In Jesus’ Name

Ever since I was a boy, I have heard prayers end with, “In Jesus’ name, amen.” This construction comes from the clear teaching of Jesus that after He was gone, His disciples should make their requests of their Heavenly Father in His name. They did so, and they turned the world upside down. In the centuries since then, it seems the power of Christian prayer has diminished significantly. There are many reasons why a prayer may not seem to be answered in the way we want; I wrote about them in “The Problem of Unanswered Prayer.” I wonder if there is another reason I missed: maybe we have forgotten what the “Name” is in which we pray.

In the first few months of church history, the Jewish leadership tried to squelch the disciples preaching in the name of Jesus. Peter refused, telling the Sanhedrin that salvation was offered in no other name. They knew what it meant to use “The Name.” In their Scriptures, their God was often referred to as The Name. God’s actual name, Yahweh, was so revered that they would not speak it out loud. Most English translations of the Bible pay homage to this attitude by substituting “LORD” in the text where Yahweh appears.

By preaching Jesus as the Name, what the disciples were doing was calling Jesus Yahweh. That is what so angered the Jewish religious leaders. They would have been even more upset if the disciples had suggested what some contemporary scholars believe: namely that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is the Yeshua of the New Testament. Students of the Scripture have proposed that there were pre-incarnate appearances of Yeshua, Jesus, throughout Israel’s history. The most fundamental of these appearances is described in the first few verses of John’s Gospel. In the beginning, the Word was responsible for all things that were created. John clearly states that the Word become flesh is Jesus. So, in some way, Jesus is identified with the creator God of Genesis one.

The key to understanding this is found in the word “pre-incarnate.” Before becoming flesh, the Word was pre-flesh, fully divine. Paul explains in Philippians chapter two that to become incarnate, to put on flesh, Jesus had to empty Himself of some of His divinity. The most significant thing Jesus put aside was omnipresence; He could only be where His fleshly body was. Exactly what He retained of divinity is unclear. He knew men’s thoughts, controlled natural phenomena, defied conventional physics, and healed diseases. What we call His miracles were just Him being God incarnate.

Something else He retained was the Name if Peter is to be believed. In other words, all the power of God, the fullness of God is wrapped up in Christ, especially the power to save. That is easy to see when Peter says there is salvation in no other name. What may be harder to recognize is what that means when Jesus tells His disciples to pray “in My Name.” At the very least, we can understand that it means we ask with the authority of Jesus. A military example will make this clear. If a corporal is told by his sergeant to get something from the supply clerk, the corporal asks for it in the name of, by the authority of the sergeant. His request would be granted because of the sergeant’s authority, not his own.

When we go to prayer in Jesus’ name, we are essentially saying, “Jesus told me to ask for this.” It takes a lot of nerve to say that if you haven’t heard from the Lord. I have cited Graham Cooke’s book, Crafted Prayer, before. He says that too often we make a request of God before having sought to know what God’s will is in the situation. We cannot honestly say we are coming to the Father in Jesus’ name if we haven’t first listened to what Jesus may be saying about the topic.

Cooke and others have also pointed out that we can pray with confidence if we are praying God’s Word back to Him as long as we are not taking it out of context. We know, for example, that it is not God’s desire that any should perish, but that all might come to Him in faith. I believe this gives us license to ask that anyone on our list would come to believe in Christ as their savior. I don’t mean to say that such a prayer is a guarantee of the person’s salvation; what I am saying is that we can confidently align ourselves with God’s attitude toward the lost and rely on Him bring about salvation for those He chooses.

There are other prayers that we can know are within God’s plan. He always cares for the poor, the orphans, the widows, and those unjustly imprisoned. He will always be in favor of approaching any situation with a heart toward peace and reconciliation. The Word commands us to pray for our civil authorities so that we may be able to live lives of peaceful godliness. We are called to pray for our church leaders so that they will be empowered to do their ministry according to God’s will. These prayers and others can be found in Scripture which gives us the right to ask for them in Jesus’ name.

However, there will always be situations that have no exact biblical reference to assure us of God’s will. Should I buy that car; should I take that job; should I marry that person; should I donate to that ministry; is it God’s will to heal that disease? How do we gain the confidence to pray in Jesus’ name in those situations? The only way I know is to seek the mind of Christ in quiet contemplation. This is difficult for most of us as A. W. Tozer points out: “Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible, multiplying distractions and beating us down by destroying our solitude…. Even the majority of Christians are so completely conformed to this present age that they, too, want things the way they are.” [1] Too often, the way things are is not the way Jesus would have them.

Tozer suggests a remedy: “However, there are some of God’s children who have had enough. They want to relearn the ways of solitude and simplicity and gain the infinite riches of the interior life. They want to discover the blessedness of what has been called “spiritual aloneness”—a discipline that will go far in making us acquainted with God and our own souls.” That is the answer. We must become better acquainted with God if our prayers in Jesus’ name are to be effective. I pray that you can find a quiet place… in Jesus’ name, amen.

Related Posts: The Presence of God; Moving Mountains; Prayer Primer

 ^[1] A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Evenings with Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2015), 348.