grows
over-confident that he knows what outward circumstances are best for
himself or his friends or the Church.

{313}

We all feel deeply the imperfection of our prayers: how weak, how
ignorant they are! And St. Paul consoles us with the belief in an
intercession--perfect, all-knowing, divine--which supports and sustains
and, we may say, includes ours. The 'intercession of the Spirit' in
our behalf, carried on, it is implied, 'in the hearts' of the saints
which only God searches, is mentioned nowhere in the New Testament but
here. But it is not to be separated from the intercession of Christ
which is mentioned just below[16]. Christ's intercession is 'at the
right hand of God,' but also He has by the Spirit taken us up into His
own life. He dwells in us by His Spirit. By His Spirit we are knit
into one and made His body. Doubtless, then, dwelling thus by the
Spirit in the body, Christ intercedes for us. This is the intercession
of the Spirit, which is also the intercession of Christ--an
intercession gathering up into one, and sustaining and connecting and
perfecting, all the imperfect prayers of all the saints.

This interceding Spirit is in Himself perfectly conscious of God's mind
and purpose, and God is perfectly conscious of His. He intercedes
'according to God.' This intercession {314} is but a form of the
perfect divine life. But in the heart of the Church this desire of the
Spirit can make itself felt only in groanings for the divine
manifestations which, like the aspirations which music suggests or
expresses, are too deep to admit of articulate utterance. St. Paul,
when he speaks of groanings which cannot be put into words, is perhaps
thinking of the 'tongues' in which the spiritual emotion of the first
Christian churches found expression. And we should think of some
earnest act of corporate Christian worship when, under the workings of
the one Spirit, the strong desire after what is holiest and highest
possesses men, and binds them together with a sense of longing for the
divine manifestation which could not be put into definite words.

St. Paul speaks of the groaning of suffering nature (ver. 22), and the
groaning of the individual Christians (ver. 23), and also the groaning
of the divine Spirit in the Church (ver. 26). No word could express
more powerfully the intense desire after the manifestation of the
divine kingdom which, in St. Paul's mind, should lie at the heart of
true Christian