Our confidence in the effectiveness of our prayers grows as we better understand what it truly means to pray “in Jesus’ name,” recognizing that we approach the Father not on our own merits, but through Christ’s perfect authority.
Transcript
Like we mentioned last week, today we’re going to be talking about what it means to pray in Jesus’ name. What does it mean to come before the Lord in the name of Jesus? I’m going to read a couple of texts, but our primary text is John 14 verses 13 and 14.
Jesus is in the upper room, just before his crucifixion. He is with his disciples and he’s giving instruction to his disciples. He’s telling them how things will be after he leaves and he’s making promises to them. And so in verse 13 of chapter 14, he says this:
“Whatever you ask in my name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.”
And then in chapter 16, verses 23 and 24:
“In that day, you will not question me about anything. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask the Father for anything in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you’ve asked for nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be full.”
The promise of the Lord to his disciples, to us through his disciples. Let’s ask God to bless his word.
Father, we thank you so much for the preciousness of the words of Jesus. We thank you, Lord, for giving us our Savior and all that he means. We ask, Father, that as we reflect on what it means to pray in his name, what the name of Jesus means, please help us to understand this with clarity from your word. We ask for the special mercy and grace that comes to us through your Holy Spirit to illuminate our hearts and illuminate our minds so that we can understand the preciousness of what it means to be able to come to you in the name of Christ. Bless us today as we consider this, in the name of our Savior, for his glory, we pray. Amen.
A Child’s Prayer
Well, this past Friday, Jess and Edmund came over, and my daughter Rachel brought her two kids over for breakfast on Friday morning. And so we were having breakfast. Before we started, I prayed as we always do, asking God’s blessing on the food. And when I finished, my three-year-old grandson, Titus, says, “You forgot to pray for the train park.” He’s been enamored with a particular park in Salem that has a train theme. And so, what do you do? Rachel, my daughter, says, “Do you want to pray for the train park, Titus?” He says yes. So he bows his head, we all bow our heads, and he prays:
Thank you, Lord, for the train park. The end.
I was thinking about that, his little prayer, and I was thinking about the way we pray. And I was thinking in particular because we are talking today about praying in the name of Jesus, what that phrase means to us when we use it. I wonder if it means any more than what Titus meant when he said, “The end.” When we finish our prayers and by rote we say, “in Jesus’ name, Amen,” that’s sort of like we’ve finished our text and we hit the little send button. And I wonder if we ever give thought to what that means, or more seriously, do we pray in his name, even if we tack that on, is the prayer that we are praying a prayer that is truly in the name of Jesus? I think that’s a very serious question to think about for us to consider, especially as we offer prayer and as we’re focusing right now on prayer and what it means to pray and where we find our confidence in bringing our requests to the Lord.
Review: Fellowship with God in Christ
So I want us to take just a minute and reflect about some of the things we talked about last week. And I want to bring this up again because I recognize if we stop where we stopped last week and we haven’t listened exactly carefully, it could lead us to a great error. Last week, we were talking about the fact that fellowship with God in Christ is necessary if we’re going to pray effectively. Our prayers depend in part on the relationship that we have with God. And so we looked at a number of verses last week that talked about that fact:
- “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, you double-minded.”
- We looked at 1 Timothy 2:8: “Therefore I want men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands.”
- And we talked about what it means to abide in Christ. To abide in Christ, it tells us in John’s gospel, “He that abides in him should walk even as he walked.” Live your life the way Jesus lived his life.
And we can look at verses like that and think about the relationship we have with Christ and whether our prayers will be answered or not, and that can lead us to a real problem. And I reinforced that last week by talking about people whose prayers are not answered. Let me give you a few of those again.
- Psalm 66:18: “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.”
- Isaiah 59:2: “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.”
- John 9:31: “We know that God does not hear sinners, but if anyone is God-fearing and does his will, he hears him.”
And so these are true texts, they are describing a reality that is true, and yet it can lead us to a kind of thinking that is wrong. And the kind of thinking that is wrong is that we need to perform a certain way, and whether our prayers are heard or not depends on how well we behave before God. That’s the kind of thinking that it can lead to, and that is sinful thought. It’s wrong thinking. If we think that because of our behavior, we’ve behaved really well, then we’ve earned merit with God, we have earned God’s blessing in some way, then that’s wrong. It’s not the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s not true. And so we have to rethink.
