SERMON
THE LORD’S PRAYER: HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME!
MATTHEW 5:43-48
SUNDAY, 5 JUNE, 2016, 10 A.M.
KEMNAY PARISH CHURCH
Let us pray:
Our Father in Heaven, thank you for the words of Jesus Christ,
which leads us to eternal life. As we prepare to reflect on Your
Word to us this morning, may your Name be truly hallowed, on
earth as it hallowed in Heaven. We pray these things in the
name of Jesus Christ, and for His sake. Amen.
As I mentioned last week, we are now entering into a new
sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer. Over the next few weeks,
we are going to look at each line of these words of Jesus. For
many of us, these words are quite well-known. For many of us,
these words of Jesus have been on our lips since a very young
age. We might be tempted to think that there is nothing new to
learn from words that are so well-known to us. As a minister and
preacher of the Gospel, one of the greatest challenges that I face
in my own life is the challenge of hearing Scripture anew, no
matter how many times I may have heard it or read it before. For
me, the only way to really hear what scripture has to say is to
take the time to pause and reflect on what any particular passage
of Scripture is saying, and that’s what we’re trying to do with
the Lord’s Prayer over the next few weeks.
As I also mentioned last week, I think that the Lord’s Prayer
is one of the greatest gifts that Jesus has ever given to His
church. In Greek, the original language of the New Testament,
the Lord’s Prayer is fifty-seven words long, and last week I
suggested that these fifty-seven words of Jesus CHANGE the
world, and can change our lives, too. Last week, we also heard
that while Jesus taught His disciples many things throughout His
ministry, his disciples only ever asked Him to teach them one
thing: “Lord, teach us to pray!” (Luke 11:1). I think this was
because prayer was at the foundation of everything that Jesus
was about. Throughout all four Gospels, we read about Jesus
taking the time to pray on twenty-one separate occasions. For
Jesus, prayer was the means by which He was in relationship
with His Heavenly Father. Prayer was the means by which He
was able to carry out the full extend of His earthly ministry. By
teaching His disciples the words of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus
wanted His first disciples to be able to have the same kind of
relationship with the Father that He had with the Father, and
Jesus desires the same for us. Our Lord gave us the gift of this
prayer, so that we could be in relationship with the Father, too.
The Lord’s Prayer is both vertical and horizontal. What do I
mean by that? It is vertical in that it teaches us that at its root,
prayer is all about relationship with God. The very first words of
the prayer (“Our Father”) make it crystal-clear that the Lord’s
Prayer is all about relationship. The Lord’s prayer is also
vertical because it prays for what is done in Heaven to also be
done upon the earth (and by the way, the structure of the original
language suggests that the line “on earth, as it is in Heaven”
applies to the entire opening of the prayer. So, we can and
should pray, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be your
name, on earth, as it is in Heaven; thy kingdom come, on earth,
as it is in Heaven; thy will be done, on earth, as it is in
Heaven!”)
So, the Lord’s prayer is vertical because it first addresses
our relationship with our Heavenly Father. The first three
petitions of the Lord’s Prayer (Hallowed be your name on earth,
as it is in Heaven, your kingdom come on earth, as in Heaven,
your will be done on earth, as in Heaven) all deal with this
vertical relationship with the Father. The latter part of the Lord’s
Prayer deals with what I would call the horizontal relational
aspects of the Lord’s Prayer (Give us our daily bread, forgive us
our debts as we forgive others, and protect us from the Evil
One).
The Lord’s Prayer is both vertical and horizontal. The
Lord’s Prayer is concerned with our relationship with God, and
it is also concerned with every other relationship, every other
concern that we have. The Lord’s Prayer is both vertical and
horizontal, and therefore it touches on every aspect of our lives
here on earth. Every need, every concern, every hope we have as
humans is summed up in the words of the Lord’s Prayer. The
Lord’s Prayer gives us the ultimate template for how we ought
to pray. The Lord’s Prayer is concerned with our past (forgive us
our debts), with our present (give us our daily bread), and with
our future (deliver us from the Evil One).
So, the Lord’s Prayer is both vertical and horizontal. The
Lord’s Prayer touches every corner of our lives. The Lord’s
Prayer addresses every need that we have as human beings! In
every sense, the Lord’s Prayer is all about God breaking into our
reality in every way imaginable. The Lord’s Prayer invites us
into a state of radical re-orientation, in which God’s priorities
become our priorities, and God’s ways become our ways. In
other words, the Lord’s Prayer is all about the in-breaking
Kingdom of Jesus Christ in our world, and in our lives!
But, the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t start with God’s Kingdom
does it? No, the first petition is not about the kingdom; rather,
the first petition is all about God Himself: Our Father in
Heaven, hallowed be your name, on earth as it is in Heaven
(remember, that line goes with all three opening lines of the
prayer). Hallowed be your name. When we hear or read those
words, they might seem more than a wee bit abstract to us. But,
there is good reason for starting the prayer by asking for God’s
Name to be Hallowed. In the words of Darrell Johnson, “at the
center of Jesus’ being, at the center of Jesus’ identity and
mission is his passion for his Father’s name being hallowed.” In
other words, Jesus’ chief concern was and is to make His
Father’s name Holy, to make His Father’s name precious, and to
invite others to follow His perfect example.
