What Does It Mean to Call on the Name of Jesus? To Pray to Him as Lord

To call on the name of Jesus is to pray to him as Lord, trusting him to save and to help. The words come from the Old Testament, where people “called upon the name of the LORD.” The apostles used them of Jesus, and the first Christians were those who “call upon the name of Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:2).

There is something fitting in it, because the name itself is a prayer. Jesus means “the LORD saves.” When we call on him by name, we are already saying what we are asking for. The thread runs from the first pages of Genesis, through a frightened psalmist and a dying Stephen, to the short prayer Orthodox Christians repeat through the day.

It starts very early, in the days of Enos, Adam’s grandson: “then began men to call upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26). When Abram reached the land God had promised him, he built an altar near Bethel “and called upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 12:8). In both places it is worship, offered to God and spoken to him by the name he had made known.

In Scripture a name stands for the person who bears it. To call on the LORD’s name is to speak to the LORD himself. Israel’s prayers, as Joseph Henry Thayer’s Greek lexicon explains, worked just this way: “prayers addressed to God ordinarily began with an invocation of the divine name.”

The psalms use the same words for a cry in danger. One psalmist, close to death, remembers: “The sorrows of death compassed me … I found trouble and sorrow. Then called I upon the name of the LORD; O LORD, I beseech thee, deliver my soul” (Psalm 116:3–4). Safe again, he calls on the name to give thanks: “I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the LORD” (Psalm 116:13). The same name, in the dark and in the morning. Then the prophet Joel turned the phrase into a promise for the day of the LORD: “whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered” (Joel 2:32).

To invoke someone is to call on them by name and ask them to act: to help, to hear, to judge or to witness. The Hebrew Old Testament says qara’ be-shem, literally to call with the name, which the Brown, Driver and Briggs lexicon explains as using the LORD’s name, that is, to “use it in invocation.”

The New Testament, written in Greek, uses the verb epikaleomai, “to call upon, to invoke.” The Greek translators of the Old Testament had already used it for the Hebrew. It can mean an appeal to a higher court: Paul uses it when he says, “I appeal unto Caesar” (Acts 25:11). Most often it means prayer. As Stephen was stoned, Luke tells us, he died “calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). English Bibles put the word as “call upon” or “call on,” and the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “all can invoke his name” (432). When the one called on is God, calling on him and invoking him are the same thing: praying to him by name, in need and in worship.

They took the Old Testament words about the LORD and spoke them of Jesus. On the day of Pentecost Peter quoted Joel: “whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Acts 2:21). He ended the same sermon by telling the crowd who that Lord is: “God hath made the same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36).

Paul does the same in Romans. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved,” he writes, and a few lines later he quotes Joel: “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:9, 13). The Lord we call on is the Lord Jesus we confess. Thayer’s lexicon reads the verses the same way: to call on the Lord’s name is “to invoke, adore, worship, the Lord, i. e. Christ.”

Passage	Who calls	On whose name
Genesis 4:26	People in the days of Enos	The LORD
Genesis 12:8	Abram at his altar	The LORD
Psalm 116:4	A man near death	The LORD
Joel 2:32	Whoever calls	The LORD
Acts 2:21, 36	Whoever calls, in Peter’s sermon	Jesus, made Lord and Christ
Acts 7:59	Stephen, as he died	“Lord Jesus”
Romans 10:9–13	Jew and Greek alike	The Lord Jesus
1 Corinthians 1:2	Christians “in every place”	Jesus Christ our Lord

Calling on his name became the mark of a Christian. When the Lord sent Ananias to the newly blinded Saul, Ananias objected that Saul had come to Damascus “to bind all that call on thy name” (Acts 9:14). A few verses later he names the one who sent him: “the Lord, even Jesus” (Acts 9:17). Years afterwards Paul still remembered what Ananias told him that day: “arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord” (Acts 22:16). The man who came to arrest those who called on the name became one of them. His first letter to Corinth is addressed to the church there “with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:2).

Jesus gave his disciples the words on the night before he died. “And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). A little later he said: “Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full” (John 16:23–24).

To ask in someone’s name is to ask on his account, as his own people, for what he wants. The Westminster Larger Catechism, which the Orthodox Presbyterian Church counts among its standards, puts it carefully. To pray in the name of Christ is “to ask mercy for his sake; not by bare mentioning of his name, but by drawing our encouragement to pray, and our boldness, strength, and hope of acceptance in prayer, from Christ and his mediation.” John’s first letter sets the same limit from the other side: “if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us” (1 John 5:14). The name at the end of a prayer is not a stamp on an envelope. It is the reason we dare to pray at all.

Paul carries the name past prayer into the whole of life: “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him” (Colossians 3:17).

The first promise is salvation: “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13). Peter said the same to the council in Jerusalem after a lame man was healed. He had told the man, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk” (Acts 3:6), and he explained to the rulers that “by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth … doth this man stand here before you whole,” adding, “for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:10, 12).

