Question: Will God help us to overcome the failures we experience every day?
Answer: Yes, He has promised to help and to intervene in our daily lives.

Conscious of our weaknesses, inconsistencies, and repeated failures, we realize that we are often our own worst enemies. We want God’s will, but we are also full of selfish desires. We wonder how God will protect us from ourselves. Paul answered this question by assuring us that God will step in and take care of us. In the person of the Holy Spirit, He will help us in our prayers. And as our heavenly Father, He will intervene in the circumstances of our lives.

He will help us in our prayers. One of the areas where our weakness shows is in our prayer life. Even when we pray, we are plagued by conflicting emotions. Selfish, sometimes even impure thoughts flash through our minds while we are talking to God. Sometimes we don’t know what we should ask for. Sometimes we are so sick or weary that we can’t do more than say, “Lord, please help me.” How reassuring to know that God understands and that His Spirit makes sure our prayers are acceptable and effective. Paul wrote:

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 with groans that words cannot express. And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will (8:26-27).

It is the Holy Spirit who groans within us, and these groans are apparently wordless. Through these groans, as He labors to purify us in preparation for eternity, the Holy Spirit cleanses and revises the thoughts and desires of our hearts and presents them to God. The Father, who perfectly knows our hearts, receives these revised prayers and answers them. Paul perhaps had the intercessory ministry of the Holy Spirit in mind when he penned the doxology:

Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be glory… for ever and ever! (Eph. 3:20).

He will work in all our circumstances for our good. It is also comforting to know that even though we may blunder and fail, God will intervene in our circumstances to make sure His purposes for us are realized. Paul wrote:

We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those He predestined, He also called; those He called, He also justified; those He justified, He also glorified (8:28-30).

In these verses Paul’s thoughts take in all eternity—from the eternity before time began to the eternity after time ends. In eternity past God made a number of choices. The cosmos came into existence by His choice. We live as His image- bearers because He chose to make us that way. We are saved from our sins and destined for glory because God loved us from before the foundation of the world and chose us as His special people (Eph. 1:4-5).

God’s eternal will is the reason for our existence and the ground of our salvation. He is not going to let anything prevent His will from being carried out to fulfillment—not the schemes of the devil, not the strategies of God’s enemies, not even the blunders and failures of His children. Therefore Romans 8:28 is true! God will intervene when necessary to make sure that His purposes for us are realized. In all of life’s circumstances God purposes to grow us up into Christ (Eph. 4:14- 19) to prepare us for the day when we will be like Jesus, experiencing the reality expressed by the apostle John:

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is (1 Jn. 3:2).