Approaching God on His Merits, Not Ours
And so what I was saying last week, and several weeks ago, is that what is true of the nature of a believer is that he abides in Christ. What’s true of a truly regenerate person is that the norm for that person is that they do seek to walk the way Jesus walked. That’s true of a saved person; that’s what they want. They’re not earning anything; it’s what they want. Their desire, their heart is the changed heart of a saved person. And when we sin, our sin creates doubt in us, and so we begin to not seek the Lord the way we should. That’s the dilemma that we were talking about last time. And so there’s a practical aspect of drawing near to God in relation to our prayer, but it’s not conditional on our behavior.
We need to be careful that we make sure that we’re not caught up in this idea that if God answers our prayers, it’s something that we merit in any kind of a way, or we forfeit by a spiritual failure. We’re not to think that way. What happens if we do? Well, there’s an example in Luke’s gospel, in Luke chapter 18, that Jesus gives of two people who are praying. And the first one is a Pharisee. And you remember, I’m just going to paraphrase that little section. The Pharisee prays:
Lord, I am so thankful that I’m not like other people, especially not like that tax collector over there. And then you remember the prayer of the tax collector:
Lord, have mercy on me, the sinner. And Jesus says it was him, and not the first one, that went away justified. You see what happens when we think that we’ve earned something before God is that one of two things happens in our approach to God.
First, we could, if we think we’ve done really well, then when we come before God, we think we’ve merited something and we come to God in our pride. And that’s sinful, just like the Pharisee.
Or we think we haven’t measured up, and we might not come at all because we don’t think God’s going to hear our prayer because we haven’t merited anything. That’s the way we’re thinking at the moment, we have sinned.
How should we come to God? Come to God like the publican, the tax collector. We come to God saying, “God have mercy on me, the sinner.”
What it Means to Pray in Jesus’ Name
And the cure for this, what we have to do is recognize what it means to pray in the name of the Lord Jesus. And we’re going to look at a few things this morning, but prayer in the name of the Lord Jesus is how we come before the Lord. It’s how we are to come before the Lord with acceptance. We come in his name.
Tacking the name onto your prayer doesn’t do it. It’s not like a magic formula and you say, “If I say in Jesus’ name, then he’ll hear this prayer.” You can say “in Jesus’ name” and it not mean anything at all. You can be a hypocrite, and by the way, hypocrites in the church, unsaved people who masquerade as Christians in Christian circles, they all use the name of Jesus. It doesn’t make you saved because you use the name of Jesus. It doesn’t make you real or true with the Lord. Hypocrites pray in the name of Jesus. Hypocrites do all kinds of things in the name of Jesus.
An example of that is in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in chapter 7 of Matthew’s gospel when he talks about those who will come to him in that day of judgment. And they say to him:
“Lord, Lord, have we not cast out demons in your name? Have we not done all these wonderful works in your name?”
And he says:
“Depart from me, you worker of iniquity, I never knew you.”
You can use the name of Jesus and not be real with God. You can tack “in Jesus’ name” onto your prayer and that doesn’t make it acceptable. The people, when they said those things to Jesus, I want you to notice they don’t know what it means “in your name.” They wouldn’t be approaching the Lord saying, “look at all these wonderful things that I did in your name.” The problem is that they think that they’re acceptable before God because of the things that they have done for the name of Jesus. And so they’re wrong. They’re not praying in his name, they’re not doing these things in his name, they are doing those things for their own selfish ends, looking for their own glory.
1. Coming Through Christ’s Authority and Merit
Now the better way is to come to God in prayer truly in the name of Jesus, and that means we come to God through Christ’s authority and through his merit. We come to the Father through the authority and merit of the Lord Jesus.
Think about your record before God. How many days of your life have you lived perfectly, sinlessly? Do you have a good record? If you added them all up, how many would you get? Do you think you could fill up a hand? How often is it that someone might live an hour without thinking some type of sinful thought or twisting something in some prideful way? Do you live a life that is perfect? Well, we don’t, do we? We haven’t. Our record isn’t too good. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, every one of us. If we’re going to come to God on our merits, what do we need to do? Well, Jesus said, > “Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” You want to earn the blessing of God? You want to earn it yourself? Then that’s the standard. The standard is perfection. When you fail to complete that, then you’re polluting the offering that you’re offering to God. If you mix it up with your sin, you do these good things, you have all this sin, and you offer that up to the Lord and expect that to be acceptable to God. God says no. It needs to be perfect.
