He gets as far as the second sentence and then he stops, every time, because he does not know what he is asking for.
He can do the first sentence. The first sentence is easy: God, it is me, and it is about the same thing. Then there is a pause where a request is supposed to go, and he sits in that pause on the back step with the evening going on around him, and nothing arrives.
What would he even ask for?
Forgiveness he has asked for, more than once, and something in him is fairly sure that was dealt with. To feel differently, which is not really a thing you can request and he suspects would be cheating anyway. For the consequences to be lighter, which feels like asking to be let off. For the person affected to be all right, which he does ask, but that is a different prayer and it does not touch this one. For himself to be different, which he wants but cannot specify: different how, exactly, and by when, and in what measurable way?
So he sits there. The pause gets longer. Eventually he says something general and goes in.
Eighteen months of the same second sentence.
And here is what makes this one especially painful. He is not blocked by shame, which he could recognize and fight. He is blocked by a technical problem. He genuinely cannot formulate the request, and he has assumed, the way anybody would, that a prayer needs a request in it before it counts as a prayer.
That is you on the step.
You've got the first sentence and no second one. And you have been treating the missing request as a locked door, when it is in fact the exact situation one verse in the New Testament was written to address, and I would guess nobody has ever pointed you to it.
Paul says the not knowing is the condition, not the disqualification
This verse is usually quoted for people in grief, and it belongs there. But read the first clause, because it names a completely specific problem and it is yours.
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 know not what we should pray for as we ought.
That is not describing a rare crisis. Paul says we, and he includes himself, and he states it as a general condition of being a praying person rather than as a fault in a few. Not knowing what to ask is normal, expected, and written into the New Testament as the starting point of the sentence rather than as the reason it fails.
You are in the exact situation this verse was written for, and the not knowing is the premise rather than the obstacle, and I am not making this easy on you: Romans 8:26 names it in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my telling you so who can get that to a man on a back step in the middle of a pause.
Now look at what happens next in the sentence, because it is astonishing and people read past it. The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us. Not helps you find the words. Not gives you a better vocabulary. Prays. On your behalf. From inside you.
And the form it takes: groanings which cannot be uttered. Not sentences. Not requests. The very thing your pause is made of.
You have Somebody praying the part you cannot reach, and He has been doing it through every one of those eighteen months of silence, which is written into the verse rather than being my consolation for you, with the Spirit of God able to make that a fact you feel rather than a doctrine you file.
Here is the pastoral thing I most want to hand you, and it comes from sitting with a lot of people on a lot of steps. The pause is not empty. You have been hearing it as failure because nothing is coming out of your mouth, and the verse says that in exactly that gap something is going on that is more articulate than anything you could have composed.
Your prayer is not stalled at sentence one. It is being continued in a register you cannot hear.
This is being prayed right now, with the first sentence said and the second one missing, because Scripture puts the interceding in the gap, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing it rather than waiting on you to phrase it.
The pause is not the failure.
You have the first sentence and no second one, and Paul says that is where every praying person actually lives, himself included. The not knowing is written into the verse as the starting condition. And into that exact gap, the Spirit of God prays, in a form that is not made of sentences, on your behalf, from inside you.
Which means the eighteen months of trailing off on the back step have not been eighteen months of nothing. They have been eighteen months of a prayer you could not hear being carried by Somebody who did not need you to phrase it first.
You are prayed for from inside your own silence, and the request you could never formulate has been made, because Romans 8:26 says the Spirit maketh intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that real rather than merely true.
Say the first sentence. Then sit in the pause without calling it a failure.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, in whatever voice this evening has left you. The standing to say them is not something you work up to and it is not on loan from a well phrased prayer: Christ is in you, and the authority in these words belongs to Him and has been given to you in Scripture, made living by the Holy Spirit rather than by how well you can put the request. Jesus put the faith required at a mustard seed, which is His way of setting it under the line where anybody would trouble to measure, and then He said the part that carries: speak to the mountain. The mountain here is not the matter. It is the pause you have called a locked door. Speak to that. What He does with everything else He does in His own way, and the opening of the hands is yours to do this evening.
- Not knowing what to ask, you are not a locked door, and in the name of Jesus I stop treating you as one. Scripture says we know not what we should pray for as we ought, and Paul put himself inside that sentence before he put me in it.
- Fear that a prayer without a request does not count, you have had eighteen months of my evenings on this step. Scripture says the Spirit makes intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered, so the gap you called empty is the exact place the praying is happening.
- Lord God, You have been praying the part I could not reach the whole time I sat here failing to phrase it, and I am sitting here now with both hands open and no request prepared. I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit does the interceding and Your word made the not knowing the starting point, and I am received in the pause and not at the end of a sentence I could never build.
Romans 8:26
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