Hi, friend, and welcome to today's encouragement from our daily bread.

I'm Alyssa Morgan, and I entitled our reading, Tong Tied in Prayer.

When my baby brother underwent surgery, I was concerned.

My mother explained that tongue-tie, ankle

glossia, was a condition that he was born with and that without any help, his ability to

eat and eventually to speak would be hindered. Today we use the term tongue-tied to describe being

at a loss for words or too shy to speak.

Sometimes we can become tongue-tied in prayer, not knowing what to say.

Our tongues tie up in spiritual clichés and repetitive phrases.

We arrow our emotions heavenward, wondering if they will reach

God's ears. Our thoughts zigzag along an unfocused path. Writing to first century Roman

believers in Christ, the Apostle Paul addressed what to do when we struggle to know how to pray, inviting us to find help from

the Holy Spirit. 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. The concept of help here is to carry a heavy load, and wordless groans

indicates an interceding presence as the spirit carries our needs to God. When we're tongue-tight

in prayer, God's spirit helps shape our confusion and pain and distraction into the

perfect prayer that moves from our hearts to God's ears. He listens and answers, bringing the exact

kind of comfort we may not have known we needed until we asked him to pray for us.

Today's Our Daily Bread Devotional Scripture reading is from Romans chapter 8 verses 22 to 27.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.

For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have,

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