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Is it OK to Pray to the Specific Persons of the Trinity?

As a Christian in general, and a parent and a pastor in particular, I find myself occasionally answering the question of whether prayer should be addressed to Jesus or the Holy Spirit. I found it helpful to come across this quote from Martin Luther where he dealt with this very question:

When you call upon Jesus Christ and say: O my dear Lord, God, my Creator, and Father, Jesus Christ, Thou one eternal God, you need not worry that the Father and the Holy Spirit will be angry on this account. They know that no matter which Person you call upon, you call upon all three Persons and upon the One God at the same time. For you cannot call upon on Person without calling upon the others, because the one, undivided divine Essence exists in all and in each Person.

Conversely, you cannot deny an Person in particular without denying all three and the One God in His entirety, as 1 John 2.23 says: ‘Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. (Quoted from Taking Hold of God: Reformed & Puritan Perspectives on Prayer), pp. 23-24

Prayer is always to the Father, in the name of Christ, through the Holy Spirit. I think Luther’s quote is helpful in that he shows that while the Persons of the Trinity have roles God himself is not therefore divided into distinct ‘gods’ as it were. I think this is where many questions may originally stem from.

It is helpful to note that the testimony of the Scriptures favors prayer to God the Father, through the Spirit in the name of Jesus. In the Old Testament we don’t really have a highly developed application of the Trinity among God’s people. I am not saying that the concept is absent but rather that it is not as developed and evident among the people of God as we see it in the New Testament. And in the New Testament prayer is mostly directed, as was modeled by Christ himself, to “Our Father.”

This is where I think a good robust Trinitarian theology (like Luther’s) is very helpful. It has been my experience that when people ask you a question like this they are not so much asking you a question about prayer as they are about the Trinity and how this shapes their lives as Christians.

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