Question from a reader:
Can you tell me if it seems OK to ask my now deceased mother, who is in Heaven, to pray to Jesus for me? She used to pray for me when she was on earth...sometimes I would ask her to pray and sometimes she would just do it without me asking.
Answer from Stephanie Anderson, EPM staff:
I’m so sorry to hear about your loss. My mom is in Heaven, too, and I know that it’s hard to be separated. No one loves you (and prays for you!) quite like a mother.
Randy has written about the question of whether those in Heaven pray for us here. He writes, “Prayer is simply talking to God. Angels can talk to God, and therefore angels pray. We will communicate with God in Heaven, and therefore we will pray in Heaven, presumably more than we do now, not less. Our prayers will be effective given our righteous state (James 5:16).”
Randy has been thinking a lot about this since his beloved wife, Nanci, went to be with Jesus in early 2022. He writes, “I sometimes ask Jesus to pass on messages to Nanci as I have asked Him to do for my mother since 1981 when she joined Him there. As I shared in a past blog, of course, we shouldn’t pray to the saints who are with Jesus, or try to talk to them directly, but we can always pray to Jesus, our only Mediator (1 Timothy 2:5), and He can tell our loved ones living in His presence whatever He wants to. He still hears our prayers, and I think there’s every reason to believe that He would pass on to Nanci something I ask Him to.”
We do want to be very careful to keep the focus on Jesus, and remember that He is the only Mediator we need. (Seeking contact with the dead is clearly forbidden in Scripture.) We don’t need to ask anyone in Heaven to pray for us (even though it’s possible they do, in talking to God).
Scripture tells us that Jesus Himself intercedes for us: “Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (Romans 8:34). What an amazing truth! We not only have the ear of the King of the Universe, but we also know He is praying for us. We’re also told in the same chapter that the Spirit prays for us: “For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).
As Randy says above, “We shouldn’t pray to the saints who are with Jesus, or try to talk to them directly, but we can always pray to Jesus, our only Mediator.” Randy has frequently talked about how Nanci is now with Jesus, her best friend, and Jesus is Randy’s best friend and always with Him (Matthew 28:20). So Jesus is the bridge that keeps them connected until they are one day reunited in His presence.
“So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most” (Hebrews 4:16, NLT).
May the love of Jesus and the knowledge that His ears are open to your every cry (Psalm 34:15) bring you deep peace and comfort as you grieve your mom and look forward to that eternal reunion. “In my distress I called upon Yahweh; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears” (Psalm 18:6).
Photo: Unsplash
