ABSTRACT: In prayer, the Holy Spirit helps us to glory in and glorify Christ, the Son of God, to the praise of God the Father. The Spirit works before prayer to renew our minds, remind us of God’s promises, reassure us of his love, and stir us to pray. The Spirit works in and alongside our prayers, both teaching us what to pray and interceding for us. The Spirit works after our prayers, making them effective and offering himself as the ultimate answer to prayer. Finally, the Spirit is the Spirit of the one triune God to whom we pray so as to be filled with all his fullness.
For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Daniel Brendsel (PhD, Wheaton), pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Hinckley, Minnesota, to explore the Holy Spirit’s role in a believer’s prayers.
Certain things, as we look directly at them, become strangely opaque. Consider, for example, the self. “Why is it possible,” asks Walker Percy in the best self-help book of all time, “to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life?”1 The problem is partly one of perspective: How could we ever get outside ourselves for a fair analysis? The self is less a thing to look at directly and figure out, and more something to consider in relation to the Other who knows us best (cf. Galatians 4:9).
Prayer and the Holy Spirit are similar in this regard. They become more greatly illuminated when we consider their necessary relations to other things and persons.2 Prayer is no self-standing reality but necessarily our communicative side of a covenantal relationship with God. There is thus good reason to introduce prayer by introducing its partners. “Prayer and . . .” is bound to be a fruitful consideration.
In his excellent guide The Holy Spirit: An Introduction, Fred Sanders takes the same approach to pneumatology.3 Sanders recognizes that the Spirit is deflective (he directs our eyes elsewhere), reflexive (he is the light in which we see light), and connective (he guides into and relates all truth). As soon as we think about the Spirit, we find ourselves thinking about other realities. It can feel like chasing after the Wind. But it is not futility. Sanders harnesses the paradoxical character of pneumatology with an indirect approach to the Holy Spirit, considering the Spirit and the Father, and the Spirit and the Son, before considering “the Holy Spirit Himself.” “The Spirit and . . .” proves to be an extremely fruitful consideration.
“The Holy Spirit and prayer” might, then, be a match made in heaven. But what can we truthfully understand about the pairing? What, more particularly, is the Spirit’s role in prayer?
In one sense, it is extremely easy to find relevant biblical material to spur our thoughts, for the Spirit’s operations in relation to prayer are, as John Owen observed, “more frequently and expressly asserted in the Scripture than his operations with respect unto any other particular grace or duty whatever.”4 Yet the sheer abundance of connections discernible in Scripture is precisely what makes organizing the material in a clear and concise manner challenging. The Spirit is like the atmosphere in which any pray-er prays, and the very breath by which any prayer is voiced. Because of his ubiquity in the life of prayer, it can be hard to know where to begin.
Let us begin before any of us begins to pray, so to speak. In what follows, we will first consider the Spirit’s merciful and mighty movement before we pray. Then we will proceed to treat the Spirit while we pray, the Spirit after we pray, and the Spirit throughout our prayer.
The Spirit’s Work Before Prayer
No one born in Adam is naturally inclined to seek God. In the flesh, our best prayerful pursuits typically reach no further than “the unknown god” (Acts 17:23), acts that are less prayer and more attempts to cover our bases. True prayer depends on the prevenient work of the Spirit.5
Most fundamentally, (1) the Spirit renews us in mind and heart to pray in spirit and truth. He gives new hearts that are alive to the God who has revealed himself and opened the way to himself through the crucified and risen Christ. The technical term for this is regeneration (note, e.g., Titus 3:5). Or to use a complementary theological concept, God by his Spirit effectually calls us through the gospel, which is effectual particularly to draw from us our prayers.6 Before words of prayer resound from us, a prior word must be spoken to us. Prayer is answering speech.
In an extended consideration of the promised pouring out of “the Spirit of grace and of supplication” (Zechariah 12:10 NASB 1995), Owen sums up the matter as one in which the Spirit freely (i.e., of grace) creates in us “gracious inclinations and dispositions” for prayer, and gives us “a gracious ability for the discharge of it in a due manner.”7 As Sanders explains in simpler language, “The Holy Spirit makes us want to pray and then gives us power to pray.”8
Additionally, (2) the Spirit reminds us of certain crucial things that motivate us to pray. Supremely, the Spirit’s special ministry in this regard is to remind us of Christ’s teachings and of the significance of his life, death, resurrection, and ascended rule (John 14:26; cf. 2:22; 12:16). As we come to truly know Christ by the power of the Spirit, we are emboldened to lift our voices to the Father who loves us (more on this in point 3).
