How Prayer Actually Works: To the Father, Through the Son, By the Spirit

How Prayer Actually Works

You don’t have to get your Trinitarian theology all sorted out before you can pray to the Trinity. Our God hears prayers. He does not wait for us to pass the theology test before he listens to us praying. God the Father knows what we need before we ask (Matt. 6:8); God the Son is a high priest who can sympathize with our weakness, giving us confidence to draw near the throne of grace (Heb. 4:15–16); and God the Spirit knows how to pray even when we do not, interceding for us with groanings too deep for words (Rom. 8:26). Whether or not we understand the doctrine of the Trinity, God has his Trinitarian theology in good working order long before we show up, and our prayers are founded on the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

It is because of God’s triunity that we have communion with God in prayer. Once we understand that the Christian life is constituted by the Trinity, we have an opportunity to pray in a way that is consistent with that constitution. If the Spirit unites us to the Son and reconciles us to the Father, we have an invitation to pray accordingly: to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. This is not just the “theologically correct” way to pray but a way of praying that draws real spiritual power from being aligned with reality. The reality is that Christian prayer is already tacitly Trinitarian, whether we recognize it or not. Aligning with it means praying with the grain instead of against it.

Wood has a grain to it. The long fibers that make up a piece of wood all run in one direction, and a wise woodworker will always find the direction of that grain before starting to work. He can work along the grain or cut across it, but he avoids planing or sanding against that grain because that is to invite a clash with the directionality built into the piece of wood. Paper has a grain to it as well, which is why you can tear straight lines down the page but not across it. Cat fur has a grain, and if you stroke a cat against that grain, the results are not good for felines or humans. When you work with the grain of the wood, or the paper, or the cat, things go well. When you go against the grain, either because you are oblivious to the structural forces involved or because you consider them negligible, things do not go as well.

The act of prayer has, metaphorically speaking, a grain to it. Prayer has an underlying structure built into it, complete with a directionality that is worth observing. This grain is Trinitarian, running from the Spirit through the Son to the Father. It is a built-in logic of mediation, designed that way by God for reasons deeper than we are likely to fathom. But we do not need to understand it in order to benefit from its solid structural integrity. Nor do we need to take special lessons in praying in a properly Trinitarian fashion. The possibility of praying in a more Trinitarian way is all promise and no threat, all invitation and no danger. Christian prayer is already thoroughly, pervasively, structurally Trinitarian whether you have been noticing it or not. The only thing you have to add is your attention, to begin taking notice of what’s Trinitarian about prayer.

Prayer is a great blessing, but it can be daunting and difficult when you stop to think what is involved in a finite, sinful creature reaching out to an infinite, holy God. When we recall the distance and dissimilarity between us and God, it is easy to wonder whether we have the ability to pray and whether coming into God’s presence is a good idea anyway. Perhaps it is that pressure that leads us to behave so poorly in our attempts at prayer: mouthing thoughtless clichés that even we don’t know the meaning of; tongue-tied; repetitious; distractible; with wandering minds that only succeed in coming back to self-centeredness as a reliable point of departure. Not only does God know that prayer is daunting, but it is even a biblical doctrine that we are not in ourselves equipped for prayer. Romans 8:26 says, “We do not know what to pray for as we ought.” That same passage goes on to say that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” And within a few verses, a second intercessor appears: “Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (Rom. 8:34). Christian prayer has double intercession built into it. The Father not only welcomes prayers, but he has provided mediation and perhaps even mediation of the mediation. Your prayer life is secure in the two hands of the Father.

That built-in logic of mediation is the grain of prayer. We are directed to pray to the Father in the name of Jesus, and it is customary to do that by ending prayers with the formula “in Jesus’s name.” But there is a thought experiment you can do to see more clearly the direction of the grain of prayer. If you try praying backward, you will find yourself beginning with the formula “in Jesus’s name” as an introduction to set up everything you are about to say. This calls attention to the fact that all Christian prayer is offered under this sign: “Not by my authority or according to my fitness or deserving of a hearing, but on the basis of the finished work of Jesus Christ I approach God.” Now consider that even if you were praying to Jesus, you would still be approaching God the Son on the same basis: not by your own authority but on the basis of the finished work of Christ. Even when you pray to Jesus, you pray in Jesus’s name, because Christian prayer has a built-in logic of mediation, a directionality, a grain. That grain becomes more evident when you do something that runs a little bit against the grain, like petting a cat from tail to head. But when you are alert to the direction of the grain, you can intentionally work along it. It is possible to pray with the grain, observing the directionality and the logic of mediation built into the Christian approach to God.

