My heart wants to write tonight about Sandy Hook, but I can’t get my mind wrapped around the events of last Friday. I can’t meditate deeply enough or ponder long enough on the tragedy to come up with any lessons save the obvious ones about the destructive nature of sin, the beauty of the hope of heaven and, always, the irony of the tragedy of abortion that occurs in far greater numbers with many more perpetrators and far less fanfare than any school shooting in history. These are lessons that I frequently discuss on this page and, as long as there is breath in me, I will continue to talk about them, even though I despair to see the American culture largely scoffing at them.
In the last few days, I have been in contact with a woman whose husband is given over to the sin of pornography, another who has succumbed to her own propensity for using and manipulating others, one who is experiencing difficulty because she was accidentally administered an extremely incorrect dosage of a strong medication, one who is waiting to die of a deadly STD, one who is recovering from a very debilitating mental and emotional trauma, one who is struggling with the placement of her aged mother who is ill with dementia, one who is tortured by the knowledge of sin in the life of someone she knows who may potentially harm others, one whose husband is experiencing hurt inflicted by his fellowmen because of something valiant he is attempting to do for the cause of Christ, one who experiences grief from anxiety and is losing her much needed counselor and one whose husband has left her and her five children for another woman. All of these women are in the body of Christ and all of them are suffering immense pain of one form or another. Tonight, I am having trouble focusing on the root problems in these scenarios and I am certainly having trouble knowing the right answers, when there are such, to these various dilemmas.
Sometimes lately when I go to a quiet place of prayer, my days seem so brimming with problems –my feeble mind so shell-shocked– that I can’t calm it enough to articulate the needs or even to find the words to plead for wisdom. It’s in times like these that I am so very thankful for the Holy Spirit who can express what I’m too weak and worn to say to my Father.
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (Romans 8: 26,27).
I fully believe that the Spirit has finished His work of revelation to mankind. We have the completed Will of God for our lives in His Word that thoroughly equips us to every good work (II Timothy 3:16,17). There is nothing left for the Spirit to disclose to us–nothing that God wants us to know. But I do not believe the Spirit has finished working. While he has finished revealing from God to man, He is now at work in the other direction. He takes my sentiments to the Father, when I am too burdened to express them–too stressed to enumerate them, too tearful to fully even understand them–I say, then he takes them, in perfect form, to the throne of grace through Jesus the Son My Father hears the perfect pleas of the Spirit in behalf of His very imperfect daughter. And, when I think of this, I am encouraged, renewed and ready to go at life once again.
I am especially grateful that the passage that tells me He is taking my pleas to the Father immediately precedes the promise that’s my life’s anchor:
And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
Problems piled into panic in me, then processed through the Spirit into perfect pleas, then perfected in His powerful plan for something good for me, because I’ve been called according to His purpose. And I can pillow my head knowing that all is ultimately well with my soul. I hope every one who reads can have this blessed assurance. It’s a peace that really does pass understanding.