More generally, the Spirit guides us into all truth (John 16:13; cf. 14:26).9 He illumines and reminds us of the truth of God’s word. At their best, our prayers respond to this word, which is filled with promises to lay hold of and even includes model prayers to teach us how to pray (e.g., Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer). The Spirit’s ministry of reminder is, therefore, essential to get rolling in prayer.
Overlapping with the ministry of reminder, (3) the Spirit reassures us that we sinners have access to the throne of all mercy. To be sure, the path to reassurance goes through, not around, the Spirit’s convicting us of our sin, so that we acknowledge our great misery and need (cf. John 16:8–11). But the Spirit not only helps us see our sin for what it is; he also and especially helps us see the Savior, the Son of God given by the Father in love for us (John 3:16). Thus, with Spirit-wrought confidence in Christ as the evidence of the Father’s love, we are emboldened to come before the Father knowing he delights to hear our prayers (John 16:23–27).10
In these ways, (4) the Spirit stirs us to pray. Rejoicing “in the Holy Spirit” stirred our Lord to pray a remarkable prayer of thanksgiving to his Father (Luke 10:21–22). Differently, Stephen prays with firm trust, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” and with exceedingly rare love for his murderers, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (an eminently Christlike prayer; see Luke 23:34). Surely it is no coincidence that he was also at the time “full of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 7:54–60). I often find myself offering the counsel that if you feel prompted to pray, whether in direct response to some Scripture (read or remembered) or for someone or something at any given moment, then stop and linger in prayer. Do not ignore the stirring of the Spirit.
The Spirit’s Work During Prayer
We highlighted above the Holy Spirit’s work of reassurance. In one of the more well-known texts on his role in prayer, the Spirit, who is the Spirit of adoption, reassures and enables us to cry out, “Abba! Father!” Comparing and contrasting the two places where this concept appears in the New Testament is instructive as we turn to consider the Spirit’s ministry while we pray:
You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:15)
God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:6)
If we ask, “Who is it that prays, ‘Abba, Father’?” the answer that likely first comes to mind is we believers. Putting these verses side by side, however, shows that the answer is twofold: We believers pray (Romans 8:15), and the Spirit of the Son prays (the conceptual subject of the neuter participle krazon in Galatians 4:6).
While we pray, (5) the Spirit prays in us. The indwelling is so deep that we can say “the Spirit and the Bride” raise one prayer (Revelation 22:17). But they do so, as Owen argued, “in diverse respects.” It is the Spirit’s prayer because he enables it in us by sovereign grace, even as he graciously joins us in praying it; it is our prayer because, enabled by the Spirit, we really do voice it as our “duty” and privilege.11 The Spirit prays of his own power; we pray only by the empowering of the Spirit poured out in us, or only “in the Spirit.”12
But the Spirit is not only “in us” empowering and upholding us through Christ to pray, “Abba! Father!” with sincere faith, love, and hope. It is also the case that (6) the Spirit prays alongside our praying, interceding for us. Here we can turn to no better place than Paul’s reassuring word of Romans 8:26: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”
The Spirit’s ministry to intercede for us is necessary because of “our weakness,” which Paul identifies (gar) as our ignorance concerning what to pray.13 Given the preceding context in Romans 8, we might think of the many times we do not know the Lord’s particular will for our present wilderness of suffering. More generally, our weakness is ignorance of God’s sovereign will for all the particulars of history, so that we must simply pray generally, “Your will be done,” leaving unspecified precisely how, and along what timeline, his will shall play out. But there is one who need not pray in such generalizations, one who knows the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10–11), one who can and does intercede for us specifically “according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27).
Even without identifying where this intercessory ministry of the Spirit takes place, knowing that it does is a considerable encouragement, much as knowledge of Christ’s intercessory ministry at the right hand of God is of great encouragement (Romans 8:34). But Paul knows that the Spirit is not external to us but poured out in our hearts (Romans 5:5; cf. Ephesians 3:16). The Spirit’s “location” in us accounts for Paul’s explanatory comment in Romans 8:27 about the one “who searches hearts.” Paul means to say that the Spirit’s intercessory ministry for us is taking place in us. The Spirit’s help “alongside us” and “in us” come together.
Going still further, though the point is debated, this intercessory ministry can be understood to be so intimately connected to us that it works through our deepest and inarticulate heart groanings stirred up by the fierce suffering we endure as we wait in hope for redemption from the present age (Romans 8:23).14 God the Spirit draws “so close to us that he supports and empowers our prayers at a deeper level than we can even articulate. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is closer to us than we are to ourselves, because while parts of our inner life may be inaccessible even to our own minds, none of them [is] closed off to the Holy Spirit.”15
As believers in Christ pray, holy spiration blows even their hurting sighs heavenward to be graciously heard by the Father as intercessions according to his will.
