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Preacher: Ross Macdonald
Scripture: Matthew 6:9
Well, this morning we continue on with the Lord's Prayer which we began last week in v. 9 of Matthew 6. And of course, beginning v. 9, we didn't even get to the second part which we'll consider this morning.
We just focused on the opening, the reference of the prayer. A prayer addressed to our Father in Heaven. We of course have been seeing the significance of the Son revealing the Father. It's very significant that we keep that in mind even as now the word Father doesn't appear as we continue on in v. 9 and 10 and following.
We want to remember that that's the larger contours of the Lord's Prayer. This prayer to the Father. The Father that we go in secret to pray to. The Father who knows already before we ask what we need.
The Father who in His all-wise providence cares for His people, protects His people, leads His people, and gives them the anchor of His promises. And so the Lord's Prayer to our Father in Heaven. Last week when we considered this, we were reminded that Christ's passion was to reveal His Father.
In fact, quite literally His passion. In other words, undergoing the torments of the cross as we saw from Philippians 2, was done to the glory of the Father. And so we recognize His whole life was before the Father, unto the Father.
His whole ministry was about revealing the Father. We saw this from John 5, v. 25,.
Really all the way through. This is v. 30.
Jesus says, I can of Myself do nothing, but as I hear I judge. My judgment is righteous because I don't seek My own will, but the will of the Father who sent Me. Jesus comes. He's been sent by His Father.
His whole life is seeking the will of His Father to the point where He says, I'm not doing anything by Myself. Everything I do is what the Father has willed. It's My life. It's My food to do the will of My Father who sent Me.
In fact, to the degree He says, Philip, if you've seen Me, you've seen the Father. Such is that radical identification of the Son with the Father. John 8, a little bit later in the Gospel, beginning in v. 28.
When you lift up the Son of Man, He's speaking of His crucifixion, then you will know that I am He, that is, I am the Christ, the One you've been waiting for. That I do nothing of Myself, there it is again, but as My Father taught Me, I speak.
So I do what My Father wills. I speak what My Father says. I am the presentation of My Father. As Colossians says, the fullness of the Godhead dwelling in Christ bodily. And He who sent Me is with Me.
The Father's never left Me alone. I'm always doing the things that please Him. So you understand, this is the Jesus who's teaching His disciples how to pray. The Jesus who ever does what pleases the Father.
Who everything He says is what the Father says. Everything He does is what the Father wills. And it's this Jesus who's saying, when you pray to your Father, pray in this way. Jesus, of course, is the One who not only teaches us about the Father, but actually brings us to the Father.
As He says, there is no coming to the Father except through Him. Jesus conducts us to the very bosom of the Father. He opens a new and living way by which we come to the very center of God's heart. Now we can understand and fathom this mysterious love of God.
The love that would not spare His own Son, but freely give Him up for us all who believe in Him. So that as disciples now, we're able to gather and pray, and God is not ashamed to be called our God. Much more, He's not ashamed to be called our Father in heaven.
He's adopted us in the Beloved One. We become sons and daughters. This is the language then of those who have been adopted. This prayer that can say from a true heart, my Father, our Father. It's the Spirit that calls us to cry, Abba, Father, as we've seen now for several weeks.
God does not desire, of course, vain repetitions, formulas, babblings, as Jesus warns against. He wants to hear from His children. His children gather together and they pray our Father in heaven. So what we saw last week was that, verse nine teaches at the very beginning, His disciples are to have a certain confidence.
The confidence of being adopted children. The confidence of those who have the ear of God and His smile upon them. Very significant. Again, I was hearing a paper yesterday, which I had all sorts of disagreements with, as it was moving toward sort of cognitive psychology and the affect of imagination.
But one of the points that was made, and it was drawn from a series of statistical surveys done by Baylor, was that people, when they rate their understanding or imagination of what God must be like, or the countenance of God toward them, there was a surprising amount of people that would view God, if not angry and critical, then at least distant.
And there was a sliver of respondents that said their understanding of God, their evoked imagination of what God's countenance must be like was smiling, having pleasure, delighting in them. That's a problem.
That's a problem.
The legal servile spirit. Remember Luther. Remember when he could only view God as this censorious judge. And what was Luther's response? I hated him. I hated the one that I broke my back to serve. I hated the one that I woke up at the crack of dawn every day to spend hours in confession, scrubbing floors and then having to run back to my Augustinian father to confess any sins of my mind or my thoughts or my emotions that happened just in the time that I had left.
And I drove the whole monastic order nuts. And you would have thought, no one loves God like Luther. And when I look back, Luther said, I hated God. I hated the judge who was against me. And it was really his reception of the Gospel that he finally could see in Christ the smile of God that had been elusive for his entire life.
When Jesus says we come to pray to our Father as those adopted in Him, He wants His disciples to understand, to experience the delight and pleasure that He has with His Father. Remember, this is the high priestly prayer from John 17.
