You remember the Lord's Prayer begins with the words, our father who is in heaven, who art in heaven, the older translation says. Hallowed be Your name is the next phrase that is said. Now we're going to focus and reflect on that phrase. Why do we ask God to hallow His own name? This week, we had our prayer meeting, which happens on Wednesday mornings.
A handful of us, eight to 10 people meet regularly, and we pray for all things related to the church. It's a wonderful opportunity. I look forward to it every time. But as I was reflecting and sharing with our little group, what I was preaching on this Sunday, Dot Vincent said to me, you have to explain what the word hallowed means. Dot, if you know or has a heartfelt concern to make the Bible as understandable and as applicable and as accessible for as many people as possible.
Now that sits well with me, thankfully as well, so I agreed with her. I said, absolutely. But I explained to her that I did try this week to understand or to come up with a better word, a more modernised word for this term hallowed. But the interesting thing is even in our most modern Bible translations, that word is kept. The NIV that has made reading the Bible that much more contemporary has kept the word hallowed.
Why? Because there is no other word that quite sums up this idea. So I'm not gonna give a better word or another word. I'm just going to try and explain it to you guys this morning. Basically, the word to hallow means to sanctify.
Jesus tells us to pray, let Your name be sanctified. Now again, unfortunately, the word sanctify needs explanation as well. That in itself is not a word that we use very much in our English vernacular. But sanctify means to make something holy or to regard something or to treat something as holy. And it carries with it this idea, this idea of hallow, of hallowedness.
To hallow something is to make it the ultimate. It is to make it the supreme end. It is to treat something as the most sacred. Now we know as Christians in the process of salvation, we've had a series on this, in the process of coming to faith and becoming part of God's people, there is this moment called sanctification that happens in the life of every true believer. God in the process of salvation sanctifies us, and that means He makes us holy so that we can dwell with Him, so that we can approach a holy God.
Be holy as I am holy, said the Lord. But when we pray for God to be made holy, it's a different story. It means that we want God. Our desire is for God to be treated as holy. So Jesus is saying when He teaches us to pray for God's name to be hallowed, Jesus is teaching us to pray that God would cause His name to be treated as holy.
And so we have to understand that the prayer, hallowed be Your name, is not a statement of fact. It's not saying, God, hallowed and holy is Your name. It is actually a desire and a request from the heart to say, God, make Your name holy in the universe. Make Your name so great. Make it so ultimate and sacred so that the entire world may be filled with an awe and a reverence and the right respect for who You are.
Lord, cause Your name to be hallowed. So what exactly does it mean to hallow God's name? Well, if we go through the Bible, and this is really important that we do, we have to go and understand the context where this word gets used. In Numbers 20:12, Moses, remember that story. Moses is told to speak to the rock when Israel is dying of thirst.
They have run out of water in the wilderness. And God tells Moses, speak to this rock and I will give you water. And we know Moses in his absolute bitterness, his anger at this rebellious people that he is leading, hits the rock twice with his staff instead of speaking. And the water comes forth. But as the water comes to him, also comes these stinging words from God.
Because you did not believe in Me to sanctify the same word to hallow Me in the eyes of the people of Israel. Therefore, you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them. So biblical theology is telling us that a part of hallowing the name of God is to believe in Him in the first place. To believe what He has said is true, God is not hallowed, in other words, when we do not have a spirit of confidence and peace in His word and in His character. So part of hallowing God in our lives is to believe in Him, to trust in Him.
A second text in the Bible that explains what it means to hallow the name of God is in Isaiah 8:12-13. God speaks to Isaiah and warns him not to be like the rest of the people of Israel. This is what God tells Isaiah, do not call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy. Do not fear what they fear nor be in dread, Isaiah. But the Lord of hosts, Him, you shall regard as holy, or you shall hallow Him.
Let Him be your fear. Let Him be your dread. In the context of this text, how do we hallow God? You hallow God by fearing God, having right reverence for God more than anything or anyone else. When God commands you to take a stand for Him, your fear of displeasing God is greater than your fear of displeasing or causing hostility with others.
When we pray, hallow Your name, we are praying, father, cause people to have such a high view of who You are and that you are much more that it is much more dreadful a thing to lose Your approval than to lose anything else. To hallow God's name is to have such a high view of God and that it is a far more dreadful thing to have His displeasure than to have the displeasure of those around us. And then a final significant text, I think, that explains what it means to hallow the name of God is in Leviticus 10:3, where Moses says to Aaron, this is what the Lord has said. I will show Myself holy among those who are near Me and before all the people, I will be glorified. In this text, we seem to see that God is showing Himself as holy and virtually identical to that is His glory.
So when we pray, hallowed be thy name, we also say, glorify or glorified be thy name. It means that we pray that God will be praised. That God will be worshipped. That He will be honoured rightly for who He is. We pray that people may adore our God.
So that is a biblical narrative. That is a biblical understanding. We're doing biblical theology here by looking at the word in different contexts. Now the question is, why are we commanded to pray for God's hallowed name? Well, very importantly, it is because of the primacy and the necessity of praise in our life.
