C R Vaughan
The Spirit makes intercession for God’s people and teaches them to pray as they ought, by enkindling and controlling the desires of the heart. Prayer is the offering up of our desires unto God, and the nature and the force of the prayer will be determined by the nature and the energy of the desires embodied in it. If the desires are selfish, the prayer will be selfish; if the desires are holy, the prayer will be holy; if the desires are feeble, the prayer will be feeble; and if the desires are strong and intense, the prayer will have the same characteristics.
It is obvious then that the desires must be controlled, if the prayer is to be regulated rightly. Nothing can more powerfully illustrate the necessity for the Spirit as an intercessor, to indite our petitions for us, than this essential fact in the nature of prayer. The human heart is full of evil; its affections have been corrupted by sin; and no honest desire after a holy salvation can spring up in the heart unless the Holy Spirit gives it.
No special influence of the Spirit is needed to make people willing to escape the penalty of sin except perhaps in cases of extraordinary depravity; the natural principles of hope and fear will ensure that result. Selfishness will determine desire in all matters in which self is concerned, whether in view of danger or the bitter power in sin itself to create sorrow. A man may be terribly oppressed by some sin, by the power of a destructive, sinful habit or by the strength of an evil impulse, and yet be purely selfish in it. He is oppressed because he feels he is injured by it; yet that feeling of dread towards his sin may have no more moral merit in it than someone’s anxiety to be rid of toothache or neuralgia.
A man may selfishly desire to be holy, not because he likes it – for if he likes it he himself is holy and not selfish – but because holiness is a condition for getting to heaven, and he knows that he cannot see God without it. This fact is enough to make us all pause and ponder the state of our hearts with intense self-scrutiny. Even the most mature of regenerate souls may well be startled into watchfulness when the deceitfulness of the heart is brought into remembrance.
Are our desires after the salvation of God what they ought to be? Are our prayers, after all, only embodiments of selfishness? If not altogether so, may there not be an element of selfishness in them, which may possibly account, in part at least, for so many defeats in prayer? May not our very desire for the salvation of sinners be tainted with selfishness, as when we desire it to gratify a partisan attachment to our own church? If our desires are substantially sound, are they truly regulated in degree? Are they strong enough to overcome our reluctance, our laziness, our love of money, our pride, our resentments, our love of ease and self-indulgence?
These questions may make us set more value on the Spirit as an intercessor; for He can remove all defects in our desires, and thus elevate the character and increase the power of our prayers. It is right that we should seek with all earnestness our own salvation; the desire to escape the penalty of sin is a desire altogether legitimate, and the distinct consciousness of such a desire by no means discounts the integrity of our wish to be saved. But is this the only reason why we seek for grace? Is there not something in the very essence of sin, a criminality in its nature, that – independent of its penal hazards – would make every right heart revolt at sin and rejoice to be delivered from it?
But surely, however trying the perplexity created by the effort to discriminate aright the mixture of motives in our religious experience, it is a matter of infinite comfort to know that the Spirit in His intercessory work takes charge of the desires of His people, and ensures so much of a pure element in them as to make their prayers effective. He regulates the degrees as well as the nature of these desires. And those groanings which cannot be uttered are simply the strong yearnings of a regenerate soul after spiritual advancement, for which it longs intensely, although it cannot give adequate expression to the desire, or adequate description to the blessings desired.