Model for Praying - Part 2 — J. Glyn Owen

The First Petition: Hallowed Be Your Name

Superb illustration of our Lord's teaching on the subject of prayer as we have it in what we've commonly come to speak of as the Lord's prayer but which I prefer to speak of as his model for praying. We're going to look tonight at those words, the end of verse 9, hallowed be thy name, hallowed be your name.

Jesus tells us that when we approach God as our Father and when we are quite sure that we know God as our Father in order thus to pray then one of the first things we ought to be able to add is this, out of an awareness of our filial consciousness, out of an awareness of our belonging to him as his children, we should have a deeply yearning concern that his name should be sanctified or hallowed, however you you'd like to translate the word that we have here.

You will have noticed I'm sure that the first three words of our Lord concerning prayer, the first three statements or the first three petitions in the prayer have to do with God. Now I'm not going to deal with that, I'm not going to try and enter into any detail concerning the principle involved there at the moment, but it's very difficult to come to the first without making mention of this principle because it is unquestionably a very important one, particularly as, to use Greg Scharf's words, we so often come to the Lord with our shopping list and we have our little needs and we take them off and we come simply to receive.

Our Lord Jesus Christ in giving us this model for praying suggests that we should start prayer not with our own needs but that we should start with God and there are three things that I mentioned here.

The first we have before us tonight, hallowed be your name. We should be concerned with God's name and it's hallowing. Thy kingdom come. We should be concerned with God's kingdom and it's coming. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

We should be concerned with God's will and it's doing, it's accomplishment. And if this pattern means anything, it then goes to tell us that now when we've got there and when we have become concerned, really concerned with the things that belong to God, we are in the right attitude to think of our own affairs and now we can bring them right down to the matters of our daily bread and the daily need for pardon, need for the battle with sin and temptation.

We can bring them all now and our Lord covers the whole variety, the whole complex human need in just two or three sentences. But first of all in prayer it is the awareness that we belong. I hope there is no one here tonight who is without that.

There is a world of difference between being a mere creature of God's making and being a child of God. Now we're all his creatures whether we like it or not and his image is embossed upon us in some measure, albeit warped and marred tragically by sin.

That's not what we have here. The Lord's prayer begins with the words our Father and the ability to call God our own Father is something infinitely greater than having to acknowledge him as our Creator.

But now here we proceed to this that is before us tonight. Having acknowledged him as our Father, now we must accompany that acknowledgement with what we have here. There must be a desire, no we must go further, a determination that God's name be hallowed.

Now my friends if you and I were honest tonight right at the beginning of this part of our worship and we were to look really at ourselves how many of us how many of us find that day after day we are really concerned about God's name in the world, the hallowing of God's name.

Put it the other way around, are we troubled by the fact that God's name is being desecrated and trampled under? But put it positively, are we showing any real concern that God's name should be honored, God's name should be set apart from every other in this respect that honor is given to him that there is given to no one else in human history, past, present, or future.

Now Jesus seems to say you see that until we have that concern for the glory of God we really can't pray for it even our daily bread. And I believe that he was right and I'm going to ask you to believe the same.

Lips that have been unable to cry from the heart, our Father who art in heaven, must also proceed to express an equal heartfelt concern for God's name, which is of course a synonym for his person. It's wholly unique and unrivaled place at all times and in all places, beginning in the petitioner's mind and emotion and thought and then action.

That God should be alone and apart. God above all else should be my main concern for living. God and his glory. If our opening words in approaching his throne confess the bond that unites us to him, our Father which art in heaven, you're our Father.

That's a bond that unites. Then this, hallowed be thy name, brings out the immensity of the chasm that separates us. We're not praying for our own good name and our own importance. We're not praying for our own little kingdom.

We're not praying for our own glory. We're not coming to seek the things for ourselves that would give us a bloated concept of our own importance. On the contrary, your name, your name, hallowed be your name.

Prayer then is not a matter of looking in, but of looking out and looking up. You may say, why should I, why should I make mention of that? I make mention of it in passing. I don't mean to stay with it, but I make mention of it in passing because there are those who tell us that God is within us and not anywhere else.

Now it's a half-truth, a very important half-truth, but it's only a half-truth. If we are believers, then God, by the Holy Spirit, has made his tabernacle within us. You are the temple of God. But there are those who say that God is nothing other than the ground of being, and if we dig deeply enough, we find God somewhere inside.

