No instance of prayer directly addressed to the Holy Spirit can be found in the New Testament. This may be due to the fact that the Holy Spirit is regarded as having already been given to the believer as the indwelling presence of God, and that therefore prayer to One who dwells within may not have been considered suitable.
But prayer is really addressed to the Holy Spirit when it is addressed to God, because, in the Unity of the Divine Essence, He is one with the Father and the Son. He is invoked in benediction: “The communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all”. He is addressed in intercession: “The Lord direct your hearts into the love of God, and into the patience of Christ”.
There is yet a wider phase of the subject. The Bible throughout, from Gen_1:2, consistently presents the Holy Spirit as the universal vitalizing Executive of Deity, the active agent in producing, nourishing, and developing all life, beauty, organic force, and order in the universe, the direct source of the fragrance of the rose, the flavour of fruit, the strength of the athlete (Jdg_14:19), the vision of prophet and poet, the equipment of Christ, the life of enduring literature (2Pe_1:19-21). His function in developing piety is central but not exclusive. Why may we not, how shall we not, find Him everywhere, converse with Him on all His glorious work, and seek from Him supplies through every department of His productive power? He is in the world as well as in the Word, and we find Him and commune with Him, open-eyed, in garden and grove as well as in the solitude of the closet and in prayer for revivals and missions.
We gain greatly in the keenness of our consciousness of the reality of the members of the Godhead by talking freely, naturally, lovingly with them, in prayer. Those who pray to the Spirit are not likely to slip into the vague use of the pronoun “it” when referring to Him, as though He were only an abstract force. He is our Comforter, our Guide, our Teacher, and our Friend. It is He who makes Christ known to us. And He uses us, if we will let it be so, to make Christ known through us to others. Shall we not talk freely with Him of this blessed, glorious mystery yet fact, Christ the life of the world, which it is the mission and the passion of the Holy Spirit to bring fully to pass? God is one God, though in three persons, and we shall come to know God better and better as we come to know the different persons of the Trinity in the sacred and intimate fellowship of the priceless privilege of prayer, addressing them individually according to the need of the moment, and in the light of the plain teachings of God’s Word.
If it is the Holy Spirit’s special function not only to speak to and deal with, but also to speak and work through, the man He renews and sanctifies, we can just so far understand that He the less presents Himself for our articulate adoration. But meanwhile the sacred rightfulness of our worship of the Holy Spirit is as surely established as anything can be that rests on large and immediate inferences from the Scriptures. If He is divine, and if He is personal, how can we help the attitude of adoration when, leaving for the moment the thought of His work in us, we isolate in our view the thought of Him the Worker? Scripture practically prescribes to us such an attitude when it gives us our Lord’s own account, in His baptismal formula, of the Eternal Name as His disciples were to know it—“The name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”; and when in the Acts and the Epistles the Holy Ghost is set before us as not only doing His work in the inmost being of the individual but presiding in sacred majesty over the community; and when in the Revelation He, in the mystical sevenfoldness of His operation, Seven yet One, appears in that solemn prelude as the concurrent Giver, with the Father and the Son, of grace and peace; above all when in the Paschal Discourse the adorable and adored Lord Jesus presents Him to our faith as coordinate with Himself in glory and grace, “another Comforter”.
So, while watchfully and reverently seeking to remember the laws of Scripture proportion, and that according to it the believer’s relation to the Spirit is not so much that of direct adoration as of a reliance which wholly implies it, let us trustfully and thankfully worship Him, and ask blessing of Him, as our spirits shall be moved to such action under His grace. Let us ever and again recollect, with deliberate contemplation and faith, what by His word we know of Him, and of His presence in us and His work for us, and then let us not only “pray in the Holy Ghost” but also to Him. [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Veni Creator, 18.]
This is the prayer to the Holy Ghost in the liturgy of the Armenians: “By Thee and through Thee, did the offspring of the patriarchal family of old, called seers, declare aloud and plainly things past and things to come, things wrought and things not yet come to effect. Thou, O energy illimitable, whom Moses proclaimed Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, by Thine immense brooding and by Thy tender sheltering of the new generations under the overspreading of Thy wings madest known the mystery of the font; who after the same pattern spreading first the liquid element as a veil on high didst in lordly wise form out of nothing, O mighty, the complete natures of all things that are. By Thee all creatures made by Thee shall be renewed at the resurrection, the which day is the last of this existence and the first of the land of the living.” [Note: Alexander V. G. Allen, Christian Institutions, 543.]
