The Trinity and prayer - part 1 - To the Father...

I'm trying to write a little piece on the difference the doctrine of the Trinity makes to our prayers. This is a rough draft of part one. Part two will look at "through the Son", and part three on "by the Spirit". Any feedback would be gratefully received, whether it is to pick up on heresy, pastoral insensitivity, or even poor writing quality.

"through Christ we have access in one Spirit to the Father" (Ephesians 2:18)

If we don't know who, or what, we are talking to then there is little reason for us to pray. We may pray when things get particularly tough and we think that anything is worth a try, but its always going to feel like a gamble. We would be like the Athenians in Acts 17 who pray to an "unknown god". It wouldn't surprise us that the unknown god never got to have the biggest temple in Athens because worshippers could never love and trust a god.

But Christians are privileged to actually know who God is. We may never have seen God, but Jesus Christ "has made him known" to us (John 1:18). Because of Jesus we know God is not a impersonal force, or the whole material universe, or one of many competing deities. Instead God is "our Father", and that person is the God we are told by Jesus to pray to.

We can be tempted to think that the title "Father" is just a description of God - i.e. that because he acts like a father towards us we call him "our Father". But God has been God the Father from all eternity. Fundamentally, God is not God the Father, because he acts like a father towards us, but because that is who he actually is. He has always been God the Father because he has always had a Son, Jesus Christ. And that is important because it means that when we say that we pray to God the Father we are not saying that we pray to a god who is like a father just like those of many other religions do. Instead it means we are praying to a particular person, to the exclusion of all others. As Paul so often says, we pray to "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ". There is only one god, who is Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Just like there is only one Father of Dave Kirkman. By addressing "our Father" in prayer, we don't just know the character of the God we pray to, but we know exactly who it is that we are talking about.

That we pray to "our Father" should shape our prayers in a number of ways. Firstly, we should pray in community because we are told to pray to "our Father". When alone, we should remember it is not just about me before God, but we should pray as part of the church. The Lord's prayer is full of the plural ("our", "us", "we") because we are not saved as individuals but as part of a whole body. We pray as the community and family that we are, concerned for each other's welfare and encouraged by the faith of our brothers and sisters praying with us.

Secondly, we should pray knowing that we have a Father who knows our needs and longs to do us good. After recounting Jesus' teaching of the Lord's prayer Matthew reminds us that God looks after the lilies and the birds and tells us that we have no reason to be anxious about anything because our Father knows all that we need. And after the Lord's prayer in Luke, we are told that even evil people like us give good things to our children so we can be confident that God will give us the Holy Spirit if we ask him. But God does not shower gifts on his children from afar, our relationship is one of intimacy so that we can call him Abba, Father, and approach him without fear.

Thirdly, we should pray respectfully. Fathers in the ancient world were august figures who demanded respect from their children. This should particularly be our attitude towards God because he is not only "our Father", but also "in heaven". He is creator and we are his creatures, but even that should encourage us to pray. Children ask their parents for things not just because they know they love them, but because they know that they can do what they cannot. As a child I asked my parents for bike not only because I thought they loved me enough to buy me one, but because I had no money and they did.