The First Prayer After Surrender

Words Will Fail You

Tonight, when you try to pray, the words will not work. The phrases you have used for years — bless me, thank You for this day, help me to — will feel like coins from a currency that no longer trades. Not because they were bad. Because you are not the same person who said them yesterday, and the old phrases were calibrated to a person who does not exist anymore.

This is alarming for about five minutes and then something better happens. You realize that you do not need the old phrases. The old phrases were often little speeches you were giving God, as if He were an audience that needed to be informed about what you were thinking. The new you — the you who has accepted that He chose you, held you, drew you, and is now carrying you — does not need to make a speech. The speech was never the point. The being with was the point. And being with does not require a script.

When lovers have been married a long time, they eat dinner together in silence without it being cold. The silence is full. Each knows the other is there. Neither needs to narrate. You have just entered that kind of marriage with God, and the first dinner of the new arrangement is tonight, and you do not need to fill the quiet with explanations. Eat. Drink. Be with Him. That is the prayer.

What Paul Knew About Wordless Prayer

"In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God."

ROMANS 8:26-27

Read that and hear what Paul is saying. We do not know what we ought to pray for. Paul. The Paul. The apostle who wrote half the New Testament and could deliver impromptu treatises on resurrection while chained to a wall in Rome. Even Paul admits that there are prayers that exceed his vocabulary. And he is not ashamed. He is relieved. Because his weakness is where the Spirit's intercession begins.

The Spirit prays through wordless groans. The Greek is stenagmois alalētois — groanings that cannot be put into speech. This is not the Spirit making noise in you. This is the Spirit translating what is true about you into the perfect prayer that you would pray if you knew how. The Spirit knows what you should be asking for better than you do. The Spirit knows what the Father wants to give you better than you do. And when you do not know what to say, the Spirit is not silent; the Spirit is speaking, in the language spoken between the Persons of the Trinity, on your behalf.

Your job, tonight, is not to pray the right prayer. Your job is to let the prayer happen inside you without obstructing it. You are not on an assembly line. You are in a marriage. The Spirit has been praying in you since the day you believed. You have often been loud enough over top of Him that neither you nor He could hear it clearly. Quiet down. Let the Spirit's prayer rise.

What That Sounds Like

Sometimes it is a single word. Jesus. Or Father. Or Abba, the Aramaic word Paul tells us the Spirit teaches us to cry (Romans 8:15). You may be surprised how full a single word can be. You may be more surprised by how often, saying it, you start to cry for reasons you cannot account for. Do not account for it. The Spirit is doing what the Spirit does. He is translating the truth of your soul's condition into the perfect prayer. Your tears are part of the translation.

Sometimes it is a Psalm. When you cannot manufacture your own words, borrow someone else's. Read Psalm 23 out loud. Read Psalm 51. Read Psalm 139. The Holy Spirit inspired these; He is happy to use them as prayer again tonight. There is no shame in borrowed words. The whole history of the church has been praying the Psalms as its own for 3,000 years. You are welcome in the long tradition of people who needed to borrow what they could not produce.

Sometimes it is the Lord's Prayer. When Jesus said "this, then, is how you should pray" (Matthew 6:9), He was giving His disciples the scaffolding for every other prayer. You can pray the Our Father tonight and discover that each line is exactly what you would have said if you had the words. Our Father — you have one. Hallowed be Your name — let it be. Your kingdom come, Your will be done — oh, let it. Give us today our daily bread — I need it. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors — please. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil — yes, deliver me. For Yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever — I have just learned it is Yours. I have not finished learning what that means. I will spend the rest of my life on the work of learning it.

Sometimes it is silence. Just a quiet room. Just you and Him. No words. He is there. He has always been there. The silence is the prayer. The being-with is the prayer. You do not need to accomplish anything inside the silence. The silence accomplishes itself because He is in it.

What Not to Do

Do not try to pray a better version of yesterday's prayer. You are not the same person who prayed yesterday's prayer. Do not dress tonight's prayer in yesterday's clothes. They do not fit.

Do not pray an apology for everything you got wrong. Yes, much was wrong. Yes, you boasted in your choice when you should have boasted in His. Yes, you made yourself the hero of a story whose hero is Christ. But the apology is not the first prayer. The first prayer is gratitude. The apology will come later, and when it comes it will be fuller and more surgical than anything you could write tonight. Let the gratitude come first.

Do not try to explain to God what has just happened to you. He was there. He did it. He knows. You do not have to catch Him up. He is, as it turns out, the Author of the event, not its surprised observer. Your job is not to narrate. Your job is to receive.

Do not pray for other people tonight. You will pray for them tomorrow and every day after tonight with a new passion, because you now know something about grace you did not know before and you want everyone you love to know it too. But tonight is not for intercession. Tonight is for being alone with the One who just redid the structure of your soul. Let Him have you to Himself tonight. He has been waiting for it for a long time.

What to Do

Sit somewhere quiet. Close your eyes, or don't. Breathe slowly. Say His name. Jesus. Wait. Say it again. Jesus. Let the name fill the room. It is enough prayer for one night. If anything else rises — a word, a Psalm, a Lord's Prayer, a groaning that has no word — let it rise. Do not censor. Do not perform. Do not craft. Just be with Him.

When you are finished — and you will know when, because something will settle — stand up and go to bed. You will have prayed more tonight than you have prayed in years, because finally, for the first time, you prayed as yourself, and the yourself who prayed has been remade, and the One to whom you prayed will not let you out of His hand. The hands are still there. They always were.

"The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth."

PSALM 145:18

You called in truth tonight. Maybe for the first time. He was near. He will be near tomorrow. He will be near forever.