It is because we are designed to praise. In the Lord's Prayer, we adore or we praise God right up the front, don't we? We address God, our father in heaven, and then we say, hallowed be Your name. It is right up the front of the prayer. But it's not there mechanically as a way because Jesus couldn't fit it in anywhere else.
It's not there mechanically. It is there organically. It's there because our hearts are inclined to praise first. In the Lord's Prayer, it comes because praise will now frame the rest of the prayer as it comes. Praise frames all that comes afterwards.
Praise, in other words, is the context to the other parts of the prayer. To pray, God, You are worthy to be considered most sacred and most precious. That truth is to saturate everything else that comes out after that in the prayer. It is to saturate how we think. It is to saturate what we say.
Why? Think about it. Because petition, petition meaning what we ask for when we come to God and we pray for our daily bread, or when we confess, when we say forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. These things are influenced. What we pray for in those moments are influenced by our understanding of who God is and what He deserves.
What you petition God for shows what you really think your world needs. And then in the confession part of the prayer, when we pray for the forgiveness of our sins, it shows you what you really think you need be forgiven of. And Jesus is saying that all the problems you bring up to God, when you petition Him for something or when you confess something to Him, all these problems are related to the way you view adoration, to the things you praise in your life. We must begin our prayer life by hallowing the name of God because more than likely, we haven't hallowed God enough in our lives. And if you have hallowed anything more than God, if you have praised anything and placed it above God, the problems will show up in your petition.
It'll show up in what you confess. The heart of the problem for me when I pray is that really the issues I'm dealing with is an issue of what I praise and what I adore. Let me explain. When you petition God, you're saying, I've got needs. I've got needs.
When you confess, when you bring confession to God, you're saying, I've got problems. But both of these needs and these problems come up because, first of all, they're related to what we adore. I'll give you this example. I'm sure you've heard people say, you know, I've made this mistake in the past or very recently, and I've gone to God and I've asked God for forgiveness of it. If I've hurt someone, I've gone to them and I have asked them forgiveness as well.
But you know what? I know that God has forgiven me. I know these people have forgiven me, but I can't forgive myself. I just can't forgive myself. Now that can sound very noble sometimes.
Well, say, yeah, this person understands the weight of their sin. The consequences of what they've done. But do you know this actually shows who or what you adore or esteem more than God. Tim Keller explains it this way when he writes of a story. He says, many years ago, I remember counselling a man who had been unfaithful to his wife.
He says, and he had admitted it, and he showed some genuine repentance, and his wife actually forgave him. His wife forgave him, and she received him back. And the people around him had also forgiven him. But Tim Keller writes, he said, we sat down because I was his pastor and we talked about it. And we went through the Scriptures, and he saw that, yes, it is possible that God can forgive him and that God can forgive and continue to use other people like He did in the Bible who had done the same thing.
But he said to me, you know, pastor, I can't forgive myself. And as we dug, Keller writes, here's what was really wrong. He came from an incredibly prudish family who saw sexual sin as worse than any other kind of sin. Now this is not at all what the Bible teaches. The Bible says that sexual sin of this kind, as destructive as it can be, is sin.
But so is paying unfair wages. We read that again this morning, didn't we? So is gossip. So is pride. The Bible doesn't make these distinctions between sins, but he came from an incredibly prudish family.
And the fact that he, even though his parents were already dead, he couldn't forgive himself because he disappointed his parents. Now that can be a familiar scenario. Right? The man in the example says, I cannot forgive myself. And we might say, well, he's just got a very low self-esteem.
He hates himself. He needs to repent of his unwillingness to receive God's forgiveness. No. The problem is prior. The problem comes way before this action.
This man needs to demote his parents. This man has placed his parents as the judge of his life where only God may sit. This man needs to remove the idols of his parents. See, the grace of God really wasn't what drove him. What was driving his self-worth was that he was living up to the standards of his parents.
And when he had failed his parental expectations, the world crashed in around him and he started thinking, I can't forgive myself because my parents would not have forgiven me. Can you see how that sounds very humble at first? It sounds very contrite, but it's actually a failure of a very deep sin, which is a failure to adore God and honour Him the way that He should be. To hold God out as our ultimate judge, the only one who must and can tell us what our reality is. Everything, absolutely everything comes from adoration and praise.
If this man truly desired the words from the Lord's Prayer, if he prayed with a deep urgency and truly desired, hallowed be Your name, he'd have had no problem with saying, father, forgive my sins, and leaving it there. What is it that you hallow? Do you search out for God's opinion on everything you do or say or think? Or are you happy with what you think about the situation? Are you happy to believe what people around you think of your situation?
What is it that you adore the most? Is it financial success? Is it sex appeal? Is it comfort? Is it the approval of others?
Young people, is it a love life? Is it your family? Moms and dads, it is your kids? What is it that you adore? Because what you hallow, what you want to be made very, very precious, is what will ultimately control how you pray.
