am very happy when someone comes to the point where he knows that he cannot pray. Because look, this, that we cannot pray, it is in the Bible. It is not only in the Bible that you ask and it will be given to you. It is not only that whatever you ask in my name, my Father in heaven will give it to you, or I will do it. And so on. There are similar powerful promises in the Bible. It also says that what we should ask for, as we should, we cannot. So it's also in there that we can't pray, and that if it's in the Bible, it means that God knows this powerlessness of ours, this inability of ours. It means that we cannot, that God has already calculated that we cannot pray, and that is why it is written, "But the Spirit helps us in our weakness, so that what we ought to ask, as we ought to ask, we cannot, but the Spirit himself pleads for us with unspeakable supplications." For let us understand, Brothers and Sisters: the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, is the help of this powerlessness of ours. And He Himself intercedes for us with unspeakable, unspeakable supplications and prayers. I would not be able to explain how our prayer and this ineffable supplication of the Holy Spirit are intertwined, but they are somehow intertwined.
Perhaps it is something like a believing mother saying to her child, "Come, let us pray! And she puts her child's little hands in her own clasped hands, and somehow they pray together. Sort of like an experience I had a couple of years ago, I was lying in hospital, semi-conscious, very ill, with a terrible fever, and I was visited by my dear colleague from church, my co-worker, and I told him I couldn't pray because I was so weak. And then he took my hand in his mighty, strong hand and he prayed with me, becoming one spirit with me. Something like that. In any case, when we pray, we are always entering into a spirituality, a spiritual atmosphere, where the Spirit of God is at work. When we pray, we give the Spirit of God the opportunity to work on us with His Holy Spirit. For the most important thing in prayer is not that I act on God in some way, but that God acts on me in prayer. For God knows much more about us than we know about ourselves. Imagine that we say something to God in prayer, and He not only knows what we are saying at that moment, but He also knows very well all the hidden and subconscious motives that give rise to consciously formed thoughts. The Spirit of God also penetrates into the layers much deeper than our consciousness, and from there brings out our real needs and reveals them to God in unspeakable supplications, in wordless, inexpressible pleas. This is the Spirit Himself pleading with inexpressible supplications for the saints.
So you could say that God is having a conversation with God about me. But in this wonderful conversation, in some way, He also includes me. So this conversation is not happening outside of me, but in some way through my prayer and my words. So it's okay if I can't pray! That's why it's okay if I don't even know exactly what I'm supposed to ask. Because the Spirit of God in me will ask for what is truly God's, what is good, what is right for me, what I really need. And so God will listen to our prayer. That's what the Word says: "He who searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the soul, because he prays for the saints according to God." Of course, it happens that my thought is not what God's thought is. Something else entirely. But never mind! Let me put my thought, my desire, before God, and the Spirit of God will transform it into a thought according to God and a desire according to God. And so the prayer shall be heard. My thought may be that my patient may be healed. And so I pray. And God's thought may be that my patient may mature in the fire of suffering for eternity. And so the unspeakable plea of the Spirit comes to God.
But then do I pray in vain? No! In fact, I receive much more, a much greater gift than I would ask for. But if God is having a conversation with God about me, why can't I be left out of it? Why do I have to be part of it? It is because, dear Brothers and Sisters, it is precisely when I pray, when I ask for something, that I am in the spiritual attitude in which I can accept what I ask of God, what God wants to give me in prayer, for my prayer. So, if it is true that the Spirit of God Himself is involved in some way in the words of my prayer - and it is true, because that's what this Word is about - then you know what we ought to do? Every time before we pray, we should take a moment of silence and ask the Holy Spirit of God, "What do You want me to ask now? So, as it were, giving God's Spirit an opportunity to shape our prayers. Well, how then would the Spirit of God pray through my words? Most certainly by closely following God's statements in the Bible. Well, let me just mention a few things. Observe how many times the Spirit of Jesus has opened up to happy, thankful praise, how many times He has given thanks! Almost always He began by saying, "I thank Thee, Lord! So that if the same Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, shapes your prayer, then your prayer will be very much full of thanksgiving, then you will give thanks to God again and again.
I have experienced many times that there is almost nothing that refreshes our dry, flattened prayer life like when one begins to give thanks. One thing is certain: prayer of thanksgiving from the heart is always in harmony with that mysterious and ineffable plea of the Spirit. Then, praying for others is also praying according to the Holy Spirit of God. Especially for those who are not very sympathetic to us. So let's say, directly for our enemies. When you stand before God with your burdens, it is good to hear the warning of God's Spirit. There's the warning that okay, fine, but what about the other person who has an even greater burden in life than you do? That mysterious Spirit, if we would truly listen to Him, would greatly expand our prayerful responsibility to other people. It would shake us out of the cycle of selfish prayers that revolve only around ourselves. It is also quite certain that much of our supplication for others is stirred by the Spirit in that unspeakable supplication. Notice that Jesus prayed in the same way.
Then one more thing. The Spirit who helps our infirmities, asks most earnestly of God Himself for the man who prays. Not for this or that intrusion of God into our lives, He asks God Himself. For even between human beings, two people are really on good terms when they can not only converse pleasantly with each other, but can even listen in each other's company. Quietly, without words. And perhaps this is the highest degree of prayer. To be with God in silence, without words. And when, in this silent, intimate communion, all human words are silenced, perhaps then what Paul writes begins to happen, that the Spirit himself pleads for us with an inexpressible supplication.
In conclusion, Brothers and Sisters, I would just like to say that whenever we pray - and it doesn't matter when, that is, in the morning, when we imagine all the tasks, worries and troubles of the day, or during the day, at the table before or after a meal, or in the evening, when we look back over the whole of the past day, giving an account to God of the things we have done, and laying before Him our afflictions, our failings - so whenever we pray, let us always reckon that in the depths of our prayer the Spirit of Jesus is in some way praying with us. That behind the words of our prayer there is in some way the ineffable plea of the Holy Spirit. And if this is so, then your prayer and my prayer have just as much value before God as Jesus'. For the same Spirit who prayed in Jesus prays in you and prays in me. It is the prayer of the Spirit that lifts up our own wretched and feeble prayers to the heights of Jesus' prayer. And then there is no difference between a simple old woman who can hardly put her thoughts into words asking God for something, and Jesus himself! God listens with equal attention to your prayer and to the prayer of Jesus. So pray as you can, as the Spirit leads you! In Jesus' name!
Amen.
Teach us to believe, Lord, teach us to ask.
Teach us to ask with the spirit, with the fervour of the soul.
You are my Savior,
Give me your love, your strength, your heart,
Do not abandon me with your soul!
Teach me to ask!
Canto 479, verse 2
Date: 12 September 1965.