Father, I pray that what I have in You, they would have in Me, that what You are to Me, You would be to them. He wants the same experience, the same embrace, the same revelation of the joy, of the bliss, of the adoration He has toward His heavenly Father to be absorbed by His disciples.
Do you see?
So Jesus, here, at the very beginning of the Lord's Prayer, teaches us to have the confidence, the simple confidence of children coming to their Father. But then we come to the latter part of verse nine, and that's immediately balanced out with reverence.
And reverence is not something that ought to erode the smile of God, the shining favor of His face upon His people. But rather, this reverence is that which enhances our experience of the favor and countenance of God to us in Christ.
That's what I'm really hoping to drive home this morning. But of course, we have the simple confidence of a child. There was a tremendous film, an Italian filmmaker, Bernardo Bertolucci, back in the 80s, that got special agreements.
This is sort of during the communist block in China, he got special agreements to have filming privileges in the Forbidden City in Beijing, which up until the communist revolution had been the reserve for the emperor and a whole host of servants and consorts and whatnot.
But just an incredible palatial complex that was absolutely forbidden to foreigners and even to the Chinese populace until the communist revolution. But somehow, this Italian filmmaker made this epic film, a biographical film about the last emperor of the last dynasty in China before the communist revolution, the Emperor Puyi.
And the whole film starts out with this little boy. He's now been embraced by the Empress Dowager to become the emperor. The emperor of a thousand years was his totem. And at the beginning of the film, the father, his father, who is a prince, is having to convey him to the palace to basically say goodbye.
Like, I'm no longer your father. I'm actually your servant. And this whole palace actually belongs to you. And he's like a five-year-old kid. So he's coming into a palace where all the servants are cowering in fear.
You don't wanna give an askew glance. You don't wanna do anything out of place. And as soon as they cross the threshold into the receiving room of the throne room, the father immediately has this sense of trepidation.
And as now his little boy is no longer his little boy but his emperor, he falls down before him. Now, a whole court is in absolute fear. You get the sense that the air has been sucked out of the room.
Here's this little boy who is imbued with all of this power, and he's just waltzing around. He's like walking up, picking up golden pots, throwing it on the floor. He's doing what your five-year-old would do.
And there's absolutely no sense of fear or trepidation. Everything he does, all the servants are like,.
No, no, no, no, don't do that.
But we can't do anything about you. And so they're just trying to kinda clean up his trail that he's the emperor. The simple confidence of a child. The simple confidence of a child. That's the beginning of verse nine.
But now we come to the end of verse nine. Reverence toward God. Reverence toward God. You see how these things are balanced out. My father, the confidence of an adopted one. Father, hallowed be your name, reverence.
You are holy. Hallowed be your name. Note that now we've moved away from the address of the prayer. This is the first petition of the prayer. This is the very first petition. Hallowed be your name. Hallowed is a word that's fallen out of common usage.
Hallowed is simply to make holy or to treat as holy. To honor as holy. To regard, to react, to proclaim as holy. That is what it means to hallow. To show an extreme reverence. To give an extreme honor.
And here what we're hallowing is the name of God. The name of God is holy. The name of God is to be regarded as holy. These are all the things that we saw, of course, in the third commandment. That the name of God is not to be taken in vain.
And you remember from that, when we're talking about a name, we're talking about something much more broad. We're talking about a reputation. We're talking about a representative way of talking about all that is true of a person.
Their name is their attributes, their character, their works, their word, their trustworthiness. And so God's name is representative of who he is. And what he does. It's his character.
It's his reputation.
It's his renown. It's his honor. And his name. He himself is to be regarded as holy. Remember, every aspect of beauty and glory and majesty, it's all bound together simply under the umbrella of the name of God.
The name is what is glorious. The name is what is majestic. The name is sovereign, all-powerful,.
Worthy of worship.
We worship the name. We worship in the name. We pray in the name. The significance of these things, we saw from Exodus 33 when Moses says, please show me your glory. As God tucks him away and presses him into the cleft of the rock.
And what does Moses actually see? He sees the afterglow of the glory of God. But what does God say right before that in Exodus 33? He says, I will make all my goodness pass before you. I will proclaim my name before you.
Something about the name is identical to the glory. He says, I will pass before you. In fact, I'm gonna make my name go before you. That's the significance of the name. We see this, for example, in Psalm 29.
Give unto the Lord, O you mighty. Give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory, do his name. It's simply another way of glorifying the Lord himself. And so Jesus begins the first petition of the Lord's prayer with these words, hallowed be your name.
These words are so simple, so well-known, so familiar to us that we rarely pause to consider their depth. This begins a prayer like what we see in Isaiah 6 when the seraphs are in the throne room, as it were, covering their faces because they're in awe as they cry out, holy, holy, holy.