The Direction and Path of Prayer

The direction of prayer’s grain is presupposed and suggested in a fragmentary way throughout all of Scripture. But it is classically stated in Ephesians 2:18: “For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” Christian prayer, as a subset of Christian communion with God, is an approach to God the Father, through God the Son, in the Holy Spirit. John Owen called this passage “a heavenly directory,” and Horatius Bonar teased out a theology of worship from it:

The whole Trinity has to do with our return and reception. The Father throws open His presence chamber, the Holy of Holies where He dwells; the Son provides the way for our restoration, by answering in His death all the ends that could have been served by our exclusion; and the Holy Spirit conducts us into the Father’s presence along the new and living way.¹

Bonar’s interpretation of the passage is typical of most evangelical treatments of it. In the context of the overall argument of Ephesians, this statement is directly concerned with the joining of Jews and Gentiles in one unified way of access to God. Paul is seeing the Gentiles included alongside the Jews in the fulfillment of the ancient promises. But Paul states his case so expansively that later interpreters are warranted in making more general application to the entire economy of salvation. When John Bunyan defined true prayer, he built his definition around this Trinitarian structure from Ephesians 2. Bunyan’s complete definition runs:

Prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God, through Christ, in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God hath promised, or according to the Word, for the good of the church, with submission, in faith, to the will of God.²

What difference does it make to begin cultivating an alertness to the Trinity in our prayer? Here is the difference it makes: it builds on what is already actually going on in prayer. We have an opportunity to bring our experience and our awareness into alignment with the structure of the economy of salvation. It might be wise to restrain ourselves from saying much more than that, but it is possible to say one thing more. Since the economy of salvation, as we have seen, is the one sure revelation of God’s triunity, then our alignment with it is also an alignment with what has been revealed about the eternal being of God. Not only are we coming to God the Father in a way that echoes the salvation-historical enfolding of the Gentiles into the promises to Abraham, but we are coming to God the Father in a way that retraces the path of his sending the Son and the Spirit to reveal himself and redeem us. Prayer thus opens up to an eternal Trinitarian vista. There is always already a conversation going on among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we pray, we are joining that conversation. We have been invited to call on God as Father, invited by a Spirit of sonship that cries out, “Abba, Father,” as the eternal Son does.

Your prayer life is secure in the two hands of the Father.

This insight leads to a second advantage of attending to the Trinitarian dynamic of Christian prayer. It takes the pressure off us to make prayer happen. Not only are the Son and the Spirit involved as intercessors in our prayers, but there is also a communicating life in the very being of God that is analogous to prayer. We are invited to enter that eternal conversation in an appropriately lower, creaturely way, but the heavenly analogue of prayer is already going on in the life of God rather than waiting for us to get it started. If you have ever become weary of working up the right response in prayer or worship, you can glimpse the relief of being able to approach prayer and worship with the knowledge that the party already started before you arrived.

The third advantage of praying with the grain of Christian mediation is that it aligns your prayer life in particular with your spiritual life in general. That is, your Christian existence is a life that has been brought to the throne of the Father by the work of the Son in the power of the Spirit. Your prayers are verbal actions that follow the same path: to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. Consciously Trinitarian prayer is an invitation to align your words with the more all-encompassing reality of your life as God has constituted it. Andrew Murray points to these multiple, mutually aligned domains when he says, “In each act of worship, each step of growth, and each blessed experience of grace, all the Three Persons are actively engaged.” He goes on to indicate how these areas will harmonize beautifully with each other when they are all echoing with faith in the Trinity:

Would you apply this in the life of holiness, let faith in the Holy Trinity be a living practical reality. In every prayer to the Father to sanctify you, take up your position in Christ, and do it in the power of the Spirit within you. In every exercise of faith in Christ as your Sanctification, let your posture be that of prayer to the Father and trust in Him as He delights to honour the Son, and of quiet expectancy of the Spirit’s working, through whom the Father glorifies the Son. In every surrender of the soul to sanctification of the Spirit, to His leading as the Spirit of Holiness, look to the Father who grants His mighty working, and who sanctifies through faith in the Son, and expect the Spirit’s power to manifest itself in showing the will of God, and Jesus as your Sanctification. If for a time this appears at variance with the simplicity of childlike faith and prayer, be assured that as God has thus revealed Himself, He will teach you so to worship and believe. And so the Holy, holy, holy will become the deep undertone of all our worship and all our life.³

Our life in Christ is an all-encompassing reality, and individual acts of personal, verbal prayer are one part of it. But attending to the Trinitarian grain of prayer can be spiritually powerful and productive. Every act of devotion can be self-consciously a microcosm of the entire spiritual life. Perhaps this kind of alignment of life with devotion is the high possibility behind the command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17).

This article is adapted from The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything by Fred Sanders.

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