GOD'S GREAT NEWS for MAN'S GREAT PROBLEM - Romans 1-8

Helping Hand in the Darkness

As a family, we love to read aloud to each other, and a few weeks ago we finished reading Les Miserables. Our 350-page condensed version of the 1200 page novel left out a crucial part of the story: the meeting of Jean Valjean, the convict-turned-Christian, and the abused child Cosette. Cosette was born into misery: born out of wedlock, her mother Fantine was so poor she left Cosette with a family who ran a tavern while she tried to find work. Fantine sold her hair and eventually her body to keep sending payments to the tavern family keeping Cosette. Cosette became a terrorized slave of that family: she was forced to work all the time, she was regularly beaten by the woman, she was given no bed other than the hearth before the fire, and she was clothed in the skimpiest rags. One night when Cosette was eight, the woman screamed at her to go out into the pitch black darkness to fetch some water at a spring deep inside the forest. Cosette was mortally afraid of the dark. She was caught between her two worst fears: the darkness through which she could not see, and the screaming woman who took pleasure in beating her.

Finally, after terrible threats hurled at her by the sadistic woman, Cosette grabbed the large bucket and walked out into the darkness. Soon she was out of town, beyond any light, walking a path she could barely see. Fearing the sounds all around her in the black forest, she pressed forward, her heart beating wildly. After walking more than a mile, Cosette found the well, and filled the bucket. She then tried to carry the bucket, but it was nearly as large as she was. Filled with water, she could barely lift it. She sloshed it along for a step or two, then put it down and fell beside it to weep. But she had to get back, so she lifted the bucket as best she could.

As she slowly moved forward, "she could not prevent herself from crying aloud -- 'Oh, God help me! Please, dear God!' And suddenly she found that the bucket no longer weighed anything. A hand that seemed enormous had reached down and grasped the handle. Looking up, she saw a burly, erect form beside her in the darkness. The man had come up behind her without her hearing him, and he had taken the bucket from her without speaking a word. There are instincts which respond to all the chance meetings in life. The little girl was not afraid."

Think of that moment: alone in the darkness, alone in all the world, numb with cold but sweaty with fear, facing a task far beyond her power, she prayed the best prayer she could muster -- "Oh, God help me!" And help her He did: by sending one to walk alongside her, one who was a Helper. Our Father God has done the same for us, in like circumstances. He has sent us a Helper, the Holy Spirit, who understands our weakness and translates it to the Father. The Spirit is our helping hand in the darkness.

The Personal Love of God: the Spirit

In this study, we will conclude our celebration of the Holy Spirit in Romans chapter eight. There is no chapter in the entire New Testament that explores the ministry of the Spirit in a more compelling way. I want to share the following tribute to the Spirit in a poem loosely based on Romans eight, entitled My Quiet Hero:

He's my hero whose voice is less than a whisper
Like the still before dawn, or an echo at vesper.

His palace is human, of flesh and blood
He's the love of God poured in like a flood.

He changes the heart, beyond scalpel's power
He makes us anew, from root to flower.

He renews Moses' Law etched in black and white
He fulfills it all in us by day and night.

He frees us from bonds forged of sin and of death
To the one he indwells he's essential as breath.

His presence defines us as Christian indeed
Without Him we're lost, no matter our creed.

His leading defines us as sons of our God,
His questions remind us of our father's rod.

He ensures our adoption as sons of the King,
He witnesses to it, he gives us his ring.

He listens to all, each sorrow and groan,
Translating it all to the one on the throne.

He's with me each morning, awakening my ear,
He's with me each evening, calming my fear.

He's with me when praying, he's with me when sinning,
He's with me when losing, he's with me when winning.

He's with me and in me, love spread abroad
I love him and praise him, my Spirit of God.

