Can I Pray to the Holy Spirit?

Four Choices

It’s a great question, and the theological guideline is that we can pray to anyone who is God. So you’ve got three choices. You’ve kind of got four choices, not because there are four persons who are God but because you can pray to God without specifying a person of the Trinity, without having a Trinitarian thought in your head. And it’s not that the letter goes unanswered when it reaches heaven.

There is no clear biblical examples of prayer to the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, you can pray to anyone who is God, especially if you are praying in such a way that you are praying around the Trinity—to the Father, thanking him for sending the Son; or to the Son, thanking him for saving you.

In that context especially, it might occur to you to complete the circle, or the triangle, and direct some prayers to the Holy Spirit because it is theologically legitimate to pray to the Spirit. There are no biblical examples of it, but I don’t take that to be a binding command not to pray to the Spirit.

I will say that in the long term, you want your prayer life to take on roughly the proportions of Scripture. And if that’s the case, then overall, if someone were watching and marking down and grading your prayer life, over the long term, you’d want to be mostly praying to God the Father, praying sometimes to Jesus the Son, and occasionally to the Holy Spirit—especially in the context where the spiritual journey your mind is on is around the fullness of the Trinitarian revelation.

Fred Sanders is the author of The Holy Spirit: An Introduction.

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