The Lord's Prayer, Part 2

The Lord’s Prayer (2)

We’re continuing our little series on prayer. I planned to do two talks on the Lord’s Prayer and today we have the second.

Jesus doesn’t just dive straight into the Lord’s Prayer. He first gave some teaching about how we should not pray, and last week, we looked at what Jesus had to say about hypocritical prayer and babbling prayer.

This week, we come to the Christian prayer. We usually call the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray ‘the Lord’s Prayer’, although Jesus wouldn’t have prayed quite like this, as the prayer includes a section for forgiveness, and Jesus didn’t need to ask God for forgiveness. But I’m sure that Jesus would have prayed all the other sections.

Last week we noted that Jesus doesn’t say ‘Pray this.’ He says, ‘Pray then LIKE this.’ This prayer is meant to be a model for how we should pray, not something we say mechanically, praying the same words every time. If we do that, there’s a great danger that we won’t think about what we’re praying – and the Lord’s Prayer will actually become a babbling prayer!

I also mentioned last week that Priscilla [my wife] and I usually use this format when we pray, so we’ve been praying this prayer for a long time. In this talk I will tell you about how we pray through the Lord’s Prayer, but as I said, it’s meant to be a model, and there are certainly other ways to use it.

In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches us to address God as ‘Our father in heaven!’ But there’s no reason why we can’t address God in some other way.

The psalms are of course the biggest collection of prayers in the Bible, and the psalmists address God in all sorts of ways. For example, they say, ‘O Lord God’, ‘O my God’, ‘O Holy One of Israel’, ‘O my Strength’, O Lord, God of vengeance.’ Nehemiah prayed, ‘O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God…’ In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed, ‘Abba, Father’. [2 Sam 7:18; Ps 59:9; Ps 71:22; Ps 94:1-2; Neh 1:5; Mark 14:36.] We shouldn’t think the only way we can address God is ‘Our father in heaven.’ However, this is a good way to address God. It reminds us that God is our father. We have a close and intimate relationship with him. But he is also ‘in heaven.’ He is the awesome creator of the universe.

It's also worth mentioning that Jesus uses ‘us’ and ‘we’ a lot in this prayer. It’s clear that he’s expecting his disciples to pray this prayer collectively and for each other.

I am going to go through the six sections of the Lord’s Prayer in turn. We got to the first one last week, but we really only touched on it. I think it’s slightly difficult to understand, so I’m going to spend a bit more time on it than on the other sections.

1. Hallowed be your name

I said that this is a slightly difficult phrase to understand.

We might struggle with the idea of ‘Hallowed be.’ ‘Hallowed’ sounds a bit like ‘holy’, and it’s a related word. To hallow can mean ‘to make holy.’ We can’t make God any holier than he already is, so it doesn’t mean that. Here, it means to respect God as holy.

So far, so good. But what does ‘holy’ mean?! Many people think ‘holy’ means very good and righteous. But it doesn’t really mean that.

Holy means ‘specially belonging to God’ or ‘set apart’ or ‘different’. A Bible scholar called William Barclay wrote that the fundamental meaning of the word for holy is ‘different.’

So, when we respect God as holy, we respect him as different. He is different from any being in this universe.

Here are a couple of quotes which express this idea of God being different. Robert Mounce and Grant Osborne are both New Testament scholars. Mounce says, ‘To acknowledge God as holy is to declare his complete separateness from all created beings.’ He is giving the same idea – God is completely separate. Osborne says, ‘He is the ‘Wholly Other,’ standing above this world and soon to judge it.’ Once again, it’s the same idea.

God is holy; he’s different. But HOW holy is he? God isn’t just a little bit holy. There are two verses where people address God as ‘holy, holy, holy.’ The fact that they repeat holy three times means that God is absolutely holy.

Let’s come now to the second part of this phrase ‘your name.’ Why doesn’t Jesus simply say ‘you’? In the Old Testament there are quite a few names for God. The principal name is Jehovah. The name ‘Jehovah’ appears in written form in the Old Testament – or at least, the four main consonants do. However devout Jews thought that God’s name was too holy to be said, so they avoided saying it. Instead they often referred to God by saying ‘your name.’ So ‘your name’ became the standard way to refer to God, and here, ‘your name’ means God.