What Jesus Christ the Son did for us on the cross ... legally, the Spirit of God does for us from within ... personally. He makes the love of God something more than a grand idea written on a page; He makes it personally known and felt within us. More even than that, the Spirit is the key to the gospel: He brings home to our hearts all the truths of the gospel, making God's great news our own personal news. In my own prayer life, perhaps the single thing that I thank God for more consistently than any other is this: the blessed gift of the Holy Spirit in me. I have never read any words, in any hymn, in any poem, that even began to give proper tribute and worship to this self-effacing, humble presence of God in our lives, who witnesses not of Himself, but of Jesus Christ. Perhaps there are no words to describe the Spirit's worth and ministry in our lives: because His ministry in us is too deep for words. This is what Paul himself concludes in Rom. 8:26, 27.

The Helper Who Understands our Weakness - 8:26

Paul picks up the theme of our weakness and suffering, and the role of the Spirit in helping us through our pain, in vs. 26: "And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words."

Paul reconsiders our own groaning as believers who are made alive in Christ by the Spirit, but who are trapped in space and time. Paul describes our groanings with great pathos in vs. 23: "And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body." Within the core of who we are, we ourselves, in the depth of our own hearts, we groan under the weight of living in a world full of suffering. If there is a song deep in the human heart, it's in a minor key.

I read an email this week from a friend who described the pain of living in this world. David Roper said, "Pain is one of the necessities of life. No one evades it. Physical discomfort is sometimes hard to bear, but it seems to me that the greatest pain comes from the heart: the pain of weakness and shame; the pain of misunderstanding, criticism and accusation; the pain of deferred hope, disillusionment and abandoned dreams; the pain of lonely isolation." There it is: the deeper pain we live with is heart pain, inner pain, the pain that makes the soul groan.

But the blessed word Paul gives us is that we groan not alone. We groan not alone: the Spirit of God inside us bears the weight with us. The term translated "help" here is a long Greek word with two prefixes. It's a jawbreaker: sunantilambanetai. It means to lend a hand together with, to come to the aid of someone, to help. It is just like the strong, large hand of Jean Valjean wrapping itself around the handle of the bucket the weak little hand of Cosette could barely lift, gently taking the load from her while walking with her. That is the help of the Spirit in our weakness: coming to shoulder the load while walking with us, without a host of meaningless words, so that we groan not alone.

When we hurt, being alone compounds the pain. There is great comfort in the presence of friends in the day of trouble. Job's three friends, for all their empty talk and groundless theologizing afterward, were friends indeed when they first encountered Job in his pain, in Job 2:11-13: "Now when Job's three friends heard of all this adversity that had come upon him, they came each one from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite; and they made an appointment together to come to sympathize with him and comfort him. And whey they lifted up their eyes at a distance, and did not recognize him, they raised their voices and wept. And each of them tore his robe, and they threw dust over their heads toward the sky. Then they sat down on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights with no one speaking a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great." Friends who are silent but present, bearing your pain without wearying words, are a great comfort.

But the comfort of human friends is always shortlived. After the seven days and seven nights, Job's friends started in on him and told him it was his own sin that caused the problem. Their comfort grew cold very quickly. Human comfort always does. But the Spirit's comfort in our pain and weakness never grows cold, for two simple reasons: He never leaves, and He never talks too much. His presence is with us through it all: before the pain, during the pain, in the pain, and after the pain. He never leaves, so we have the comfort of His presence no matter how awful our circumstances. And the Spirit is a quiet hero: when He speaks, it is a timely word in perfect harmony with the Scriptures, a word that sustains the weary one. In fact, in my life, it is the quiet word of the Spirit, that still small voice that assures me, "I am with you," or "I will carry you through," that has been the greatest comfort I have known in this life. The Spirit's comfort is comfort indeed: He is always there, and He speaks the gentle or searching word that is perfect for sustaining the weary one struggling under the load.

And how we need the Spirit when the burdens pile up on us! There seems to be an inverse relationship between the thoughtfulness of my prayers and the amount of suffering I am under. When the load seems light, my prayers are more thoughtful, more well considered, more focused on God than on myself. But when the weight is so heavy on my shoulders that my knees are buckling, when problems are mounting far quicker than answers, my prayer life suddenly becomes very basic; very childlike. About the best prayer I can muster in those times is "Help, Lord." I am so overwhelmed I don't know how to pray as I ought. Just like Cosette in the forest, burdened by a life of abuse, hungry for love, scared to death, she blurted into the darkness a simple prayer, "Oh, God help me! Please, dear God!" Truly, when we are suffering, we do not know how to pray as we ought.