It's impulsively reactional to what they see. We sang that hymn moments ago and we didn't sing it like the seraphs.
I can assure you, holy, holy.
Sit down, quiet down. They're impulsively reacting to the sight of God to which they must cover their faces like you would during the solar eclipse and you can only peer the edge of it and that enough is cause to cry out, holy, holy, holy.
It's a reaction to what they're seeing. And this is the kind of hallowing that's taking place in the presence of God all the time. Isaiah just gets a glimmer of that. And that glimmer, that vision, that little glimmer of experience is enough for Isaiah to say, here I am, Lord, send me.
Woe is me, I'm a man of uncleanliness. I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. If you have something for me to do, send me, I'll do it. No wonder Jesus, who ever beheld the presence of his father would only do what his father willed.
Jesus is the Isaiah par excellence. Send me, here I am. This is what it means to hallow the name of God. Remember, the third commandment was first given to a kingdom of priests. These were those that would be placed under the name of God, quite literally.
The high priest having the name of God emblazoned on his forehead. The kingdom of priests tasked to represent the Lord God to all of the nations surrounding them so that the Lord God would be hallowed by all, that all flesh would come to glorify the Creator God.
The name was crucial then, and the third commandment enshrines that the name could never be borne lightly. My people who are called by my name. These are the people who must cause God's name to be magnified and honored among all rather than blasphemed by the nations, which is the very predicament of Israel.
God places his name quite literally upon the people when he instructs Aaron to give the Aaronic blessing from number six, often a close to our service as a benediction. He places his name upon his people and in so doing, he promises to bless them and shine his countenance toward them.
Judgment, of course, falls upon Israel because his name was profaned by the nations rather than held in honor. The people, as it were, led the nations to dishonor the name of God rather than revere it.
We see this in Malachi 1, which Paul takes up all this language in Romans 2. Malachi 1, I mentioned it last week. God is saying to his people, listen, even a son will honor his father. Even a servant will honor his master.
If I'm a father, where's my honor? If I'm a master, where's my reverence? This is what the Lord of Hosts says to the priests who despise my name. Jesus begins the first petition of the prayer. Hallowed be your name.
Hallowed be your name. Thomas Watson, we read his book actually as a little trilogy going from the Ten Commandments. He's also wrote an excellent little book on the Lord's Prayer and one of the things he points out within the Lord's Prayer is he says, well, this is the first petition.
He says, in fact, we pray, hallowed be your name before we pray, give us this day our daily bread. If we're praying, hallowed be your name, God, before I pray, please give me my bread today, that means that God's name is more precious than my own life.
When you say, give me this daily bread, you're essentially saying, Lord, please preserve me and provide for me all that I need to live this day. But that's not the first petition. The first petition is about the glory and renown of God.
Notice when Jesus teaches us to pray, God's glory comes first. That's the first thing we're taught to pray. When you pray, pray like this. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. The first thing that's prayed is a prayer to God about God, that's the first petition of this prayer.
Is that the case when we pray, typically? Isn't it normally that we pray to God about ourselves first and foremost? Aren't our first petitions usually, my Father, please help me with this and please do this for me and I really hope this works out and I really need this.
And then what ought to be the first petition is the very last petition. Oh, and by the way, may you be glorified in everything. This is the first thing that Jesus teaches his disciples to pray. The glory of God's name, in other words, ought to be our chief concern.
It will not be a chief concern, as Watson is pointing out, if it's not your supreme treasure. You hallow what you treasure. This is even true of just carnal things, earthly things. If you treasure something, you will hallow it.
In other words, you will honor it. You will show reverence for it. You will be zealous for it. You will protect it. I was reminded of this some years ago. One of the world-renowned opera singers of the last century, Maria Callas, who some just considered to have a divine, angelic voice for singing arias.
And an incredible singer, and my dad had many vinyls of Maria Callas that I grew up hearing and didn't really like opera much back then, but I love it now. And so I would, every now and then, find a video to listen to, and her performances of Verdi pieces, especially, is incredible.
And if you look at the comments, even though she's long since passed, there's this devoted fan base to her. And devoted's not even the word. Intensely zealous. They hallow the name of Callas. And if anyone takes even a slight or a paw shot in a comment, there's about 300 responses aggressively attacking them.
How dare you put her name in your comment? You're not worthy to speak of Maria Callas. They hallow her so much that they go on the offense to protect her. This is what we do. When we hallow something, we treasure it above all.
And when we treasure something above all, we hallow it. So if my life and my felt needs and my discomforts are far more value and far more weight for my life than the glory of God, no wonder that my first petitions are gonna be about me.
But if Jesus saw as preeminently valuable, of preeminently weighty, the very glory of the Father that He loved and adored, no wonder that His first petition is for the Father to be glorified. We will hallow what we treasure.
In fact, this petition, it's not only about our understanding of the worthiness of God, our experience and delight in the glory of God, it's also in some way expressive of our desire for others to hallow the name of God.