God has given Jesus, Paul writes, “a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:9–10). In Philippi, Paul spoke to a spirit that troubled a slave girl: “I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her” (Acts 16:18). The Catechism of the Catholic Church gathers these passages up: “The evil spirits fear his name; in his name his disciples perform miracles, for the Father grants all they ask in this name” (434). A promise often quoted here, “In my name shall they cast out devils” (Mark 16:17), comes from the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel, verses 9 to 20, which some of the earliest manuscripts do not include.

Scripture is just as plain that the name is not a spell. In Ephesus, seven sons of a Jewish chief priest named Sceva tried to drive out an evil spirit by saying, “We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth.” The spirit answered, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?” and the man attacked them until they fled “naked and wounded” (Acts 19:13–16). They used the name of a Lord they did not know. Jesus warned that even miracles done “in thy name” do not prove that someone belongs to him: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21–23). The name carries power because of the person it names. Calling on it is trusting him.

The commandment that forbids misusing God’s name takes for granted that his people will use it rightly: “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain” (Exodus 20:7). Martin Luther’s Small Catechism explains it both ways. Christians “may not curse, swear, use witchcraft, lie, or deceive by His name, but call upon it in every trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks.” Using the name as a curse is the opposite of calling on it, as saying “Oh my God” carelessly shows.

Yes. The psalmist called on the LORD’s name when “the sorrows of death compassed me,” and Stephen called on the Lord Jesus as he died. Luther’s catechism tells Christians to call on the name “in every trouble.” A cry as short as the blind man’s at Jericho, “Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me,” can be prayed in the dark, in panic, or on waking from a nightmare.

Saying the name does not promise that the fear or the trouble will stop, and nothing in Scripture treats the words as a charm. What Scripture promises is that God is near to the one who calls: “The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth” (Psalm 145:18). The Orthodox Church in America, writing about calling on Jesus in temptation, says this does not mean that God “miraculously and magically descends to deliver him.” He is near. That is the promise, and it is enough to call on.

If fear, nightmares or a sense of spiritual attack keep coming back, a pastor or priest can pray with you. If panic or sleeplessness goes on, a doctor can help as well.

The Jesus Prayer in the Orthodox and Eastern churches

The Jesus Prayer is the best-known way of calling on his name. The Orthodox Church in America calls it “the most normal form of unceasing prayer in the Orthodox tradition,” and gives its usual words: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” It is prayed over and over, as a way of keeping Paul’s “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

Anyone can repeat it through the day, the OCA says, “whatever one is doing, without the employment of any particular bodily postures or breathing techniques.” Monks also pray it in silence with set postures and breathing, and for that method the OCA gives a firm warning: it “requires always and without exception the guidance of a spiritual guide.”

Its words come straight from the Gospels. “Have mercy on me a sinner” echoes the tax collector in the Temple, who prayed, “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13), and the blind man at Jericho who cried, “Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me” (Luke 18:38). The Catholic Catechism, which teaches the prayer too, says it was “transmitted by the spiritual writers of the Sinai, Syria, and Mt. Athos” and calls it “the Eastern prayer of the heart” (2667, 435).

Catholic devotion to the Holy Name

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives the name of Jesus a place of its own in prayer. “To pray ‘Jesus’ is to invoke him and to call him within us,” it says, and “the invocation of the holy name of Jesus is the simplest way of praying always” (2666, 2668). The Hail Mary, it notes, “reaches its high point in the words ‘blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus’” (435).

“The greatest promoters of this devotion were St. Bernardine of Siena and St. John Capistran,” the Catholic Encyclopedia says. They were preachers in the cities of Italy, and they carried “a copy of the monogram of the Holy Name, surrounded by rays, painted on a wooden tablet,” asking their hearers to put it over the gates of their cities and the doors of their houses. The monogram is the three letters IHS. In the Roman calendar the Most Holy Name of Jesus has an optional memorial on 3 January, and the prayer of that day’s Mass asks “that all may know there is no other name to be invoked but the Name of your Only Begotten Son.”

Protestant prayer in Jesus’ name

Protestant churches set the practice down in their confessions. Lutherans learn to call on the name from the Small Catechism’s line quoted above. Prayer, says the Westminster Confession of Faith, held by Presbyterian churches, “that it may be accepted, it is to be made in the name of the Son, by the help of his Spirit, according to his will” (21.3). The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 uses the same words: “that it may be accepted, it is to be made in the name of the Son” (22.3). That is why Protestant prayer, usually in the believer’s own words, is offered in Jesus’ name.

So the forms differ: one short prayer repeated in the East, a feast and devotions in the Catholic Church, prayer in one’s own words among Protestants. But the churches draw on the same verses, and each ties the name to the person who bears it. The Westminster catechism says “not by bare mentioning of his name.” The Orthodox Church in America denies that God “magically descends” at the words. And the Catholic Catechism puts it most warmly: “whoever invokes the name of Jesus is welcoming the Son of God who loved him” (2666).

Jesus means “the LORD saves,” which the Catechism gives as “YHWH saves” (2666). Its Hebrew form and history are told in what Jesus’s real name was, and its meaning at more length in what the name Jesus means. So the name we call on already says what we are asking. The angel gave Joseph the reason for it before the child was born: “thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).

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