<p>10:20&nbsp;For<em> it is not you that speaks, but the Spirit of your Father that speaks in you</em>- Mark has &ldquo;the Holy Spirit&rdquo;, but the reference to God as Father paves the way for the next teaching- that human family will likely forsake us if we are faithful to our true Father (:21). Even although &ldquo;we do not know how to pray for as we ought, the Spirit himself intercedes for us&rdquo; (Rom. 8:26). The Spirit of the Father and Son speaks in us when we pray (Rom. 8:15), if our will / spirit is theirs. To put this in more technical but I think very telling terms: &ldquo;The subject-object scheme of &lsquo;talking to somebody&rsquo; is transcended; He who speaks through us is he who is spoken to&rdquo; (Paul Tillich,&nbsp;<em>Systematic Theology</em>&nbsp;Vol. 3 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963) p. 192). It&rsquo;s perhaps the thought behind Mt. 10:20: &ldquo;It is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you&rdquo;. This is why Paul can thank God that he finds himself praying constantly for Timothy (2 Tim. 1:3)- because he recognizes that not only can we influence God by our prayers, bur He influences us in what we pray for.</p>
<p>We read &quot;in you&quot;, not, as we might expect, &lsquo;through you&rsquo;. It may be that the Lord is hinting that if we have the Spirit of God within us, if we are thinking in a spiritual way generally in life, then in times of crisis that Spirit which is in us will guide us to say the right things when under pressure. This approach would explain the present tense here, when the context is speaking of the future (:19). He doesn&rsquo;t say &lsquo;It will not be you who will speak, but the Spirit which will speak in you&rsquo;. The present tense is used here in :20 to suggest that if we are&nbsp;<em>now</em>&nbsp;spiritually minded, with our spirit being God&rsquo;s Spirit, then in that future time of crisis we will know how to speak, the words will come out right, because we have lived now in a spiritually minded way. The idea of the Spirit of God speaking in a person, so that their words are not theirs but God&rsquo;s, was language which Jews would&rsquo;ve associated with the Old Testament prophets. Again we see the Lord inviting His secular, immature followers to see themselves as the prophets, those whom they had been taught were in a class of their own, and to whom they as mere secular men could in no way pretend. But the Lord&rsquo;s followers were to be a new Moses, new prophets, a new priesthood, a new Israel.</p>