Hallowed be Thy Name
Matthew 6:10
Pastor Jefferson Williams
First Baptist Church Chenoa
2-17-19
Mavine
Several years ago, Maxine and celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary with a dinner cruise on lake Michigan. It was a beautiful night with wonderful dinner, a jazz quartet, and dancing, which we are not very good at.
The host of the cruise came to the stage between songs and said that there was a couple on board celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary. Then he said, “Let’s all congratulate Jeff and Mavine Williams!”
I finally got his attention and he corrected himself. But it was too late. Mavine wasn’t happy!
Don’t you hate it when someone gets your name wrong? Mavine does!
We hate it because our name is important to us. It represents us and tells people something about us. When people fumble our names it makes us feel like we aren’t very important to them.
Review
This morning, we are continuing our series on the Lord’s Prayer. Last week, we studied the preface of the prayer “Our Father in heaven,” and we learned that if we have placed our full faith and trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins, we have the privilege of addressing God as Abba.
Abba means daddy or papa. It’s a term of endearment. In love, God chose to make us part of His family through adoption. Because we are God’s children, we can approach the throne of grace with “confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Hebrews 4:16)
The Lord’s prayer begins with the word “our” to remind us that we are part of a huge family of believers all over the world.
And lest we are tempted to approach our Abba/Father without awe and reverence, Jesus reminds us that God is “in the heavens.” He is not the “the big man upstairs” but the majestic and mighty King.
Solomon reminds us:
“Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” (Ecc 5:1-2)
First Things First
The disciples were overwhelmed listening to Jesus talk to His Father. So much so that they asked Him to “teach us to pray.” (Luke 11:1)
Jesus gives them, and us, a model prayer. It is just 57 words in the Greek and it takes 20 seconds to pray but believers all over the world have prayed it for the past 2,000 years.
After setting the tone of the prayer with the preface, Jesus directs the disciples to focus on six petitions. The first three uses the pronoun “Your” and the second three use the pronoun “our.”
We are begin prayer with three vertical and radically God-centered petitions that God’s name be hallowed, that His Kingdom would come and will be done on earth as it already is done in heaven.
Halloween?
A couple of weeks ago, the children invited me to their Sunday school class to answer some of their questions about communion and baptism. (By the way, I’m so thankful for our teachers that are shepherding these young souls). As I was about to leave, I asked the class what they thought “hallowed by Your Name” meant. Without missing a beat, Cammy said, “Well it obviously has something to with Halloween!”
Even as we have modernized our Bibles and replaced “Thy” with “Your” and “art” and “is,” we still have this old English sounding word “hallowed.” The reason that we haven’t modernized this word is because there really isn’t a good word to replace it with.
In the first petition, we are asking that God would make His Name be hollowed. What does that even mean?
Hallow comes from the root word for holy. (So maybe “hollify” your name?) It means to “be set apart.”
In India, cows are set apart as holy. People literally are starving with filet mignon wandering the streets.
When we say that God is holy, we are affirming that He is altogether different from us.
So what this petition is asking is that God would make His name holy.
Wait, I have a Question
Does that strike any of you as a bit strange? If God is perfectly holy, how can our prayer make any sense? He can’t be more holy than He already is. He can’t become more glorious. What is Jesus trying to say?
We are to ask that God’s name be honored as holy, reverenced, and acknowledged by the world around us.
John Piper puts these verses in these words:
“Father, cause your great and holy name to be honored and revered, exalted and treasured above all things everywhere in the world.”
God cannot be more holy but His name, his reputation, can be more glorified by His creations.
We pray for God to let His name be different than all other names, let it be given a position which is absolutely unique.
Augustine wrote:
“This petition is prayed for, not as if the name of God is not holy already, but that it may be held holy by men.”
OMG
Let’s stop here for a minute and just acknowledge that God’s name is not hallowed in this world. In fact, God’s Name is used as a curse word and is used frivolously in every part of our culture.
I recently watched a comedy special on Netflix that featured a comedian that I think is very funny. But I was appalled by how many times he used God’s name as a swear word. The saddest point was that it was completely unnecessary.
But we shouldn’t be surprised when people who do not worship God do not honor His name.
But what about those of us who call ourselves Christ-followers? Are we living in such a way that God’s Name is honored?
One of the Top Ten
Lest you think I may be making a mountain out of molehill, we need to remember that God gave Moses Ten Commandments, not ten suggestions!
They begin with absolute centrality of putting God first in everything – no other Gods before me.
The second commandment is similar in that we are warned against making ourselves idols.
Anyone remember what the third commandment is? You shall not take the Lord’s Name in vain.