Your confession and your petition will be completely driven by that. And so here's a very simple test. Think back on how you've been praying this last week. What have you been asking God for? And then ask yourself how that relates to His glory and the adoration of Him.
And then ask yourself, are those two connected? If God was to give you what you prayed for, would that honour and glorify Him? Or would it make your life better? Would it please you? Would it in some way serve the idol that you are chasing?
If you hallow anything more than God, it distorts your view of yourself, and it will distort your confession and your petition. And before you realise it, your life is filled with guilt and frustration because there's no lasting peace in those things. When someone says, I can't forgive myself, what they mean is I hallow something more than God, and it won't forgive me. It won't let me go. I have failed it, and I am ruined because of it.
Now it doesn't just count for confession. It obviously counts for what we ask for. We are told to pray for all our needs when Jesus sums it up and teaches us by saying, give us this day, give us today our daily bread. Now what is bread? What is Jesus indicating when He says we have to pray for our bread?
Bread is something you have to have. It is your staple. It is your basic needs. Bread. You survive of bread.
Jesus doesn't say, give us today our daily Snickers bar. It doesn't go on to say, Lord, give me a porterhouse steak with a nice mushroom sauce. It says bread. Bread. It doesn't say cappuccino, it says bread.
I have to remember that one. A test of what you adore most can be identified for what you ask for. What do I do when I fold my hands and pray to God? What do I say, God, I have to have that. I have to have that.
How often don't we say, I've prayed and I've prayed and I've prayed and I have no peace, and I don't think God is hearing me. I keep praying for this, but I get no peace. Well, perhaps this is why. If you go to God and say, I have to have this promotion, God. Otherwise, my life is over.
You view it as your daily bread. A job promotion is your bread. If I don't get married, my life is over. If my business fails, my life is over. If my grandkids act up, my life is over.
No wonder we don't get any peace. If you have hallowed your career, if you have hallowed your kids or your grandkids, they run your life. Whatever you hallow, whenever you think about losing it, you go to pieces. And the reason you cannot get over the worry and the reason you cannot get over the anxiety, no matter how much you pray, I have all this anxiety. I have all this that I come to God for. Philippians 4 says, I should bring all my anxieties to God and list them to Him and make them known to Him, but it doesn't get any better, God.
I am overcome with worry. What is the matter? It is a failure of adoring God as the highest and the most supreme end for your life. You have to demote your job. You have to demote your grand friends who indicate whether you are good enough, cool enough, or not.
Sometimes we even need to demote what others think in our church. Who holds that position in your heart? We pray, our father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. So praise, the adoration of God is the thing that will heal your view of the world. It will heal the way that you view yourself.
Praise must saturate your heart and your mind so that you can train yourself to start thinking the way you are to pray. Prayer. Friends, if you find your heart saying, yes, this is true for me. I have failed in this area. I can give you the answer, prayer.
Go to Him and pray for His name to be made great in your life, and it will calibrate you. It will calibrate you. Not simply what you pray for next, but it will calibrate how you see life. Prayer is the great recalibrator. It resets our way of thinking.
And when we begin our prayers by marvelling at the power, marvelling at the grace, marvelling at the good naturedness of our God, if you dwell on that just for a little while, you realise that everything else is coming back into focus. Everything else makes sense, and there is peace in your heart. As we wrap up, this request for God's name to be hallowed is telling us that God has every intention to cause His name to be hallowed. This was Jesus, God incarnate, who told us to pray for God to magnify His name. In other words, God is saying, I will do this.
I will do this. Just like I will give you daily bread, I will hallow My name. If God is the highest, if God is the most glorious thing in this universe, which He must be if He is its creator, then there is nothing higher on God's priority list than His own glory. So when we pray this prayer, we actually align ourselves more fully to what God wants. This means that our priorities are moving into line with His, which is only ever good for us.
John Piper says, in a way that only John Piper can, God wills to make great things the result of our prayers when our prayers are the result of God's great purposes. In other words, let your first and all determining prayer be for the hallowing of God's name, and that grand request, think about it. That grand request in a world that spits at the name of Jesus, that persecutes His church. The prayer that God, in the midst of all that, make Your name be the most sacred thing there is. That is the greatest, grandest prayer you can ever pray.
Humanly speaking, how impossible is that to pray for in the Middle East? How impossible is it to pray for God's name to be sacred in Australia? But this is the great challenge and the great joy that we as Christians can be a part of. God knows that His name deserves to be hallowed. God is omniscient.
He knows everything, and He knows perfectly well that He deserves all of this. He has perfect self-esteem. The only being that does. And we say to Him, God, do what You need to do. Glorify Your name.
Make Yourself to be the most highest and the most sacred thing there is, and then we get to have the opportunity and the great joy to see Him do it. We get to see God's name be glorified. It is our greatest joy. It is our greatest privilege to be a part of that. Let's pray.
Lord, You will to make great things the results of our prayers when our prayers are the result of Your great purposes. Our father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are Yours forever. Amen.