What does it mean to pray to the Father in Jesus’s name? I’m concerned that most Christians simply think of it as the sign-off thing you say when you’re ending your prayer. The truth is to pray in the name of Jesus is to believe that Jesus is your prayer life. Because of our union with Christ, we have the privilege of addressing our heavenly Father in the name of Jesus. Colossians 3:4 says that “Christ is our life.” That is not meant to be some kind of a slogan communicating that Christ is very important to us. It literally means that Christ is our life. The Holy Spirit, through the apostle Paul, is telling us that Christ is not just the standard but is the very source of the Christian life. Therefore, to do anything in His name is to participate in what He is doing. It is acknowledging and abiding in your union with Him. We have been grafted into His faith, His love, His obedience, His peace, joy, His patience, His power, His moral purity, His worship, and His prayer life, etc. As we pray in His name, Jesus takes our imperfect prayer and adds it to His perfect prayer, and offers it to the Father as ours. This is remarkable, and it raises our level of awareness of our intimacy with the Father to His and our level of expectation in the Father’s response to our prayers to Jesus’s level of expectation.
