Day Four: Groaning Is Not Unbelief

There is a sound a body makes when it has run out of language. It is not a prayer and it is not a complaint. It is the noise you make transferring from the chair when everything catches wrong, or the noise at the end of a day when you have spent everything you had before dinner. Most of us are quietly ashamed of it. We have absorbed the idea somewhere that a mature believer should have a psalm ready instead.

Romans 8 has three groans in it, and I would like you to see all three together.

The first is creation’s. “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” The ground itself is not at rest. The world that God called very good is running under a curse it did not choose, and the noise it makes is the noise of a woman in labor.

The second is ours. “And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” Notice who is groaning. Not the immature. Not the ones who have not learned to trust yet. The ones who have the firstfruits of the Spirit. Having the Spirit does not stop the groaning. It explains it.

The third groan is the one that undoes me. “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.” God the Holy Spirit groans. Inside you. On the days you cannot form a sentence, the praying that is happening in you is being done by God Himself, in a register below words.

If groaning were unbelief, the Spirit would not do it.

Paul carries this over into II Corinthians and gets even more specific about the body. “For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.” Then he says something people rush past. “Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.”

Read that again slowly and let it correct something. Paul is not asking to be rid of a body. He is not longing to become a spirit floating free of the thing that hurts. He rejects that outright. He wants this mortality swallowed up by life, the same body raised and made to work. The Christian hope has never been escape from flesh. It has been the redemption of the body, which is the exact phrase Romans 8 used.

The longing you feel is not a longing to be finished with the body. It is a longing for the body to finally be what it was made to be, and that longing is not weakness. It is the firstfruits of the Spirit doing what firstfruits do, which is to make you hungry for the harvest.

So groan. Out loud, if that is what today requires. You are not the only one making that sound, and one of the others making it is God.