When you say, Father, hallowed be Your name, within the wings of that prayer is a desire that others would come to glorify the Father and experience who He is, to know what He has done. It voices a longing that Christians have that others would know and adore the Father as they do.
As Christians come to recognize God as the source of all things, He's the embodiment of all glory. We just heard it in our brother's praise report and our prayer time. Just a simple observation. Oh, Lord, You are good even to those who hate You.
How I wish I would see this more regularly. How I wish others could just begin to see this. Father, hallowed be Your name. You are good, patient, wise, loving Father. Everything that God does is meant to display His glory.
We saw that many weeks ago from Psalm 19 and Romans 1. All of creation, this panoply of glory that's meant to lead us in a chorus of praise to God. And all of that is preeminently shown forth in the way the Father seeks to glorify the Son who came to glorify the Father.
He shares His glory with us as we're drawn to Christ. And we receive that revelation of His glory. It ought to be the instinct of our prayers then, of our praises to say, Father, hallowed be Your name.
We've tasted, we've seen that the Lord is good. How we long for others to taste, to see that the Lord is good. How we've waited for Your salvation. Lord, Maranatha, how much longer? When will Your name be hallowed throughout the earth as our brother closed our prayer time with?
Like the waters cover the sea. This was the great desire of Jesus. He treasured His Father above all. When He prayed this, He had a longing in His soul that His followers would come to treasure His Father, experience His Father's love, be awash in the glory of His Father's wonders in the same way He was.
And when we come to pray this prayer in a meaningful, heartfelt way, we too desire that other followers and others who are not yet followers would come to know the Father in the same way. It's not a token saying.
It's not a hollow saying. It's something guttural. Lord, glorify Yourself. This characterized Jesus' whole ministry. As we saw just from reading John 5 and John 8, this constrained everything that Jesus did.
You heard the old saying, you know, practice what you preach. Jesus is essentially challenging us, practice what you pray. Practice what you pray. You pray, Father, hallowed be Your name. Practice that prayer.
Jesus practiced that prayer. And everything that He taught and everything that He did, everything He sought after, everything He denied Himself of, His chief desire was that His Father's name would be revealed and glorified.
That characterized His whole ministry. From the very dawning of it, when He was seeing the skies open above to experience in a visible and tangible way the Father's pleasure upon Him, to then be hurled into the wilderness and to be starved for 40 days and 40 nights.
And when the tempter, when that serpent slithered in and said, not in a paradise, but in a wasteland, turn the rocks into bread. Cast yourself down. Glorify Yourself. The son denied himself and said, no, why?
So that my Father would be hallowed. I don't eat bread that I make from rocks. I eat everything that comes from His mouth, Jesus said. Characterizes every aspect of His power. It characterizes His amazement.
His initial reaction is always Father first. When Peter confesses, well, some say that you're Elijah. Some say that you're the prophet we've been waiting for. But Peter, who do you say that I am? You're the Christ.
You're the Son of God.
What's Jesus' first reaction?
Oh, Peter, flesh and blood didn't reveal this to you. My Father in heaven revealed this to you. His instinct, His first thought was about His Father. His Father's word, His Father's will. When He's in Gethsemane and He's sweating blood and the men that He's poured His life into for three years are either asleep or as the torches and clubs come out, they're on the run.
As Zechariah says, strike the shepherd, the sheep will scatter. And as He's there, you can imagine His cloak saturated with the blood from His sweat as He's encountering the terror of the prospect of bearing the wrath of God.
And how does He preface His prayer? He doesn't say, hallowed be Your name. He says it in a more particular way. He says, Father, the hour has come. Glorify Yourself in me. It characterized every aspect of His ministry.
And as the Father was being glorified, though the sky was pitch black and the sun was crying out, why have You forsaken me? What do we find at the very end when He's about to give up the ghost? Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit.
At every aspect of His life, the Son hallowed the Father. Do we magnify the Father in this way? Do we hallow His name? We could never hallow His name. We'll never find this to be the first petition of our prayer lives if we don't treasure the Father as the Son treasures the Father.
If we don't delight in the knowledge of God, the Heavenly Father, in the way that Jesus revealed Him and the Spirit draws us to cry out to Him as our Heavenly Father. We cannot grow in this knowledge of God without a growing conviction of just how holy and majestic He is.
It's not conviction of sin that will really ultimately get you there.
That's a huge part of it.
Because conviction of sin shows you your total lack of regard, your coldness of heart,.
Your distance of thought.
You have to begin with conviction of sin, but it has to become something far more than that if you would relate to God the way that Jesus teaches us to. Conviction of sin is the starting place, but conviction of sin must give way to a certain conviction, a certain zeal for the holiness and beauty and power and mercy of God so that you're not stuck within yourself, oh, look at me and look at this, and why am I like this, and forgive me for that, and I promise I'll do better, and Monday's gonna start out really strong, and our prayer begins in ourself, and our prayer ends in ourself.
