We always pray according to the will of God when the Holy Spirit helps our praying. He prays through us only “according to the will of God.” If our prayers are not according to the will of God they die in the presence of the Holy Spirit. He gives such prayers no countenance, no help. Discountenanced and unhelped by Him, prayers, not according to God’s will, soon die out of every heart where the Holy Spirit dwells.
We must, as Jude says, “Pray in the Holy Ghost.” As Paul says, “with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit.” Never forgetting that “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.” Above all, over all, and through all our praying there must be the Name of Christ, which includes the power of His blood, the energy of His intercession, the fullness of the enthroned Christ. “Whatsoever ye ask in my name that will I do.”
XV THE TWO COMFORTERS AND TWO ADVOCATES
_If we were asked whose Comforter the Holy Spirit was, the answer would be—Ours. The answer is not so ready when we are asked whose Advocate He is. The Spirit is Christ’s Advocate, not ours. It is Christ’s place He takes, Christ’s cause He pleads, Christ’s name He vindicates, Christ’s Kingdom He administers._—SAMUEL CHADWICK.
The fact that man has two Divine Comforters, Advocates, Helpers, is declarative of the affluence of God’s provisions in the gospel, and also declarative of the settled purpose of God to execute His work of salvation with efficacy and final success. Many-sided are the infirmities and needs of man in his pilgrimage and warfare for Heaven. These two Christs can meet with manifold wisdom.
The affluence of God’s provision of two Intercessors in executing the plan of salvation finds its counterpart in the prayer promise in its unlimited nature, comprehending all things, great and small. “All things whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” All things we have in Christ, all things we have in the Holy Spirit, and all things we have in prayer.
How much is ours in God’s plan and purposes we have in these two Christs, the one ascended to Heaven and enthroned, there to intercede for our benefit, the other Christ, His Representative, and better Substitute, on earth, to work in us and make intercessions for us!
The first Christ was a person. The other Christ, a person, but not clothed in physical form nor subject to human limitations as the first Christ necessarily was. Transient and local was the first Christ. The other Christ not limited to locality, not transient, but abiding; not dealing with the sensible, the material, the fleshly, but entering personally into the mysterious and imperial domain of the spirit, to emancipate and transform into more than Eden beauty that waste and dark realm. The first Christ left His novitiates that they might enter into higher regions of spiritual knowledge. The man Christ withdrew that the Spirit Christ might train and school into the deeper mysteries of God; that all the historical and physical might be transmuted into the pure gold of the spiritual. The first Christ brought to us a picture of what we must be. The other Christ mirrored this perfect and fadeless image on our hearts. The first Christ, like David, gathered and furnished the material for the temple. The other Christ out of this material forms God’s glorious temple.
The possibilities of prayer, then, are the possibilities of these two Divine Intercessors. Where are the limitations to results when the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, when He so helps us that our prayers run parallel to the will of God, and we pray for the very things and in the very manner in which we ought to pray, schooled in and pressed to these prayers by the urgency of the Holy Spirit! How measureless are the possibilities of prayer when we are filled with all the fullness of God; when we stand “perfect and complete in all the will of God”?