At the recent DTC I attended the question came up as to whom we are supposed to pray — the Father, the Son or the Spirit? Someone facetiously said that what we need is an “org chart”.
This is a good question, and perfectly reasonable; we are told that God is personal, and so we want to know how the personal God relates to us and vice versa.
In response to the question I chimed in, suggesting a “verbal org chart” as follows:
We pray
to the Father
through the Son
by the Spirit.
Now I admit that looking at things analytically like this is a little like dissecting a frog. You might get greater insight into some things, but you will not expect the frog to start hopping around again when you are done. But nevertheless it is cool to understand how the Persons of the Trinity interact in having a relationship with us. Or maybe one might simply say, “Well, you asked.”
At any rate we pray ultimately to the Father. He is the greatest because he begets the Son, and the Spirit is the personal embodiment of the relationship between the Father and the Son.
But we pray through the Son, Jesus, the one mediator between man and God, the one who knows us because he became one of us.
But Jesus is no longer physically present with us. Instead, he is present with us through the Spirit. And so it is the Spirit who connects us to God, convincing us that we are God’s beloved children and he is our loving Father. We pray by the Spirit because he is God beside us, the comforter that will never leave us, the One who even helps us pray because we do not know how to pray the way we should.
But here we must remember that the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Spirit. (This is known as the idea of “co-inherence.”) And so it’s not as though praying by the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father is a long-distance call. The Son is right there in the person of the Spirit, and the Father is right there in the person of the Son.
And so ultimately it doesn’t matter to whom we direct our prayers. They end up in the right place.