At the center of Jesus’ life and ministry was a passion for His Father’s Name being hallowed. (We see that especially in John 12 and 17, “I brought you glory here on earth by finishing the work you sent me to do”) As a good Jewish boy, He would have been raised knowing the Ten Commandments.
What Moses gives us as a “you shall not take the Lord’s Name in vain,” Jesus flips and puts it in the positive – “you shall pray that God’s Name would be hallowed.”
It’s as if God has trademarked His Name. One author puts it this way:
“God retains legal control over His name and threatens serious penalties against the unauthorized misuse of this extremely valuable property.”
To “take” means to “lift up, to carry, to bear or raise.” As Christians, literally “little Christs,” we carry God’s Name into a lost and dying world.
“In vain” means “empty, useless, nothingness, wasted, with a worthless purpose.” When we take the Lord’s Name in vain we are saying, “Your Name means nothing to me.”
In this commandment, God was directing us not to use His Name flippantly, whether in word, thought, or action.
It’s interesting that none of the other petitions tell is to pray for a specific human response of the heart. All the other petitions flow out of this one.
The Name
We are to hallow God’s Name. We are not to treat it as if it means nothing. But what is God’s Name? Isn’t it just God?
In the Bible, a name wasn’t just a collection of letters. A name described the character, personality, and reputation of a person. In the Scriptures, people don’t have names, they are their names.
Jacob means “deceiver” and he lived up to his name. Jesus literally spoke courage into Simon and renamed him “Peter,” which means, “Rock.” (Not that Rock)
We are studying Habakkuk in the Wednesday morning Bible study and his name means “embrace to wrestle” and that’s what he did with God through his questions.
My name means “son of peace” and I try to remember that when conflict arising in my life.
Before we had kids, I told Maxine that I wanted to name a daughter Msyteri Lorilei. She said no because those were stripper names!
At the junior high, I worked with a student named Tovah, which in Hebrew means “good.” She was the personification of her name.
In Scripture, there are over 300 names for God. The Name of God is a composite of all His attributes – His title, His person, His power, His authority, and His very reputation. God is faithful, good, holy, immutable, infinite, just, patient, loving, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotence, righteous, self-existent, and sovereign. I could go on, but it would take all day!
When Moses encountered God in the burning bush, he asked what God’s Name is? God replied, “I Am who I Am.” This is called the “tetragrammaton” because in Hebrew it only has four consonants YHWH. In our Bibles, it is translated “LORD” (in all caps) and is used over 6,000 times in the Bible. God is the eternal God of the universe.
Ancient scribes so feared misusing God’s name that when they came to “Yahweh” they would take a bath and use a new pen before writing the word, leaving out the vowels. This word then became Jehovah and then finally LORD. Only the high priest could utter the name and only on one day of the year, the Day of Atonement. Orthodox Jews today don’t write out the name God. In Israel today, they write it this way “G D.”
By the way, are you beginning to understand how absolutely radical it was for the disciples to call God Abba?
Later in our prayer time, we are going to learn more names for God.
John Calvin wrote:
“That’s God’s Name should be hallowed is to say that God should have His own honor of which He is so worthy, so that man should never speak of Him without the greatest of veneration.”
God’s Name, all of who He is, should be honored, esteemed, reverenced, valued and treasured above all names.
Lift Him Up
David Jeremiah wrote a wonderful book on prayer and he gives us three ways we can practically hallow God’s name.
* Remember who He is - As we come into His presence with worship, gratefulness and praise, we hallow His name. When we focus on His glory instead of our story, we hallow His name. When we preach the word, sing to him, pray, give, and baptize, we hallow His name.
* Relinquish control of your life – when we lift up His name and let Him be the leader of our lives, we hallow His Name.
When William Booth, the founder of the Salvation army was dying, there was some paperwork the lawyers needed his signature on. They gently approach Mrs. Booth and asked if she could get him to sign the papers. He was going in and out of consciousness but she managed to get him to sign the papers. After he died, they discovered that he hadn’t signed his name on any of the papers. He signed everyone “Jesus.”
* Recognize His Presence in our lives – God is not some far off, distant deity who wound the earth like a top and then went on vacation. God is close; He is involved, most of the time behind the scenes.
John Piper has said that at even given time “God is up to 10,000 things in our lives and we may be aware of only three.”
The story is told of a man who was dying and asked the pastor to visit him. He admitted to the pastor that pray had always been hard for him but he wanted to pray. The pastor pulled up a chair beside the bed and told the man, just talk to chair as if Jesus is sitting there, because He is.
A couple of days later, the pastor got the call that he had died. The nurse calling said it was the strangest thing. When they found him, he had his head resting in a chair that was beside his bed.
Live it Out
Let’s get really practical. How do we actually “hallow” God’s Name in our lives?