How do we know that that the holiness of His Father’s name
was Jesus’ chief concern? We know if from the other Lord’s
Prayer, which was recorded for us in John chapter 17. In John
17:1, Jesus said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son,
so that Your Son may glorify You”. John 17:6, “I have revealed
your Name to those you gave me out of the world…I have made
your Name fully known”.
When He taught His first disciples to pray, Jesus started with
“Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, on earth as it
is in Heaven” because that’s where HE starts in His own prayer
life! Again in the words of Darrell Johnson: “From first to last,
and at every point in between, Jesus lives and dies to see the
Father’s name be hallowed on earth as it is in Heaven.”
But, what is Jesus driving at when He prays for God’s Name
to be hallowed, to be made Holy? Much of it comes down to the
fact that in the the Bible, names have great meaning. In the
bible, names are not mere labels; names were much, much more.
Names described and shaped a person’s reality. For instance, the
name “Abraham” means “Father of many nations”. In light of
God’s great promise to bless all the nations of the earth through
Abraham, this was a fitting name for him! “Moses” sounds like
the Hebrew word we would translate as “to draw out”. After he
was born and because Pharaoh had ordered the death of all
newborn Hebrew boys, Moses was placed into a basket and
hidden in reeds by a river bank. When he was discovered, Moses
was “drawn out” of the water. Later in his life, God would use
Moses “draw out” the Hebrew people from Egypt, so that they
could begin their journey to the Promised Land. Saul, the name
of Israel’s first king, means “asked for”, or “prayed for”. The
people of Israel wanted to be like the rest of the nations, and so
they asked God for a king, and they got a man named Saul. The
name “Israel” means “wrestles with God”, and that name
certainly captured the nature of the relationship between God
and His people on more than one occasion! Peter comes from
the word Petros, which means “rock”. Peter started out as
shifting sand, but by the time that Jesus was done with him,
Peter was a true leader of the church, and he was as solid as a
rock. And, Jesus is the Greek form of Yeshua or Joshua, and it
means “God saves”.
So, in the biblical world, someone’s name was not just an
arbitrarily chosen label. Instead, a name was meant to
communicate an individual’s character, an individual’s
personality, and also an individual’s reputation. This is why the
book of Proverbs tells us that “A good name is to be chosen over
great riches”. In the biblical world, a good name was a precious
commodity, even more precious than gold.
As we have heard, names in the bible are not just random
labels affixed onto people’s lives. In the bible, someone’s name
tells us something about the reputation and character of person,
and that is also true when it comes to God. When Jesus prayed,
“Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, on earth as it is in
Heaven”, He didn’t mean that God’s name was somehow less
than Holy. No, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus was praying that
God’s name, God’s character, God’s reputation would be
revered on earth, as it is already revered in Heaven. In this first
line of the prayer, Jesus was inviting all of His disciples in every
time and every place to join in His mission of building up and
protecting God’s reputation here on earth, as it is already built
up and protected in Heaven! Every other part of the Lord’s
Prayer flows from this great passion to see God’s name, God’s
reputation treated as well on earth as it is treated in Heaven!
So, at the very start, the Lord’s Prayer invites us into Jesus’
own mission of making God’s Name, God’s reputation as sacred
on earth as it already is in Heaven. But, the question remains:
how do we make God’s name Holy? How do we continue Jesus’
own work of making His Father’s Name precious here in the
world? I would like finish up this morning by making one
suggestion about how we might go about this, and it is based on
another passage from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which was
read aloud for us earlier in this morning’s worship. Matthew
5:44: “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those
who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father
who is in Heaven”.
Did we hear the causal link in that verse? Love your
enemies, pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be
children of your Father who is in Heaven. In His own life and
ministry, Jesus hallowed His Father’s name by showing God’s
love to those who were enemies of the Gospel. The Sonship of
Jesus was most clearly seen in His willingness to love and
redeem fallen and sinful humanity. As the Son of God, Jesus
shared God’s love with everyone who crossed His path; that is
how He hallowed His Father’s Name!
This first line of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father in Heaven,
hallowed be your Name, on earth as it is in Heaven” invites each
of us into the same practice of hallowing God’s Name by
showing His love especially to those people in our lives who for
one reason or another are counted as irritants, adversaries, or
enemies.
Now, we might think that all of this sounds too grand for us,
that we aren’t good enough to Jesus’ good work of Hallowing
God’s Name by loving our enemies. We might be worried that
try as we might, we might just make matters worse. We might
be worried that we will actually harm God’s Name, God’s
reputation by our actions. But, here’s the Good News: Scripture
tells us that God delights in using imperfect people to carry out
His perfect will. In the words of St. Paul, God’s power is
perfected in our weakness. Jesus Christ is the One who fully
hallows God’s Name. By God’s grace, by the Spirit’s Power,
each of us here is invited to have a share in Jesus’ great work of
winning the world back to God, of making God’s Name Holy
here on earth, as it is in heaven.
Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your Name, on earth as
it is in Heaven. Amen.