With the exception of the third invocation of the Litany, there is nothing within the covers of the Prayer-Book, I think, immediately addressed to the Holy Spirit save the hymn Veni Creator. This may be our sanction for sometimes employing this soul-invigorating form of prayer, only we must be careful in this case, as in the case of prayers to our Lord, to safeguard the unity of Almighty God. Certainly others besides ordinands need the inspiration of this prayer. It forms, for instance, a most helpful introduction to the act of early morning private devotion, or as a preparatory exercise before the reception of Holy Communion. The original of this hymn in Latin, simple, vigorous, and concise, is of great antiquity, though it is perhaps impossible to trace its authorship. Our English version was made by Bishop John Cosin of Durham in 1660, and found its way into the Prayer-Book of 1661 (the longer version appeared first in 1549, and was modernized in 1661). No other Latin hymn—the Te Deum alone excepted—has taken deeper hold of the Western mind, and its influence has prompted many other hymns to the Holy Spirit. Most of these unfortunately lack the safeguard alluded to above. Of these the most beautiful—probably because it represents in a translation what Archbishop Trench termed “the loveliest of all the hymns in the whole circle of sacred Latin poetry”—begins, “Come, Thou Holy Spirit, Come”. [Note: C. H. Druitt, The Obligation of Prayer, 25.]
St. Paul speaking of Christ the Lord says, “Through him we all have access by one Spirit to the Father”. In this little verse we have mention of all the three Persons. There is the Father, to whom we have access, or approach in prayer; there is the Son, through whom we have this access; and lastly, there is the Spirit, in whom this access, this open way to God and to the throne of grace, is ours.
(1) And, first, it is access to the Father; He is the ultimate object of our prayers. I do not say that we do not most fitly pray to Christ. He too is God. Our Church, in more than one of her Collects, expressly addresses herself to Him, makes her supplication to Him. Still these are the exceptions, and not the rule. They are more often brief ejaculations of the soul that go forth to Him, as those in the Litany: “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us Thy peace”; or as this, “O Son of David, have mercy upon us”. It is these, rather than more set deliberate prayers, which are addressed to the second Person of the Trinity. We have access to the Father, and our prayers must not stop short till they mount up to Him. The prayer of all prayers, that with which the Son of God taught us to pray, begins with “Our Father”. O words of comfort and strength unutterable for the children of men! Conceive to yourselves what it would be, how it would fare with us, if God only presented Himself to us as a God of nature, a God of power, a Maker of heaven and earth, with a certain vague general benevolence and good-will toward us, in common with the other creatures of His hand. Think what this would be in our trials, our temptations, our remorse of conscience, our agonies, this God of nature, as compared with what is, a God of men, a Father in heaven, who opens wide a Father’s arms to His wandering and suffering children here, and will embrace with a Father’s love, and draw them close to a Father’s heart. Here is the magic of that word of the Gospel which we declare, here is its secret, attractive power —that it wakens up in the hearts of the poor prodigals of earth such thoughts as these, “I will arise, and go to my Father”.
(2) But if prayer is thus to the Father, it is, as St. Paul declares, through the Son. He is the Daysman that must lay His hand upon us both,—upon God and man, upon God in heaven, and man upon earth, upon God holy and man unholy—and must bring them together, face to face, so that man may see God’s face, and not perish in the seeing; may enter into God’s presence, and not be consumed by the intolerable brightness of that presence; may speak with his unclean lips to God, and yet, unclean as those lips are, may speak not in vain, but words which shall prevail.
When we affirm, or rather when Scripture affirms, that all approaches to God the Father, all approaches in prayer or otherwise, are through God the Son, that no man can come to the Father but by Him, while by Him all may come near, it affirms herein the absolute holiness of God, the deep sinfulness and defilement of man, which renders him quite incapable by himself of holding communion, of entering into fellowship with God; which has put a broad gulf between these two; but it asserts likewise that this gulf, which no other could bridge over, has yet been bridged over by Christ; that He by His life, being at once God and man, the two natures in one person united, by His death, making a sacrifice for the sins of all mankind, has brought near those who were before far asunder; that there is now freedom of access, an open way to the Father, through the Son.
(3) But, thirdly and lastly, it is in the Spirit that this access is ours. What may this mean? Prayer, my brethren, is a work of grace, and not of nature. We pray because God, God the Holy Ghost, puts it into our hearts to pray, helps our infirmities, suggests to us what things we ought to pray for, and how. Look at a ship without a wind, becalmed in the middle sea, its sails flapping idly hither and thither; what a difference from the same ship when the wind has filled its sails, and it is making joyful progress to the haven whither it is bound! The breath of God, that is the wind which must fill the sails of our souls. We must pray in the Spirit, in the Holy Ghost, if we would pray at all.
Lay this, I beseech you, to heart. Do not address yourselves to prayer as to a work to be accomplished in your own natural strength. It is a work of God, of God the Holy Ghost, a work of His in you and by you, and in which you must be fellow-workers with Him—but His work notwithstanding. [Note: R. C. Trench, Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey, 229.]