No, conviction is just a launch pad. Conviction of sin must become conviction of adoration. Oh, Lord, that I could see you the way the seraphs see you, how I long for that day when faith becomes sight.
I was reading Rosalind Marshall out of a biography of John Knox, the great reformer, and I just finished it toward the very end last month, and in the last chapter, she was just recounting several of the reports of how John Knox died.
He was very, very weak, had taken ill, and throughout the last several days of his life, he sort of had round-the-clock presence of believers and fellow ministers, and his wife was there, and at one point, he had enough strength to sort of muster and stutter out a whisper, and he said to take me to the place where I first cast my anchor, and his wife knew he meant, read Romans to me.
That's where the Lord saved me. So they read through Romans together. Hours went by, he was in and out of sleep. They all would gather and pray around him, and one of the last things that he said before he died, as ministers all took turns to pray, and as it were, bear him up to the presence of God and encourage him, one of the ministers leaned to his ear and he says, Brother John, are you able to hear us?
Have you heard our prayers for you? And John Knox said, oh, that God would allow you to hear them the way that I have heard them. In other words, there was something supernatural.
About the way that these brothers.
Who were earnestly praying for John Knox, and they're saying, oh, these prayers, are you hearing these prayers, and he's saying,.
You are the ones that aren't hearing the prayers. I'm hearing the prayers.
My soul is being conveyed toward my Father in heaven. It was his chief treasure, it was his highest aim. Do we magnify the Father in the way that Jesus magnifies the Father? Even when he bears the cross in his life, again, if he is not our preeminent treasure, if conviction of sin doesn't become conviction of adoration, if conviction of sin doesn't become just the wonder of the mercy of God, then our petitions will always be about ourselves, and our experience of God will be some paltry, weak, fragile, powerless thing in our lives.
In the daily walk, in the daily battle of faith, when you make God's name, the hallowing of his renown to be your chief aim, your starting point, to go from I'm addressing you, Father, and here's my first desire, that in everything,.
Everything I encounter today,.
Everything I do with the energy and time and relative health you have given me, that it would be with an eye to your glory. And if that is your aim, you will find that throughout the day and throughout your days, you will have a deepening reverence for God.
You'll be aware of things that otherwise you'd never be aware of, aware of things within yourself, ways that you easily go astray or become cold, aware of things around you, ways that you see others getting so distracted and preoccupied with things that don't distract you at all, things that others will easily take for granted and never notice in a hundred years that you can't help but notice surrounding you day by day, lilies by your sandals, sparrows being fed by his hand, the very things we see Jesus noticing and relishing.
This will inspire your love for God and therefore your love for your neighbor. You'll find yourself to be a far more patient person if you set out your life of faith to be about the hallowing of God's name.
It will encourage your trust, whatever comes. You know the panic, I know it very well, when everything seems to go well and you're driving down the road and you hear a clunk and then your dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree,.
And you're like, oh no, oh no.
You're thinking, I need this, I need to get around. How much is this gonna cost?
Where are we gonna go?
I don't have time for, I can't deal with this. There's a sense where any little thing that happens to you, however inconvenient, will become something that you trust. Okay, Lord, maybe you have some mechanic that you expect me to be salt and light to today.
Father, forgive me, I've been a little aggravated, I was distracted by that. Help me to trust your providence right now. Let me be prayerful, let me prepare myself for something you're orchestrating. It'll be a comfort to you.
There's a reason that Jesus is gonna go from this prayer to forgiving one another, that comes from a desire to hallow God's name. Again, you'll be very patient, long-suffering if your desire is for God's name to be hallowed.
If you're bearing that name, you won't have time to be pinching and sniping and backbiting. That doesn't hallow God's name. You won't be so bent on protecting your ego. And so there's a sense which it'll inspire your love, it will encourage your trust, but also it will comfort you.
And of course it will embolden your witness. How many opportunities we fail to take up because we haven't prayed this first petition. Hallowed be your name. Hallowed be your name. The problem is that the closer we walk with God, the more conscious we are of our failures.
And our failures, the evil one is very good about paralyzing us with our sense of failure. We feel very distant from God. We cannot sense that smiling countenance upon us. And so we can't begin the prayer, our Father in heaven, my Father.
We're already a step removed from that. My judge, I'm really sorry. I'll try to make it up to you. My landlord, I promise I'm putting things together. Not my Father. There's not the confidence. There's not the boldness to enter in.
But then also we're so consumed with our own sense of failure and struggle that it all becomes about us and our performance. And in some ways it's sort of a cycle of self-defeat. All of our prayer life is consumed with our own sense of permeated failure.