The Spirit’s Work After Prayer
After we pray, (7) the Spirit makes the prayers we lift in Jesus’s name effective unto the glory of God the Father in the world. Paul gestures at this with striking diction in Philippians 1:19. Considering his imprisonment, Paul expresses confidence to the Philippian church “that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance.” It is impossible to reflect in good English the peculiar construction Paul uses in which two genitive nouns are governed by a single article to form the object of a preposition: dia tēs hymōn deēseōs kai epichorēgias tou pneumatos Iēsou Christou. The grammar suggests “the closest kind of relationship between their prayer and the supply of the Spirit. Paul is referring not to two realities (‘your prayer’ and ‘the Spirit’s help,’ as the NIV), but to twin sides of a single reality.”16 What the Spirit supplies is less a second help added to the effective prayers of the Philippian Christians. Rather, he supplies the effectiveness of their prayers, resulting in Paul’s deliverance to continue on for their progress and joy in the faith unto the glory of Christ (see verses 25–26).
The same basic point may be discernible in the cultic imagery of Revelation 8:3. As seven angels with trumpets appear poised to blast their judgments, “another angel” takes “the prayers of all the saints” and puts them together with “much incense” in a censer to offer in smoke on the altar.
Previously the saints’ prayers were identified as incense (Revelation 5:8). But in 8:3 their prayers are distinguished from “much incense,” which is added to them, and “with” which they are offered (verse 4). What is this extra “incense,” and why add it to the incense that is the saints’ prayers? I think it is reasonable to identify the incense of 8:3 as the prayers of Another. They are joined to the saints’ prayers, and in fact fill up the saints’ prayers (cf. Romans 8:26), making them effective to accomplish God’s will in the world (Revelation 8:5).17
Last but certainly not least, (8) the Spirit is received as the ultimate and best gift in response to prayer. Our Lord promises, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). Jesus does not specify what “those who ask him” might request. Is it a fish? An egg? Ice cream? Jesus’s emphasis is less on what God’s children ask for, or whether they know to ask for proper things; he emphasizes the Father’s wisdom and love in knowing “how to give good gifts,” demonstrated in his commitment to give the best gift, the Holy Spirit. It is as though whatever we ask for in Jesus’s name is, at bottom (by the power of the Spirit), a longing for God himself, which God is glad to fulfill.
This was true in Jesus’s life: In answer to prayer, he received at his baptism the Father’s endorsement in part by the manifestation of the Spirit in the form of a dove (Luke 3:21–22). It was true in the life of the early church: The gathered church prayed fervently, “and when they had prayed . . . they were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 4:31; cf. 8:14–17). The best gift God gives in answer to prayer is himself in the person of his Spirit.
But the order of praying — or who prays and receives the Spirit, and when — is crucial. First, the Son asks and receives; then, we adopted sons and daughters enter into the life of asking and receiving. Because Jesus first prayed faithfully and fervently unto his Father, even unto death, therefore upon his victorious ascension he “received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:33), and it was this prize received from the Father that the ascended King then poured out in turn on his kingdom of believers. God gives the Spirit as the best and ultimate gift in response to prayer.
The Spirit’s Work Throughout Prayer
Breaking from the somewhat artificial mold of the Spirit’s role before, during, and after prayer, we need to end with a point that is true throughout. The Spirit’s role in prayer is not just as one who is active for, in, and by prayer. He is also and especially the one, the God, to whom we pray.
