THE PRAYER -- AND THE LIFE! -- THAT EXALTS GOD
“...hallowed be thy name.”
Matthew 6:9
Jan and I were watching a cooking show the other day -- Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa, I think it was -- and I commented on how Ina chops vegetables. In this instance, she was chopping parsley, and she held the knife in one hand while resting her other hand on top it, on the blunt edge. Then she rocked the knife up and down with admirable speed and agility. I turned to Jan and said, “She makes that look easy.”
And she does! She even talks to the camera while she’s doing it. And, you know, it probably is easy, once you learn how to do it. But, if I were to try it, I would have to think about it. I certainly couldn’t talk to others while doing it. And I wouldn’t be nearly as quick and thorough as Ina is. Until...I had done it enough times, made enough mistakes, trained my eyes and my muscles, and become familiar with the movement and the rhythm...in other words, until I had disciplined myself! I probably never would be as good at it as Ina is, but I would be a lot better at it than I am now!
That’s the way prayer is. People think that prayer ought to come easy, and they don’t do it -- or don’t do much of it -- because, when they try, they find out it’s not easy.
Learning to pray is a discipline -- not unlike learning to chop vegetables. Prayer may be “easy” in some sense, but it’s not easy on us! It’s not easy to talk to God about the things Jesus teaches us here in the Lord’s Prayer. It stretches us, challenges us, and takes us to a new level. Take the hallowing of God’s name.
To hallow God’s name means to offer praise to God, and it takes more than mere words. Lip service is not adequate. The whole of life has to give expression to the holiness of God. In other words, we praise God not only with our lips but also with our lives.
And yet, there is that within us that resists it. There is something about us that does not want to exalt the name of God. We spend much of our energy, focus much of our desire, employ much of our attention on exalting ourselves instead. And where does that get us?
In Matthew 23:12, Jesus says, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” With these words in mind, let me suggest that there are three phases through which we pass in the spiritual life. They are not necessarily sequential in order. Sometimes we even circle back and repeat the first phase and then the second. But let’s track them all the same. I think it will be familiar territory to most of us.
I. WE EXALT OURSELVES
In the first phase, we exalt ourselves. This is just another way of saying that we indulge ourselves. Instead of practicing the virtue of humility, we nurture the sin of pride. We become self-centered, self-focused, and self-preoccupied.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci is the pastor of the Little Flowers Community in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Jamie once wrote that the petition, “Hallowed be Your name,” would better be translated, “May your name be made holy.” And then he went on to say that “every Jew listening [to Jesus] knew (in part) [that making God’s name holy] came about by how they, His chosen people, reflected His holiness in their lives.”
To be holy means to be “set apart,” and it means further to be “set apart for God.” But the truth is, we do not always see ourselves as set apart for God; we see God as set apart for us. We imagine that we have God on retainer and that all we have to do is call and God will, or should, move quickly to do our bidding. And we don’t understand why we don’t get what we pray for. If we pray with skewed desires, God is not going to give us what we ask for.
I love the promise that Jesus makes in Matthew 7:9, where he asks, “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” No! But what if our children ask for dessert first, before eating their vegetables? Or, what if our children ask permission to play in the street. Under ordinary circumstances, we are not going to comply with such requests from our children.
Why not? Because our job as parents is train our kids to know what is good for them, to develop in them a taste for healthy food, to instill in them a sixth sense for safety. As parents, we foster certain preferences above others.
Jesus goes on to say, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?” (Matt. 7:11).
When we exalt ourselves above God -- when we prefer our desires to God’s, when we place more importance on our agenda than we do on God’s, when we try to press God into our service rather than yielding ourselves to God’s service -- there is a predictable outcome. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled.” We will run into a brick wall. We will bloody our noses on the hard surface of reality. Not because God is unwilling to give us good things but because God is unwilling to give us bad things.
What we really long for -- in all our yearning -- what we really want is God. What was it Augustine said? “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
II. WE HUMBLE OURSELVES
“All who exalt themselves will be humbled,” Jesus said, “and all who humble themselves....” This is the second phase of the spiritual journey: humbling ourselves. And this is where prayer gets hard. Because humbling ourselves requires time and patience.
Henri Nouwen once wrote that all our conflicts, all our struggles, can be seen as the mere tip of the iceberg. He went on to say that “it is worthwhile, even necessary, to explore that which is underneath the surface of our daily actions, thoughts, and feelings.”
This past week, David Hartman and I hosted a Hospice luncheon at which the speaker was a woman named Elaine Magruder. Elaine is a nurse who lives in Midland, Texas, and she tells how God sent her to Vietnam to start the first hospice program there. To hear her story is truly inspirational.
Elaine says that our goal has to be “to let the Word of God scrutinize us. God,” she says, “detects those dispositions in us that won’t work in his service. What lies underneath is obstructing” what God wants to accomplish in us and through us, and “what’s needed is giving up the right to [ourselves].” And she adds, “It’s the thing that is so very hard to give up that God wants [us] to give up.”
Occasionally, I read a web log by a young man who gives only his first name, which is Justin. In a recent post on his blog, which he calls “Uban Idealist,” he says this. He says, “For a long time my reaction to seeing [the broken] areas in my life has been to work hard on them. Try to act more humble. Try to act more patient. Try to act like I don’t need control. And I splash about in the water with great passion, but then end up losing sight of the bottom because I’ve disrupted the still water that God brought me to so that I could see the bottom.
He goes on to say, “Our icebergs are not a time to be quick to act, quick to try and fix our lives, or quick to change ourselves through effort. They are opportunities for us to come close to God through prayer, stand shoulder to shoulder with Jesus, and let him lead us into the cold and deep waters of our hearts. Only in being still and trusting God can we continue to see clearly.”
This is what it means to humble ourselves -- to let God show us what is in our hearts, what is in our very cells, that we don’t want to see. And we bow ourselves before God and attend to God’s scrutiny so that God can heal us, so that God can change us, so that God can transform us, so that God can then exalt us.
III. GOD EXALTS US
And that’s the third phase of spiritual formation. Jesus says, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” When we give up exalting ourselves and humble ourselves instead -- when we exalt God -- then God exalts us. God raises us to a new level of honor; God elevates us to a new plane on the spiritual path.
To say that God exalts us is not to say that, now that we have humbled ourselves, God will relent and will at last indulge us with what we had desired at the outset. Not in the least! To say that God exalts us is to say that prayer has done its work -- at least in part -- and now what is elevated is our desires. More and more, we want what God wants. More and more, we hallow the name of God.
Martin Luther called the Lord’s Prayer “a summary of the whole gospel.” And what he meant by that is that Christian prayer is talking with God about the things the Lord’s Prayer talks with God about. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, what we are asking God for is the grace to return to the true vocation of all human beings. From creation, our vocation has been to bear the image of God. In the Greek translation of Genesis, the term for “image” is Eikon. Our great calling in life is to be Eikons of the glory of God. This is, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism says, “the chief end of man,” the main purpose of life.
Of course, our sin has marred the image of God among us. We are cracked Eikons, but God has begun the great work of reparation, and the final result will be to restore us to God’s original intent. Which is, to be conformed to the image of God’s Son, Jesus Christ.
What I am trying to say is what St. Irenaeus of Lyons said as long ago as the second century. He said, Gloria Dei vivens homo; that is, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” When God exalts us, it is to raise us up to the dignity of our full humanity. It is to change us into the likeness of Christ. And then, like Christ, we hallow the name of God -- not only in word but also in deed. Not only with our lips but also with our lives.