Think about Jesus’ record. His 33 years of perfect obedience to the Lord. Always doing the will of the Father. That’s a record. That’s incredible. That’s merit. So we need to appropriate Christ’s 33 years of perfect obedience through faith, which he offers to us. Not only did he pay for our sins through his suffering on the cross, but he lived perfectly and that perfect obedience that he has he offers to our credit. Through faith, God credits that to us as the sacrifice and gift of Christ. It’s the gift of Christ to us. And so Christ’s sacrifice provides a permanent access to the Father that our performance can’t come close to. So we need to avoid the Pharisee’s type of prayer, thinking about our own merit. We have to look to Christ and his authority. It’s his authority.
In the ancient world, to speak in the name of the king is to be the representative of the king. To come with the authority of the king. If we come before God in the name of the Lord Jesus, we’re coming with his authority. A police officer walks out into the heavy traffic of a busy road. And he’s in uniform. He holds out his hand and all the traffic stops. It better stop, because he’s there with the authority of the state. He’s there with the authority of the Commonwealth. And when he holds out his hand, he essentially is saying, “stop in the name of the law.” You know, the traffic is far more powerful than that man is. They could keep going. They stop because of the authority of the law that is behind him. That’s a big difference between me walking out in the street and saying, “stop in the name of Steve.”
When we come before the Lord, we come as the representative of Christ in that sense. We come with all the authority of Christ because we’re in him. And we have all the blessings of a relationship with Jesus Christ. And we come with the authority of the very name of Christ and all the glory of Christ, all the credentials of Christ, all his attributes and all that he is. So we come before the Lord in the name of the Lord Jesus. That’s part of what it means. We come by his authority, by the merit that he has earned. Every answer to prayer that you’ll ever receive, Jesus Christ paid for. He paid for it. We come to him bankrupt, but he gives us a check with his name on it. We come in his name. And so it’s through his perfections that these prayers are answered. Who gets the glory for it? Christ must get the glory for it.
2. Praying Consistent with the Character of Jesus
So we come in the name of Jesus, we come clothed in Jesus’ righteousness. And when we pray in the name of Jesus, it means—and this is important—it means that we’re praying consistent with the character of Jesus. The name represents all that Jesus is. It represents who he is with all of his attributes. In the Old Testament, when it talked about the name of the Lord and taking the name of the Lord in vain, using the name of the Lord in an empty way, when you talk about the name of the Lord, you’re talking about all the attributes of God, all that he is. When he shows himself to Moses, he declares all the things that are true of himself. His mercy, his righteousness, his perfections. So the name represents all of God’s attributes.
The name of Jesus represents all that Jesus is in his person. The fact that he is infinite God and man at the same time. All of those things is what it means when we use the name of Jesus. And so we’re talking about the very character of Jesus when we mention this name. And so when we pray, when we pray in Jesus’ name, it means that what we are asking for should be in agreement with something that is true about him. If we’re praying for something that’s not in agreement with his nature, then we’re really not praying in his name. Our heart and our purpose in prayer needs to be aligned with the heart and purpose of our Lord Jesus Christ, with Jesus. And when our heart is aligned with Jesus’ heart, if we’re abiding in him in that way, then we ask what we want. Whatever we wish. And it’s in agreement with the Lord Jesus. So we are to come to him in that way. And we’re to come to him in that way because it’s the only way to come to the Father.
3. Coming Through Christ’s Mediation
We come through Jesus Christ’s mediation. Jesus is our high priest who takes our prayers to the Father. Jesus said:
“I am the door. If anyone enters through me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.”
In John 14:6, he said:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.”
If you’re going to come to the Father, the only way you can come to the Father is through the Lord Jesus. The only way you can get access to the throne of God’s grace is through the Lord Jesus. There’s no other name in heaven and earth by which we must be saved. There’s no other name that gives us access to the Father or the benefits of what it means to have access to the throne of grace.
