Himself to know what the will of God is and not to ask for the things that our foolishness would prompt us to ask for but to ask for things that the never-erring Spirit of God prompts us to ask for. True prayer is prayer “in the Spirit,” that is, the prayer which the Spirit inspires and directs. When we come into God’s presence, we should recognize our infirmity, our ignorance of what is best for us, our ignorance of what we should pray for, our ignorance of how we should pray for it and in the consciousness of our utter inability to pray aright look up to the Holy Spirit to teach us to pray, and cast ourselves utterly upon Him to direct our prayers and to lead out our desires and guide our utterance of them. There is no place where we need to recognize our ignorance more than we do in prayer. Rushing heedlessly into God’s presence and asking the first thing that comes into our minds, or that some other thoughtless one asks us to pray for, is not praying “in the Holy Spirit” and is not true prayer. We must wait for the Holy Spirit and surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit. The prayer that God, the Holy Spirit, inspires is the prayer that God, the Father, answers. The longings which the Holy Spirit begets in our hearts are often too deep for utterance, too deep apparently for clear and definite comprehension on the part of the believer himself in whom the Spirit is working—“The Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us _with groanings which cannot be uttered_” (Rom. viii. 26, R. V.). God Himself “must search the heart” to know what is “the mind of the Spirit” in these unuttered and unutterable longings. But God does know what is the mind of the Spirit; He does know what these Spirit-given longings which we cannot put into words mean, even if we do not, and these longings are “according to the will of God,” and God grants them. It is in this way that it comes to pass that God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us (Eph. iii. 20). There are other times when the Spirit’s leadings are so clear that we pray with the Spirit and with the understanding also (1 Cor. xiv. 15). We distinctly understand what it is that the Holy Spirit leads us to pray for.