And then our whole direction in our lives, our whole manner of walking is about basically wrestling with that sense of failure and trying to find God's help to overcome it. And then at the very end, if there's time, if there's something else, of course we'll look for those other opportunities the Lord has worked out.
I'm telling you, that is completely upside down. One of the best ways you can overcome struggles, failures, difficulties, seasons of decline, is by getting out of yourself and getting toward the hallowing of God's name.
Approaching Him with appropriate reverence, but with the simple confidence of a child. And from that desire, from that place, as you seek every opportunity He gives you and every good thing He surrounds you with, as you're seeking to hallow His name, you'll find that a lot of these struggles you finally have victory in.
And a lot of the areas of decline and a lot of the ways that you're feeling like a dried up pot shirt, now there's streams in the desert. Now you have a certain strength and vitality. All of a sudden, you're now rightly aligning your walk of faith toward God.
I think this is exactly what Jesus is teaching His disciples. And of course, it all turns upon the Lord Christ. We can't even contemplate the hallowing of God's name without Christ. If we're going to honor the Father and hallow His name, we must honor His Son, the One whom He sent.
We must, in other words, draw near to the Father in this way through Christ. And so, hallowing God's name is not some abstract way of thinking about the Father. It's a concrete way of drawing near to the Son.
And those that cannot conceive of a God smiling upon them, those that cannot conceive of a God who delights in them, it's not the father from Luke 15 who's running to the Son who's spurned every good thing in His life and has come back like a slave.
It's not the father running to Him. It's the father running from Him.
No, get away.
Go back to the far country. Please, Dad, one more chance. That's not the image we're meant to have. It's not the God of Zephaniah 3. He delights in His people. 3 .17, He sings over His people. Is that your understanding of God?
When you came to worship the Father here this morning to exalt His Son by His Spirit, and as we sang hymns to Him, did anyone have a conception that God Himself was singing over us? He delights in His people.
You look at the great promise of the New Covenant. Part of the unfolding of the promise of the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31 is, it's not just I will be their God, they will be my people. He says, I will ever do good to them, for I delight to do good to them.
It's His delight.
You don't come to a father that needs his fingers pried open. He already knows what you need. The way that you come to Him is with the simple confidence of a child and if you understand the Father you're coming to, your instinct will be the instinct of Jesus.
Your first petition, your first desire, what wakes you up in the morning as we sang from the hymn will be, may your name be hallowed. May Jesus Christ be praised. So of course in drawing near to the Father and since we're focusing about the Lord's prayer, all of this attention on prayer and perhaps our zeal now to pursue this kind of prayer, this foundation, this attitude of prayer in our lives means that we can't make the prayer the center.
The prayer's just a means. If you try to make prayer the center of your relationship with God, that's a sure way to lose prayer. No, Christ is the way you relate to God. You come to the Father through Him, by His Spirit.
Prayer is just the outflow of that, the outgrowth of that. You pray because that's true of you. You pray because you're doing that. You pray as you do that. You pray so that you'll continue to do that.
The impulse to pray is not something that we then stir up and muster up from ourselves. It's not that we begin from indifference and we say like we're trying to cold start an engine. All right, come on prayer.
Give me those warm fuzzies of drawing near to God. No, you rather understand who you are in Christ. Recognizing He is a faithful high priest urging your prayers from heaven. He's the one drawing you to pray.
He's the one calling you to commune. He's the lover of song of song saying come to me, beloved. Come commune with me, come dwell with me. Come to the secret place. Jesus ever lives to make intercession in this way.
So your whole totality of approaching God is that Father, I desire that your name would be hallowed because I've tasted, I've seen your goodness. I know of your salvation. It is all my delight. As I consider these things, I grieve, Lord.
There's so much clay and mud and dirt, hay, rubble and straw that weighs down what I'm feeling as I consider who you are and what you've done. Lord, I recognize it's you wooing me. Even now you're drawing me to yourself.
Father, may your name be hallowed. You recognize that's not something that I want to do in and of myself. That is something that you do in your son. The son is the one who hallows the father. He just brings us into that great act.
And the writer of Hebrews says, Jesus ever is this way. In your prayers, you come to one who is a high priest, ever living to intercede for you.
That's how faithful he is.
So that you will be conveyed to the father and know the father and be able to hallow the father in this very way.
Hebrews 8, one, it's so good.
I love when writers say things like this. Now this is Hebrews 8, one. Now this is the main point of what we are saying. Ah, but what's your main point? You've said so much. What's your main point? This is the main point of everything we've said.
What does he say?
We have a high priest.
Don't you love that?
This is the main point of everything we've said. We have this high priest. We have one who's seated at the right hand of God in majesty. Whoever lives to intercede for you. So that his father's name would be hallowed because of what he's undertaken to do for you and in you.
Precious promises that are sure. Anchors that will take you through the grave to glory. And so Christ then is the hopes of all our ground as the old hymn says. There is no prayer. There is no desire. There is no hallowing of God's name outside of Christ.