Jesus, when he saves you, he reconciles you to the Father. In that group of passages as Jesus is talking to his disciples and instructing them to pray in his name, he basically says, “I’m not going to ask the Father on your behalf because the Father himself loves you.” Isn’t that a great statement, by the way? When you come to the Father, you can expect your prayer to be met because the Father himself loves you. Do you know why he loves you? Because you’re in Christ. Jesus has washed you from your sins. You stand pure before the Lord. You love the Lord with a mighty love because God has placed that love in your heart. You’re his child. He knows what you’re going to ask even before you ask it, just like a parent knows the needs of a child and wants to meet those needs. He loves you with a mighty love. Why is that? Because Jesus has already reconciled you with God. That’s his mediation. He’s made you right before God. And so that’s part of what it means to pray in the name of the Lord Jesus. We’re coming to him through Christ’s mediation.
What does Jesus do if he’s not asking in our place? See, I have wrongly thought in the past that I pray my prayer and God the Father is sort of disgruntled, and Jesus comes and says, “well, you need to forgive him for my sake,” and so maybe he’ll grant the request. It’s not like that. Christ has made you right before the Father. And so the Father loves you. What does Jesus do as the high priest? Well, one of the things that he does is, because of his own nature as our high priest, he has experienced all the things we’ve experienced. He’s been tempted in the ways that we’ve been tempted. He knows the struggles of our heart. And he can represent us before the Father knowing our needs, and why we pray what we pray, and what we feel. And he expresses that to the Father. When we pray in Jesus’ name, we’re praying and recognizing that Jesus’ name is equivalent to Jehovah of the Old Testament. He is the Lord.
If you have been reading through your Bible week by week, you would have read Acts chapter 4 this week. In Acts chapter 4, Peter and John are put on trial because they did a miracle and this man who had been lame all his life for more than 40 years is healed. And it was a big miracle. And so they’re brought before the Supreme Court of Israel, the high priest and the same people that put Jesus on trial and had him crucified. They’re brought before them and they’re asked, “By whose name did you do this?” There’s a passage in Deuteronomy that says, if someone comes and they do a miracle, and it happens, and they tell you worship this God instead of the true God, you’re to put them to death. The job of the high priest is to check this out and see, is this miracle a legitimate miracle, and by whose name are you doing this? Are you doing this in Jehovah’s name, are you doing this with the authority and the credentials that we give out? What is your authority in doing this? And they say, “In the name of the Lord Jesus.” They say it’s the only name on heaven and earth by which we can be saved. What they’re saying in essence is that this Jesus is Jehovah. This Jesus is God manifest in the flesh. And this miracle testifies to who he is. Jesus is to receive the glory for what he has done.
4. Praying for the Glory of Christ
One last thing, in writing about what it means to pray or do something in the name of the Lord Jesus, Jonathan Edwards gave us some really good insight into what it means to pray in his name when he recognized that the word “name” is essentially connected, it’s essentially the same thing as saying “the glory” of Christ. To say the name of Jesus is essentially the same as saying the glory of Jesus. And that’s related because the name represents all that the person is. And so when you’re praying in his name, one of the things that we are praying for is that he gets the credit for what he does. He is to get the credit for bringing about the answer to this prayer. And the very prayer that we pray should be for his glory.
We talked about Muller and his prayers for all the orphans for all those years. He cared about the orphans, of course. But the reason he went exactly in the pattern that he did was because he would pray for these children’s needs to be met, he wouldn’t tell anyone about the need. He only told God and asked God about the need. When God answered, he told everyone about the answer, and who did it. It was to bring glory to the name of Christ. It was to show people the glory of Christ. Muller didn’t do anything. His whole purpose was to bring glory to the name of Christ. And he did it consistently throughout his life, and God used him in wonderful ways. It wasn’t just to meet the needs, though that’s good and wonderful. But Christ received glory through the prayers that the Lord answered. So if we’re to ask something that would not bring glory to the name of Jesus, a request that’s rooted in our selfishness, then we’re really not praying in his name. It’s to bring glory to the name of Christ that we pray in his name. Even if we tack those words to the end of our prayer, it’s not a prayer in the name of Jesus if we are praying a selfish prayer. How many of our prayers are selfish?
