Pray for as We Ought
Jerry, several months ago Richard Roberts and I prayed for a patient in the Intensive Care Unit of the City of Faith. It was a critical situation and the man was hovering between life and death. And Richard Roberts and I went into the room and I did not know what to do. I didn’t know what to say in my humanness. And the scripture came to my mind, “For we know not what to pray for as we ought.” The family was there, the wife, the mother, the daughter, and the man there in the bed and I greeted them and I was saying in my spirit: What do I do? What do I do? And people say, “Well, you’re a minister of the Gospel. You know what to do.”
I’m a human being, folks. I didn’t know what to do. So what did I do? The first thing I began to do was to pray in the Spirit. I began to pray in tongues. Now when you accept Jesus as your personal Savior, the Holy Spirit comes in. The only way you can really know you’re a Christian is the Spirit of God witnesses with your spirit. Jesus comes in…. well, Jesus not in the flesh; Jesus by the Holy Spirit.
So therefore the Holy Spirit comes into your heart. So on the day that you accepted Jesus, if you’ve accepted Jesus, the Holy Spirit came in. And the Spirit is doing something.
He… not an it… He is praying 24 hours a day in your behalf. He’s praying to God in God’s perfect will. Now what Jerry was talking about and what I’m talking about is we’ve learned how to tap into that Holy Spirit’s prayer and to pray in the Spirit, or to pray in tongues… some people call it the baptism of the Holy Spirit, some people call it praying in tongues, some people call it praying in the Spirit. Jerry and I aren’t hung up on titles. We’re doing the same thing.
But we’ve learned how to tape into his prayer and pray in the Spirit. I began to pray in the Spirit and immediately as I prayed in the Spirit I stopped and I began to pray out loud in English. Suddenly the words began coming out of my mouth… not out of my mind but out of my spirit in English, and suddenly I knew what to do. I knew how to pray.
I knew what to say. I knew something about the situation that I didn’t know when I walked in the room. And we had a fantastic prayer and that man is alive today. Now to me that’s the value. That helped me in a situation when I did not know what to pray for.