A.W. Tozer, writing 60 years ago:
“The greatest loss today is the loss of reverence for God Himself.”
1. As Christians, let’s make it a priority to not profane God’s Name. This can mean cursing or using God’s Name in a flippant manner. This even means OMG. . When we are in conflict and don’t handle it Biblically, we profane God’s name. When we gossip, we profane God’s name.
By the way, I read a quote from Scott Sauls this week on gossip:
“Gossip is just another form of pornography in which you undress someone and turn them into a thing in order to get a cheap thrill.”
The world is listening to us. They are watching us.
I read of a story in Maryland about a drunk driver that was pulled over arrested. He fought the officer and cursed them out, including asking God to damn the officers to hell.
The judge hands were tied by the sentencing structure and had had to give him a relatively light sentence. But then he the found a statute that hadn’t been used in years but had not been repealed.
He changed him an extra $100 and an additional 30 days in jail for the crime of public blasphemy.
The local paper went crazy citing separation of church and state and that no one cares about blasphemy anymore.
That truck driver better be glad that he didn’t during the time of Moses because he would have been stoned to death!
Ezekiel told the Israelites to take this seriously:
“Therefore say to the Israelites, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake, people of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes.” (Ezekiel 36:22-23)
Paul told the Romans that because of their unholy living that “God’s Name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” (Romans 2:24)
When I was subbing one day, one of the students used Jesus name as a curse word. I stopped the class and told him that the name of Jesus was very special to me and I would appreciate it if he would not use that name in that way.
Paul told the believer at Colosse,
“Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” (Col 4:5-6)
It is very difficult to reconcile a heart that says that they love God but lips that blaspheme God.
2. Worship Him with all your heart
“I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness; I will sing the praises of the name of the Lord Most High.” (Psalm 7:17)
We begin this prayer focusing on God not ourselves – may Your Name be more and more hallowed in this world, may Your Kingdom come and will be done as it already is being done in heaven.
We can say with the Psalmist:
“Not to us O Lord, not to us but to Your Name be the glory.” (Psalm 115:1)
This has a way of reorienting us from our preoccupation with our own belly buttons.
As we gather together on Sunday mornings, we have the opportunity to lift up the Name. As you get alone with God and pray and sing to Him, you are hallowing His Name.
King David wrote these encouraging words:
“Those who know your name trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.”
3. Live a life that displays the wonders of our King.
It’s been said that of all the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, this one will expose our hypocrisy faster than all the others combined.
As we pray, “Abba, may the world see the greatness of Your Name through my life” we are reminded of all the ways we fall short.
We carry is His name with us wherever we go. We are a walking billboard for the glory of God.
I’ve always tried to remind my boys that “a good name is more desirable than gold” (Prov 22:1) and that their name “Williams” means something. They represent us. Williams are loyal, we work hard, we are honest, we are faithful, and we don’t leave when the going gets tough. I’ve said to them, “Our name is important, carry it well.”
When we live in such a way that God’s Name is hallowed through our lives, people will say, “I know what family they come from. They are one of Abba’s kids.”
Martin Luther wrote that God’s name is hallowed in our lives when both our doctrine (orthodoxy) and our lives (orthopraxy) are truly Christian.
We are not perfect but let’s make a commitment to make much of Jesus in our daily lives.
A great example of this is Tim Tebow. Whatever he has been involved in, he has never backed down from giving God the glory.
This past week, thousands of churches throughout the world held, “Night to Shine” – a prom for special needs people where each on them because the prom king or queen.
Tim said that he does it because there is so much tearing us apart but we could all come together to help these special friends of his know that God loves them very much.
Read the Lord’s Prayer Together.
The Name Above Every Name
Out of all the petitions, this is the only one we will still pray in heaven. We won’t have to pray for His kingdom to come (it will be consummated) or His will to be done (because it will be done joyfully), or for our daily bread (because we will all eat our fill of deviled/angel eggs and oatmeal butterscotch cookies, we will not pray for forgiveness (because there will be no sin!) or pray against temptation (because that’s done as well).
But we will join with the angels singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy” and spend eternity praising His Name.
Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.” (Rev 4:9-11)
Will you be there with me?
“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” (Psalm 20:7)
Will you trust Him? He is trustworthy!
“The name of the Lord is a fortified tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.” (Proverbs 18:10)
Cry out to Him and be saved!
“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)
What name? Jesus!
Who, being in very nature God,? did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing? by taking the very nature of a servant,? being made in human likeness ?And being found in appearance as a man,? he humbled himself? by becoming obedient to death—? even death on a cross!Therefore God exalted him to the highest place? and gave him the name that is above every name,? that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,? in heaven and on earth and under the earth,? and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,? to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:7-11)