But at just the moment when our suffering so suffocates our prayers, the Spirit provides the helping hand in the darkness. Paul says, "we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." Not only do we groan not alone, but when we can barely pray, the Spirit takes our groanings and groans on our behalf. He picks up the song of our lament when we can no longer sing it because we are out of breath. He communicates with His deepest groanings the full measure of our pain, having understood it far better than we ourselves. Having understood all, he turns to the Father to tell all, by a divine means of communication far deeper and more perfect than human words or language.

Let's consider this marvel for a moment. If you think about it, words are limiting things. The minute we describe an event, a person, or a feeling with a word, we have boiled it down too much. By choosing that single word, we leave other possibly better words unspoken. Our language is always imperfect. Although we communicate with words, the words themselves are inadequate to the task of true communication. And the deeper the thing being described, the more powerful the emotion, the less adequate the word is. Words so often fail us, especially as our pain or suffering or feeling or joy intensifies.

I was faced with this when I was writing a love note to my wife via email this week. If spoken words are limited, words typed into a grey computer screen are more limited still. I was trying to tell my wife I love her. So, I came up with a new way to tell her. I wrote her a crescendo of love on the screen, like this:

I told her my love for her was growing more and more every day. But the word "love" simply isn't big enough to communicate how I am committed to her, how I enjoy her, how I love to talk with her, how I respect her wisdom, how impressed I am with her as a mother. Love is just too small a word to express all that. And if that is true of my love for my wife, how much more true is it for the love of God for us in Christ.

Words: they are hopelessly inadequate things. The use of words brings communication, but always imperfect communication. That is the joy and heartache of language. And that is why the Spirit of God, when fathoming the depth of our pain, does not rely on spoken words to communicate our pain to our Father. With pain that is too deep for words, He knows words are hopelessly inadequate things. So He abandons words for something deeper. He groans at exactly the same frequency as our groans, at a perfectly sympathetic vibration; then He translates exactly that groaning to our caring Father, employing a far deeper level of communication ... the perfect communing of the Godhead.

Thus, the Spirit is the perfect translator: knowing perfectly our pain, and communicating it perfectly to our caring Father. As we travel in the very foreign land of this world, understanding so little of our own language, let alone the language of heaven, it is an unspeakable blessing to have a perfect translator travelling with us. We walk not alone, though we walk in a foreign and hostile land. And we groan not alone, because the Spirit translates and transmits our groans to our listening Father.

One of the things I have marvelled at over the years is watching a mother with a sick baby, long before the child acquires the facility to describe how it feels. I have watched Blythe tend all five of our children under these conditions. She is with them night and day; she takes their temperature; she adjusts their covers so the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold; she watches closely what they eat and drink, and how much; she tries to discern if they have lost too much body fluid; she checks their bodies for rashes or outward signs of inward problems; she checks to see if the child is rubbing an ear or itching a rash. She is with them through it all. She as an adult watches them like a mother eagle, eyes alert, gathering every piece of data. And she gathers this data because she is going to the doctor. She takes the child to see the doctor, and she as the mother describes in adult, technical terms, the pain the child has been going through. The child can barely say "Mama." The child cannot speak to the doctor as she ought. But the mother, the adult with her, can communicate the problem in adult terms far beyond the knowledge and experience of the infant. The Spirit in us is just like this: with us through it all, keenly watching like a mother eagle, and communicating all to a Great Physician who heals our souls.

It is a marvelous thing, beyond the power of words to describe, how "we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." This is so mysterious, Paul takes the next verse to describe how this happens, using imperfect human words to describe the perfect communion of the Godhead.

The Helper Who Translates our Groanings to our Father - 8:27

Paul started with us as as believers in our weakness, and he discussed how the Spirit within us groans with us in our weakness. Verse 26 describes the communication between the believer and the Spirit. In vs. 27, Paul describes the deeper communion between the Spirit and the Father. Taken together, vs. 26, 27 tell us exactly how the Spirit helps us in our weakness: he listens to our groanings and is present through all pains with us, and He perfectly communicates our pain to our eagerly interested Father who cares for us.

