When you pray, do you always pray to the Father in the name of the Son?

While I normally offer my prayer to the Father, in the name of Jesus, with the help of the Holy Spirit, sometimes I address my prayer to the Spirit and sometimes to the Son. The German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) said that when we pray to Jesus, we “need not worry that the Father and the Holy Spirit will be angry on this account. They know that no matter which Person [we] call upon, [we] call upon all three Persons and upon the One God at the same time. For [we] cannot call upon one Person without calling upon the others, because the one, undivided divine Essence exists in all and in each Person.” In his treatise Communion with God (1657), the Puritan theologian John Owen (1616-1683) encouraged us to fellowship with each person of the Trinity. Indeed, our prayer should be trinitarian. In our prayer, we can say with the Puritan pastor Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661) “I don’t know which Person of the Trinity I love the most, but this I know, I love each of them, and I need them all.”    

To learn more how to pray, see these books:

Co-edited with Joel R. Beeke, Taking Hold of God: Reformed and Puritan Perspectives on Prayer (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011).

The Very Heart of Prayer: Reclaiming John Bunyan’s Spirituality (Mountain Home: Ark.: BorderStone Press 2012)