This might be taken to mean we can address our prayers to the Holy Spirit. As far as it goes, that is appropriate. Admittedly, there do not appear to be any scriptural prayers addressed to the Holy Spirit. The vast majority are addressed to God the Father through (and sometimes to) God the Son. But since he is the third person of the Trinity, creedal Christians have always confessed that the Spirit “with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.”18 There is a great tradition of hymnody and prayer voicing praise and petition to the Holy Spirit.19
Still, the general biblical pattern reveals the proper grain of prayer, so to speak, and we do well to pray with it.20 The grain of prayer, praise, access, and all communion as regards God is given in a nutshell in Ephesians 2:18: “Through [Christ] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”21 To the Father, through the Son, in (and by the power of) the Spirit. Before prayer, during prayer, after prayer, and in all other forms of happy communion with the one God, we come to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.22
Through the ordinary means of prayer in Jesus’s name, the Spirit helps us to glory in and glorify Christ the Son, who loves us and gave himself for us (John 16:14; Ephesians 5:2). As we pray for the hallowing of the Father’s name, in the Spirit’s power we are heard by the Father, who gave his Son for us in love and whose response to our prayer is guaranteed. As we grow in our knowledge of both the Father and the Son who love us, we also thereby grow in knowledge of the Spirit who is the gift of love to us from both. Without the Spirit, none of these blessings would be forthcoming. With the Spirit, we are driven deeper “into the mystery of the holy Trinity,”23 so as to “be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 1. The above quotation is actually one of five (or nine) alternative subtitles that Percy offers for his book. ↩
It was under such a conviction that I wrote a book about prayer, though to describe it that way is misleading. It was less about prayer and more an attempt to look through prayer at other realities it answers to and participates in — God, Scripture, language, and temporal rhythms of life. See Daniel J. Brendsel, Answering Speech: The Life of Prayer as Response to God (Crossway, 2023). ↩
Fred Sanders, The Holy Spirit: An Introduction, Short Studies in Systematic Theology (Crossway, 2023). ↩
John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 4, The Work of the Spirit (Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–53; repr. Banner of Truth, 1967), 253. ↩
Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. H. de Vries (Eerdmans, 1900), 621–28, goes all the way back to the Spirit’s work in creating us in God’s image, which is the necessary precondition for our engagement with God in prayer. ↩
See Jonathan Hoglund, Called by Triune Grace: Divine Rhetoric and the Effectual Call, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (IVP Academic, 2016). ↩
Owen, Works, 4:259. ↩
Sanders, The Holy Spirit, 78. ↩
See also 1 John 2:20, 27, where the “anointing” is probably a reference to the Holy Spirit with which believers are anointed. See Gary M. Burge, The Anointed Community: The Holy Spirit in the Johannine Tradition (Eerdmans, 1987), 174–75; and especially Stephen E. Witmer, Divine Instruction in Early Christianity, WUNT 2/246 (Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 131–52. ↩
For a more detailed argument regarding John 16:7–27, see my “The Spirit After Pentecost: Three Facets of His New-Covenant Glory,” Desiring God, January 28, 2022, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-spirit-after-pentecost. ↩
Owen, Works, 4:268–69. ↩
The phrase comes from Ephesians 6:18 (also Jude 20). I take it to refer to the ordinary Christian power, privilege, and practice of praying by the enabling of the Spirit, with Spirit-renewed spirits that desire to pray, Spirit-led wills that seek what the Spirit seeks, and hearts that have tasted of the down payment of the Spirit (2 Corinthians 1:22; 5:5; Ephesians 1:14) and thus have “a passion sparked by the foretaste of a world that is new in a qualitatively different sense than any era that has preceded it” (Michael Horton, Rediscovering the Holy Spirit: God’s Perfecting Presence in Creation, Redemption, and Everyday Life [Zondervan, 2017], 288). Paul in Ephesians 6:18 urges the whole church to such prayer “at all times,” suggesting that what is in view is not a special ecstatic utterance that only some experience some of the time. See rightly Constantine R. Campbell, The Letter to the Ephesians, PNTC (Eerdmans, 2023), 293. Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Hendrickson, 1994), 731, thinks the reference is “especially” to “praying in tongues,” though he significantly adds that it is “probably not exclusively” so. ↩
The ESV rightly translates the clause — which features a singular ti rather than a plural or pōs — in terms of content of which we are ignorant (“what to pray for”) rather than manner (“how to pray”). See James D.G. Dunn, Romans 1–8, WBC 38A (Word, 1988), 477. ↩
Contra Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Eerdmans, 1996), 524–25. See Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, BECNT (Baker, 1998), 445–46. ↩
Sanders, The Holy Spirit, 80. ↩
Fee, God’s Empowering Presence, 740. ↩
See also Peter J. Leithart, Revelation 1–11, ITC (T&T Clark, 2018), 350–51. The point is strengthened if “another angel” (allos angelos) in Revelation 8:3 is identified as the Spirit. ↩
See also Kelly M. Kapic, Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Baker Academic, 2007), 163–64. ↩
E.g., “Come, O Creator Spirit blest,” “Holy Ghost, dispel our sadness,” “O Breath of life, come sweeping through us.” ↩
Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010), 211–39. See also Sanders, The Holy Spirit, 139–44, where he speaks of prayer addressed to the Spirit as “eccentric,” in the root sense of the word. ↩
Owen prized Ephesians 2:18 as a “heavenly directory” for our communion with God. See The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 2, Communion with God (Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–53; repr. Banner of Truth, 1965), 269. It may well have been his favorite prooftext on the matter; see, e.g., Works 2:7, 10, 23, 107–8, 122; 4:267, 292, 296. ↩
See further Sanders, The Holy Spirit, 75–79. ↩
Andrew Murray, The Spirit of Christ: Thoughts on the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Believer and the Church (London, 1888), 195. Quoted in Sanders, The Holy Spirit, 141. ↩
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