The portrait of the Father in vs. 27 depicts a Father so keenly interested in everything about us that He constantly searches our hearts. Paul says, "and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He [the Spirit] intercedes for the holy ones according to the will of God." Our Father in heaven searches our hearts as intently as the prodigal's father scanned the horizon: always looking, always seeking, desiring to know the state of the son's heart.

And the way the Father knows what is really in our hearts is by scanning the mind of the Spirit. The Father does not ask us to discern and diagnose the state of our own hearts: because He knows we are unequal to the task. It was God the Father who revealed to Jeremiah the desperate state of the human heart in Jer. 17:9: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (KJV). Indeed. Who can know it? The Spirit alone, dwelling within the heart and understanding its darkest cavities, plumbing its deepest deceits, measuring its great capacity for self-deception and self-adulation. The searching of the Father is wise: He looks into the mind of the Spirit, who knows the believer's heart far better than the believer does.

Notice that the communication between the Father and the Spirit is telepathic. It is wordless communication, a perfect mind-meld in which pure and true communication happens. The Spirit knows us better than we know ourselves; and the Spirit knows the Father better than we ever will. The Spirit perceives our pain and our self-pity, weighing the reality of both. And having assessed our true need, He opens His mind to the Father, that the Father may meet the real needs of our hearts in ways far beyond our understanding; in ways that harmonize with the sovereign purposes of God. The Spirit and the Father become one-minded in the pursuit of our holiness, pushing us along the journey as we are slowly conformed to the image of the Son.

This is a deep mystery. The comfort of the Spirit is that He is present, He doesn't talk too much, but He is not silent when it counts. His triage of our wounds enables our Great Physician to know exactly what treatment to apply in making us more holy and more Christlike, our truest comfort. We do not have a distant father who passes us by every day, who is buried in a newspaper whenever we want to talk: we have a Father who knows our hearts and needs better than we do ... because He has searched our hearts and scanned the mind of the Spirit.

The ministry of the Spirit, standing between the believer who hurts and the Father who heals, is a marvel. The Spirit abandoned the celestial fields of heaven, where He has soared and hovered for all eternity, to constrain Himself to live inside me, that He might be the essential connection between my heart and my Father. Surely this must be uncomfortable for the Spirit. Surely the cost is great, trading heaven for the prison-like cells of individual humanity. But the Spirit loves us that much. As the Son gave His life to legally bridge the gap between God and Man, so the Spirit continually gives His life to personally bridge the gap between God and Man, allowing the searching Father to know and comfort the hurting heart of His child.

There is a story of a quiet hero during the early days of broadcasting. A Scottish preacher named William Still wrote about this story. It is said that on the very first Christmas broadcast of King George V of England, a vital wire in Buckingham Palace was found to be broken and there was no time for the engineer to repair it. Considering the word from the King to the people to be more important than his own life, the engineer simply held the two ends of the spliced wire in his burning hands to let the current, and the King's message, pass through. What a hero: a self-sacrificing intercessor, and we don't even remember his name. Likewise the Spirit has sacrificed his heavenly freedoms to constrain Himself to live in such as us, which is to me the marvel of the ages. And He lives in us to translate our suffering to our caring Father, and to whisper our Father's love for us. He lives within us to intercede: forming the crucial communication link between Father and believing child. May we praise Him for His crucial role in our lives!!

Conclusion: Closing the Gap

Let me close with one final image to implant in our minds. The role of the Spirit is to take our little hands and join them with the mighty hand of our Father. Perhaps the most famous religious painting is on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, depicting the moment of Creation when God created Man. God, full of majesty and enswathed in a cloud, has just released the man He has created. The hand of God is outstretched, and the hand of man is outstretched. But there is already a gap between them. The marvelous ministry of the Spirit is to re-join those hands.

If there is a Sistine Chapel in heaven, that picture will have been mended by the Spirit: the extended hand of God will grasp and hold forever the extended hand of His new creation, the regenerate Man. Together God and regenerated Man will stand united as one for all eternity.

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