Which means if you desire to hallow the name of the father, you will be drawing near to Christ, relishing the gospel, preaching it to yourself, living it out. You will be practicing these things. Octavius Winslow, who I mentioned last week.
How endeared our hearts should be to the savior since the father's name is revealed in him and through him. Every sin that you take to him is taken in the blood of Christ. Every corruption you take to him is taken in the grace of Christ.
Every need you demand.
Is taken to him by the love of Christ. Every sorrow you bear is taken to him from his very heart. This is all contained within our father in heaven. Hallowed be your name. Christ interceding. Christ the means to this great end.
And that means that if we are people who hallow the name of the father, who treasure him above all, we are people who relish the gospel. We are people who treasure the cross above all. We are people who if we let our minds dwell on the cross, it breaks down those hardened calluses in our hearts.
It doesn't take but a dusty old 19th century hymn to well our eyes with water when we consider the old rugged cross, the story we've been told a thousand times before and we'll hear it a thousand times again and it will ever have power and sway over our lives.
People who seek to hallow the father's name are people who relish the gospel and people who relish the gospel are people who treasure the cross. I take, O cross, thy shadow for my abiding place. So many of the hymns, we don't leave the cross.
We come to the foot of the cross and we camp there. We stay in the shadow of the cross. It's our abiding place. This is the place where we see the father rightly. This is the father who justly deals with our sin in his wrath.
But in his mercy and love, he deals with our sin upon his son for our sake. Here justice and mercy meet. So the cross becomes our abiding place. Listen to the hymn. I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of his face.
Do you see the countenance?
Where does that countenance come from? When I'm off on my own, when I'm trying really hard to do better, I'm introducing all sorts of disciplines. This week's really gonna be something. Is that where I find the sunshine of his face?
No, listen to the wisdom of the hymn writer. Where does God's face shine supremely upon his people? It's at the foot of the cross. I take, O cross, thy shadow for my abiding place. I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of his face.
I'm content here. I'm content to let the world go by, to know no gain, no loss, my sinful self, my only shame, my glory, all the cross. My glory, all the cross. When Paul relays the Christ hymn in Philippians 2, it's all about the hallowed name of God.
God giving His Son a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, that the nations would one day proclaim the name of the Lord. Peter the Apostle said it. There is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.
Jesus now has that exalted name, the name Lord. And when we understand and desire to hallow that name, we too will say, my sinful self, my only shame, my glory, all the cross. That's what the Christ hymn was all about, wasn't it?
The great valley leading to, He did not cling to the equality, the glory He had with His Father, but rather He deprived Himself of it freely, taking the form of a slave, becoming obedient even to the point of death, even death on the cross.
You come to the lowest part of that valley.
Of the shadow of death,.
And then the crescendo bursting forth.
As it were from the grave.
So now God has given Him a name above every name. As I said, the cross is the means by which God hallows His name. If we would hallow His name, we will relish the gospel, we will treasure the cross. And let me make this a little more personal.
Don't you think God desires to do that in our lives as well? If the cross of Jesus is the means by which His name was hallowed, and Jesus says no servant is greater than his master, don't you think the Father's good desire,.
Trustworthy desire,.
Is that the cross He gives you, He fits you to bear, will result in the hallowing of His name? When bitter trial comes, we often make our first petition, Lord, take this away from me. It's not just a bitter trial,.
Just bitterness.
Bitterness makes us magnify other people. Bitterness makes us minimize the Lord. Jesus teaches His disciples, they must love one another. It's a new commandment He lays out before them. Notice, and there's a reason we extend it.
All the way through.
Notice that the very next thought after Jesus closes the Lord's prayer is, so you must also forgive one another. He recognizes how significant that is. You cannot hallow your Father's name if you're magnifying your grievances and bitterness toward a brother or toward someone else.
You cannot do it.
You have minimized your desire to glorify the Lord's name. What you've maximized is your desire for vindication. Lord, vindicate me. Lord, hallow my ego.
Bitterness is a contradiction.
To everything we see in the posture of the Lord Jesus. The Son of Man who didn't come to serve Himself or to meet His own needs or vindicate His sense of self-worth. The Son of Man who came to deny Himself, take up His cross.
Why?
Because the first thing He ever prayed was, Father, hallowed be Your name. It's simply impossible to take up that cross of being wounded, of being grieved, of being persecuted, of being afflicted, of being isolated.
You cannot bear that cross unless you have the eyes fixed on the hallowing of God's name as Jesus did. Then He could put up with the spit and the insult and the mockery of men. Then He could see through even prideful, arrogant, foolish disciples.
He could love even one who came so full of Himself. Jesus could look on that rich, young ruler with love. He loved Him because He had a preeminent desire that the Father would be hallowed. So it could be a personal struggle, a trial of bitterness.
