Searches Our Hearts- Romans 8:27

In our previous post, we examined Romans 8:26 in order to understand what form of “intercession” the Holy Spirit does on our behalf. He intercedes by being in control of the things which we are not in control of, using them to produce new life and a new order of things in our lives, orchestrating all of these things together in order to bring us into God’s will for our lives. Two questions immediately arise out of this: What specific purpose does the intercession have in our lives? and How does the Spirit do this? This post will examine the first of these questions, and our next post will look at an example in someone’s life in order to see exactly what happens and how the Spirit goes about accomplishing this. We will look at verse 27 in order to answer our first question. The verse reads as follows: “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”. The first issue to address here is who is referred to by the “he” here? The word “he” here is actually the definite article in the Greek (the English word “the”), and its usage here is what is known as anaphoric, which simply means it refers back to the previous noun, which in this case is Spirit. The Holy Spirit here is the one who does the “searching”. Remember the word search here means to test to prove genuine, and the thing searched here is our “hearts”. The Greek heart here is kardia, and it does not refer to the muscle in our chest which pumps blood. In Scripture, the heart is the core of a person, and it is the seat of emotion, thought and action. We feel, think and act with our hearts, our hearts are what determine why we feel what we feel, think what we think and do what we do. The Spirit here intercedes by using the circumstances of life, the things we cannot control, to show us ourselves, to show us what is in our “hearts”, in order that we may see if it is in accordance with what God wants or if it is not. The purpose of this intercession is that our hearts may be transformed (for a transformed heart will produce transformed feeling, thinking and doing), that we would think, act and feel more and more like Jesus did. This is the goal for all believers, it is God’s will for every one of us, that we would be conformed to the image of Christ, and the Spirit, through this intercession, is the one who brings about this transformation. He orchestrates all of the circumstances of life to show us ourselves, to show us all in our hearts that is not like Christ, in order to stimulate in us a desire for change, for nothing will change if we do not want it to, and we must know something is wrong before we seek any change. We must remember here that the Spirit helps us in our “weakness”, for we generally do not want any change and often are not aware that we need to change. But we rest in the fact that He is in control of all things and knows exactly what we need to be conformed to the image of Christ (which is what is best for all of us), and that He will intercede for us in the way which best suits us as individuals, always working sovereignly behind the scenes for our good, to transform our hearts and conform us to the image of Christ. May we all understand this and rest in this knowledge, assured that He is in control of what we are not in control of, that we are always in His hands and can count on His love for us and his working all things together for our good.