With what weakness does the Holy Spirit help us?

When we read in Romans 8:26 that the “Spirit helps us in our weakness," the weakness spoken of here, rendered in the plural form weaknesses in many manuscripts, and in which the Spirit aids us, refers to the weakness of our own human nature, which misses the glory of God opens the door wide for the indwelling sin. God himself will deliver us from this weakness, and through the Spirit we can look forward to that deliverance. Even though this is still an expectation of the future and is based in weakness, the Spirit himself helps us by means of his own prayer that rises up above our weak prayers. For we do not know how to pray as we ought. When we pray to God we use our words as best we can, but we lack complete insight into the present and the future and as such we are often in the dark about what we should pray for. Paul encourages his readers in Rome by pointing them to the fact that the Spirit prays along with us and exceeds us in his omniscient prayer. He covers for the weaknesses in our prayer with his secret and divine prayer. The advance of the future glory given to us in the Spirit far exceeds the law which had been given under Moses. The law pointed the way, and the Spirit prays for us along the way. This constitutes the decisive difference between the old way of the letter and the new way of the Spirit (see Romans 8:11).¹