Pray in Jesus’ Name

The significance of the name of Jesus in relation to prayer deserves special notice. To pray in the name of Jesus, to ask anything in His name (Jn. 14:13; cf. v 14; 15:16; 16:23f.; etc.), is not merely to add to one’s prayers a meaningless formula, but it is to ask something from God as Christ’s representatives on earth, in His mission and stead, in His spirit, and with His aim. Such a phrase, correctly understood, cannot help but govern the kind and quality of the prayers Christians pray.

C. Conclusion The importance of a name to the biblical writers cannot be overstated. Their fondness for names and their understanding of the significance of names is everywhere observable—from their noting that God knows Moses by name (Ex. 33:17) and calls Cyrus by name (Isa. 45:3) to simply filling whole pages with names (see Gen. 5; Nu. 1–3; Mt. 1:1–17; Lk. 3:23–37; etc.). These writers thus articulate in a quiet but emphatic way what has been called “the personalism of the Bible.” The Bible presents people not as a mass, nor as a fraction of a mass, or as cases to be studied, but as persons. The proper name in the Bible is the symbol of the person, and to address a person by name is to give to that person significance, meaning, dignity, and worth.

G. F. Hawthorne, “Name,” ed. Geoffrey W Bromiley, The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Revised (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979–1988), 483.