It could be a physical trial. Again, how often, whatever the trial may be, a bitter trial often causes our first petition to be, Lord, take this away. Jesus says, if you're my disciples, if you're following Me, when you take up your cross and its jagged edges begin to cut your shoulder, your first petition is not, Lord, take this from Me.
Your first petition is, hallowed be Thy name. Your first petition is not, Lord, I can't do this. I don't want this. Tell me what I need to do to get rid of this. Your first petition is, Lord, glorify Your name in my life.
So long as there is any collision of our will with His, so long as we cherish the secret feeling of bitterness, of rebellion, of hostility, we will never be able to hallow the name of God. The highest honoring of God's name, I believe the highest honoring of God's name on the part of His beloved and adopted children is bearing an intensely painful cross and having a life that resounds, if not spoken, then lived.
Glorify Your name in me. This is not something abstract and out of reach. This is not something from the heroes of faith. I could list any number of household names that are great examples and illustrations.
Of this very thing.
Then it feels so out of reach, doesn't it? Oh yes.
Well, if I was like Whitefield.
Oh yes, if I was like Athanasius. And it feels so abstract and out of reach, like these are almost mythical Christians that were able to bear a cross and glorify their Father's name. So let me bear it and make it a little more personal.
There was a brother who visited us a few weeks ago. And most of you probably didn't even notice. He left pretty quickly after the service. A brother I met last fall, Greg and I met him at a preaching conference.
And some of you remember prayer nights where we prayed for him as a result of a really tragic incident where he lost his sweet six-year-old daughter, Grace. And the wound is fresh.
It is raw.
It's months young.
And he came and he sat down and I greeted him. He didn't know that I had known. And so I could tell he was squirming, as I just said, you know, how are you? How is the church there? And he was kind of squirming, like I kind of need to get this out there.
And I just kind of, I know what happened. You know, I just wanted him to know, you don't have to, we don't have to talk about it. And he worshiped with us. And he prayed with us and he sang with us. And then he came up to say goodbye.
And just in a short exchange, I said, brother, I'm so sorry. And I'm praying for you.
We've prayed for you as a church.
I'm so glad that you're still pursuing the Lord. And he just said, I know that he'll be glorified in this. That's just someone that came and went like any one of us. Not some mythical hero of the faith, just an average Christian brother like you or me, who has an intensely painful cross to bear.
And his instinct as a result of being drawn and sustained by the all-preserving spirit of God is to say, your name be hallowed in this. Your name be hallowed in this.
I trust you with this.
This is what it looks like for a believer to bear the very name of God. We bear His name in the hope that one day His name will be hallowed. That there'll no longer be any shadow, any denial.
Every knee will bow.
Every tongue will confess His name. That's our great hope. Rend the heavens, reveal Your majesty. Let Your glory submerge the earth in Your goodness. Let the curse, as far as it is found, be put away forever.
And may the radiance of Your beauty and holiness be magnified and adored by seraphs and cherubs and the saints on high everlasting. That day is fixed, that day is coming when His name will be hallowed on earth as it is in heaven.
A day when we'll gather with all those that are departed that have trusted in Him and we'll sing with them, my sinful self, my only shame, but my glory, all the cross. That day is coming when the name of the Lord will never again be taken in vain.
Can you imagine that? Never in our thought, never with a single stray emotion, never with any act or attitude or posture or grievance. Never ever will I take my Lord's name in vain again. And that day is coming, hallelujah.
A day when God's name will be hallowed. For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things to whom be glory forever. The day when our great end comes about, which is the hallowing of His name. You may not realize it, but that is the great end of all of life.
It's the chief end of man.
That the name of the Father be glorified and that we enjoy Him in His glory forever. That's what life is about. That's what creation is for. I don't know where you are if you're sitting here this morning, but I assure you, I don't need to know you to know this.
Every fiber and molecule of your existence was made to glorify and enjoy the God who made you, who's been good to you even when you've been evil, who's given you good things, though you spite Him, who loves you and desires you not to perish but to have everlasting life in Him by believing on the Son whom He sent.
Why did God give us life? But so that we could hallow His name. Hallowing His name is enjoying Him for who He is. Hallowing His name is seeing Him and therefore ourselves rightly. And unto that great day we pray, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, amen.
I'm gonna close us in prayer just using, I'm gonna paraphrase Augustine who wrote a commentary on the Lord's Prayer. And I'm just paraphrasing this into a prayer. Just so you know, let's pray. Father, this we ask, that your name may be hallowed in us for your name is holy.
And how can your name be hallowed in us, Lord, unless it is holy? We were once not holy, but now we have been made holy by your name. But Lord, your name is always holy because you are always holy.
And so it's not for your name,.
But for ourselves that we pray because we desire what is good in ourselves, which is that your name would be hallowed so that which is always holy may become hallowed in and through us. This we pray in your Son's name.