Should we pray to the Holy Spirit?
We can pray for the Holy Spirit, but can we pray to the Holy Spirit?
There is no example in the New Testament of anybody ever praying to the Holy Spirit!
Yes, the Holy Spirit is a person. Yes, the Holy Spirit is divine. So the Holy Spirit is a divine person.
But nobody in the New Testament ever prays to the Holy Spirit.
There are also calls to “pray in the Spirit” (Eph 6:18) and there is “praying in the Holy Spirit” (Jude 20), but not exhortation to pray to the Spirit!
But I’m convinced that we can and even should – on some specific occasions – pray to the Holy Spirit.
This is not about a scriptural proof-texting, but about the logic of the Trinity.
If we believe that there is one God, in three persons, and each person of the Trinity is Eternal, Almighty, God, and Lord, equal in glory and majesty – then, to use the language of the Athanasian Creed says – “we must worship their trinity in their unity and their unity in their trinity.”
That would apply to prayer as well.
Here I need to introduce you to Basil of Caesarea, a fourth-century bishop and theologian, and his book On the Holy Spirit. Basil’s big idea is that you cannot separate the Spirit from the Father and the Son. The Spirit is not expendable nor inferior to the other members of the Godhead.
Where you have prayer and worship to the triune God, there too, you have the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit can empower our prayer and even intercede to assist with our prayer. But the Holy Spirit can also be the object of our prayers for areas of which the Holy Spirit is known for in the operation of divine grace.
In many prayers of the Latin and Greek tradition, there are petitions to the Holy Spirit for knowledge, holiness, comfort, unity, and strength.