There was a playwright, Henrik Ibsen, in the 19th century, and one of his characters in one of his plays, he describes in this way: He says he’s a “cask of self stopped with a bung of self.” It’s a pretty good description of someone, isn’t it? Kind of a pretty harsh insult in a way. A cask of self. Think of a barrel filled with something fermenting. A cask of self, stopped with a bung—a bung is the stopper—and the bung is of self. The whole thing is of self, all wrapped up in yourself. I was thinking about my own prayers. How many of our prayers could be described that way? If we’re praying that way, and there are a lot of preachers that teach you to pray that way, I’m sad to say. There are many preachers out there that encourage people to pray selfish prayers. James says:
“When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
See, when we pray those prayers, that’s just like a cask plugged up with the bung of our self. We’re not to pray that way. Remember the text that I began with?
“Whatever you ask in my name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”
That’s the reason. That the Father may be glorified in the Son. Who gets the glory for the prayers that we pray?
A few years ago for Christmas, Jared gave me a really special book. It was a special copy of David Brainerd’s diary that was edited by Jonathan Edwards. And it’s a powerful little book. He had a remarkable life that I don’t think many people would envy. He went to Yale and he was kicked out, which was an incredible disgrace. And so he goes out into the colonial wilderness and he preaches to the Native American tribes. He’s lonely. He’s in his twenties, he’s lonely, he’s battling depression. He has tuberculosis. And he’s literally coughing his life away in the cold, sleeping on straw, getting lost in the woods, spitting up blood. What would you pray for?
In his journal, he writes about how he realized that most of his early prayers were a bundle of selfishness. He didn’t believe that they were really true prayers at all. And he starts praying for the glory of God. If you were in his situation, wouldn’t you pray, Lord, find me a better place to live? Fix my lungs. Can you fix my reputation, Lord? How did Brainerd pray? Here’s the prayer in his diary:
Lord, set up thy kingdom for thine own glory. Glorify thyself, and I will rejoice. He’s saying, “I’m living for the joy of seeing your name magnified and glorified, and your kingdom built. If your kingdom is being built, if your name is being glorified, that’s where my joy is.” His joy shifted from himself and the things that he needs and wants to the glory of God. And so he’s praying a prayer that God would be glorified. And he goes on to say:
Do with me just as thou wilt. Blessed be your name forever. That’s Brainerd’s prayer.
Edwards called that attitude being a weaned child, from Psalm 131 that we read at the beginning. See, a nursing infant screams if it doesn’t get its milk right away. But a weaned child, a child that’s a little more mature, can sit on its mother’s lap and be content with the closeness of its mother. When our soul has gained a little maturity, and we’ve stopped focusing on ourselves, and think about the glory of God, then we can find joy in the nearness of God. And seek his glory. And take great joy when we see something of the work of God, when the work of God grows. When Jesus Christ gets more credit, when his name is glorified, then we can take great joy.
Doing All in His Name
Does that mean that we never pray anything practical? Not at all. We are to do everything in the name of the Lord. Colossians 3:17 says:
“Whatever you do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father by him.”
So what do we do? You do like I do sometimes, you go to the hospital, you’re going to visit somebody, and you’re driving around. I pray for a parking spot. I pray that God allows me to park here today so that I can go in and do what I need to do there, to his glory. Is what we’re doing for the glory of the Lord? And that’s true for the basic things that we need. When we ask for bread, we do that after we seek the name of the Father to be hallowed, to be glorified. And then we pray for our bread. And if we do so, we do that to the glory of Christ. Whatever you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
So we do these things for God’s glory. The prayer that seeks the glory of Christ, that’s the prayer that’s in the name of Jesus. Jesus, with all his perfect righteousness, has given us authority to come before the Heavenly Father to make our requests. We come in his very name. He’s already paid for our prayer requests to be answered. And by his grace, and his work, and his merit, we receive the things that we receive. We need to give him the glory for it. We need to praise him for it. And we need to make sure that when we come, we’re not just tacking on a line that basically means “the end.” We need to actually come in the name of Jesus.
Let’s pray.
Father, we are grateful to you for the abundant mercies you give us. Thank you for our Savior. Thank you that we can come to you, boldly to the throne of grace, to receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need. We praise you for all the things you do for us, and we ask that you would glorify the name of your Son in our lives, in our church, and in this world. In his precious name we pray. Amen.