The Roles of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
By Mark Bird
During a weekend seminar on the cults, I took a few students on a Sunday field trip to a nearby Kingdom Hall. That morning, a Jehovah’s Witness leader gave the Bible lesson on prayer. One of his major points was that “Jehovah has not delegated prayer to the angels or to Jesus. Jehovah has reserved prayer only for himself.”
After the service, I asked the leader to explain why we should only pray to the Father and not to Jesus. He said it was because “Jesus is not Almighty God, and only God is to be worshiped.”
Of course, traditional Bible-believing Christians reject that reason for not praying to Jesus. But I have heard some evangelicals, though rightly affirming that Jesus is divine, express reluctance to address Him in prayer. I’ve had students suggest to me that when Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father, which art in heaven,” He meant that only the Father should be addressed in prayer. Yet they would also recognize that all three members of the Trinity are worthy of worship.
This confusion could be cleared up by taking a good look at the role that each member of the Trinity plays in prayer. We should first understand how the Persons in the Godhead relate to one another.
The Communion of the Persons of the Trinity
When we pray, we enter the communion that the members of the Trinity have had for all eternity with one another. The communion of the Father and Son (in the Spirit) is characterized by several traits: self-giving love, gratitude, cooperation, submission and delegation, intimacy and honesty, honoring one another, finding pleasure in one another, and expressing concern for others outside the fellowship of the Trinity. God models all these positive expressions for us.
The members of the Trinity do not want to keep the joy of their relationship to themselves. They want us to join the Trinity’s communion and to live in unity with each other. The Son prayed that the believers “may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). This can only happen through the Holy Spirit (1 John 4:13).
Differing Roles in the Godhead
While we understand that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one in nature and inseparable in all their operations, we also understand from Scripture that there are key distinctions in the way they relate to one another and to us. The theological backdrop of prayer is the following: Each member of the Trinity has a distinct part to play in our salvation. The Father initiates our salvation, the Son accomplishes our salvation, and the Spirit applies our salvation.
It is the Father who sent the Son into the world to become the Savior. The Son is the express image of the Father. The Son willingly submitted to the will of the Father to become incarnate, and then the Spirit (who proceeds from the Father through the Son) came to abide fully in believers.
Just as the members of the Trinity have distinct (though not separated) roles in salvation, they also have distinct (yet overlapping) roles in prayer. As salvation comes down to us from the Father through Christ in the Spirit, our prayers go up to the Father through Christ in the Spirit.
The Role of the Father
The New Testament reveals God the Father as the primary recipient and answerer of human prayer: “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:11; see also Matt. 6:6, 9; 18:19).
The Father is also the primary recipient of the intercession of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Role of the Son
Jesus is the mediator between us and God the Father (1 Tim. 2:5–6; John 14:6). As mediator, Christ is our advocate, and He intercedes for us (1 John 2:1; Heb. 7:25). Jesus is our High Priest who made propitiation for our sins, rose from the dead, and now intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father. This is a present-tense work.
Jesus invites us to ask in His name to receive from the Father and glorify Him: “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:13-14). We can address both Jesus and His Father in prayer when we come in His authority. And He promised that He (and the Father) will answer.
Once I wrote a note to my daughters to motivate them to clean their room:
Girls, I will take you out for ice cream if you completely clean under your bed. When you are done, bring this note and pictures on a camera to prove your work, and we will go out within two days of the cleaning. Dad
This note was a promissory note with my signature. When one of the girls came to present the note to me, she was coming in my name—my authority. The girls had every right to expect that I would take them out for ice cream when they brought back the note with my promise and my name on it.
Jesus gave us some promises as a divine Person with the authority to make much greater promises than I could make. We come to Him or to the Father in His authority. He has given us the “promissory note” with His “signature” so that we can be assured of the answer to our prayers.
The Role of the Spirit
The Spirit is revealed in the New Testament as an intercessor. The apostle Paul explained the way the Spirit prays for us:
The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God (Rom. 8:26–27).
The Holy Spirit empowers us, enabling us to pray as we ought (see also Eph. 3:16, 6:18; Jude 1:20). But He’s not only helping us say the right words in the right way. He also takes the initiative, adding to our prayers by asking that God’s will be done in and for us, in ways that we are not even aware of.
A chaplain friend of mine has learned to listen for the heart cry of his hospital patients, and then to pray the prayers they have difficulty praying for themselves because of their weakened mental concentration. He doesn’t make demands on God but takes to the Father the requests he believes come from the hearts of the patients.
Likewise, the Spirit, out of intimate knowledge of both God and each of us, is taking our needs to the Father, expressing our requests better than we ever could. The Spirit’s unutterable groans are more efficacious than any number of requests we might utter on our own, no matter how eloquent we may sound.
The Spirit is not only interceding for us. He is also involved in answering those prayers as granted by the Father. The Spirit’s power is at work as He moves on hearts or heals sick bodies. The Spirit may give directives to us in response to prayer (Acts 13:2). As Christians, we experience His “promptings” and “checks.” I believe the Spirit’s desire to glorify the Son motivates Him to help us become more like Christ and to minister to others (John 16:7–14).
My oldest brother Dave had a unique experience that shows the Spirit’s desire to exalt the Son as well as to answer prayer. For years, Dave struggled with alcohol and had problems in his marriage. He was far from God. But one morning, as he drove to work, he suddenly heard an audible voice (from the vacant passenger side of the car), saying, “Jesus loves you.”
My brother responded to the voice of the Holy Spirit. “Lord, save me!” he cried. Dave was instantly converted, and when he got home that night, he poured out all his alcohol, gathered his family around him at the kitchen table, and told them life was going to be different. Since then, Dave has lived a transformed life. He is a testimony to answered prayer and to the awakening and regenerating power of the Spirit, who has come not just to convict people of their sin, but also to connect them to the Savior.
No Wrong Way!
Though we have the privilege to pray to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, there is a sense in which all our prayers are ultimately directed to the Father, who is the Head of the Trinity (1 Cor. 11:3). We need to remember that the members of the Trinity are one. When we pray to one member of the Trinity, the others hear our prayer as well, and respond in a way consistent with their Person.
Because prayers directed to the Father are so common in the New Testament, it is certainly appropriate to address the Father on a regular basis, maybe more than we address the other Persons. But I am confident that God is not counting our prayers to each member of the Trinity to make sure we have prayed to each in proper proportion.
The Persons of the Trinity love to glorify one another, so whether we pray to the Spirit in the name of Christ, for the Father’s glory, or pray to the Father in the name of Christ for the Spirit’s glory, God will be honored either way.
DR. MARK BIRD is professor of Systematic and Practical Theology at God’s Bible School and College in Cincinnati, OH.