Well, that's not what the Bible says. That's not what Jesus says. He urges us to look outside and away from ourselves. Oh, there may be marks of his, there may be some of his finger marks left upon our very natures.

It may be, but he himself is a God who is infinitely above us and above the whole creation. Now, there are two things I want us to look at here tonight. The first of which is the scale of values that we have here.

Prayer Begins by Giving God First Place

Because that's really what we have behind this request that Jesus puts on the lips of his every disciple. Hallowed be thy name. He introduces a scale of spiritual values. He's here giving us this scale of values, and he is saying that at the very outset of prayer, we must be able to learn to give God a place of priority, which sets him alone, sets him apart from everybody else and everything else.

I would I had the ability of an archangel to preach on this theme. We haven't got it, and that means that you and I have to pray the more that the Spirit of God will teach us this lesson. Now first, just a word about God's name.

This text is dressed up in Old Testament language as so many other things are dressed up in Old Testament language. When the Bible from the Old Testament onwards speaks of a person, it sometimes speaks of a person under this synonym, speaks of his name.

The name really means the person. The name is not just a tag. The name is not just an index mark or something of that kind. A person's name represents that person himself in his totality. Now this is different in Oriental countries, and especially going back over the years, quite different from anything known to us in our Western world.

A name was rarely a mere label or index mark for the ancient Oriental. To him, a name was his whole nature, his whole being. And sometimes, of course, a person's character and destiny was kind of prophesied in a name.

Many people grew up, and you can see their pilgrimage in terms of becoming what their names implied. And that's too long a story to go after. But Jews were particularly careful as to how they named their children.

Generally speaking, though not exclusively, but generally speaking, they named their children and they gave them a name which was a prophecy of what they hoped they would become. And if there was a major change that took place in the experience of the child that has been named, if he was changed in behavior or in character or something, they would give him a change of name that corresponded to this change of character.

Now you have that, of course, in such people as Abram. Abram was changed from Abram, pure and simple, to become Abraham. And that's a different word altogether. Jacob was changed to become Israel. Simon was changed to Peter.

Saul was changed to Paul. Now why these changes? Well, something happened in the experience of each one of these people and of many others in virtue of which the Jew would have to give them a different name.

And the Christians, in some cases, gave them different names. Because a name means something, you see. We wouldn't do that, but they did that. And we need to understand that when we're speaking about, Hallowed be thy name, we need to see behind the name everything that makes God the being he is.

The whole person, the whole nature, all the attributes of God are there behind this word name. Hallowed be thy name. It's only another way of saying, Hallowed be God in all that he is and ever will be.

In line with the usage to which we've referred then, God's name was deemed to mirror his nature and his character. In process of the progressive self-revelation, therefore, we have in the self-revelation of God, we have in the Old Testament many, many names given to God.

Now, if you can understand Hebrew, as some of you do, and you read it, well, this is very clear to you, but it's not always as clear in the English language as it is in, well, it's never as clear in the English language as it is in the Hebrew.

You see, there are a myriad names used in the Hebrew language concerning God, and we miss them. If you don't study your Bible very carefully and get the key to the use of capitals and things like that, then you miss it.

There is the name El, Elion, Elohim, Adonai, Shaddai, Yahweh, and a few others, which are the main names of God. And so many of them are translated in our Bible as God or the Lord or whatever. But we miss the fact that something has happened to cause God to be called by this name.

He has revealed himself in a new character. Something of his nature has been disclosed. And because something new of his nature has been disclosed, then he's got to have a new name that corresponds to that revelation.

God is bigger than he was known by the name previous to that, you see. Until at last, there comes the complete and the final capstone to the divine revelation. He who had spoken in times past unto the fathers by the prophets hath in these last of his speaking days spoken to us in his Son.

And in the name Jesus, the whole of the divine revelation is summed up, and in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form. God's name stands for God's person as revealed. Now let's keep that in our minds.

Sanctifying God's Name Means Setting Him Apart

Now come to the next word. Hallowed be thy name. What does it mean to hallow? Well now, at first reading, the thing is a little more confused when you discover that the word to hallow is really the word to sanctify.

And the word to sanctify is the same verbal form of the noun which means holiness or holy or sanctification. Now this is the question, and this is where some people are challenged and they don't quite know what to make of it.

How can you make God holy? He is eternally holy. There never was a time when God was other than holy. How therefore is Jesus telling us here to hallow God's name, and the verb he uses is the verb make God holy, sanctify God.

How can you sanctify God? Well now, it is more than probable that the answer to that is very simple. That Jesus is using the verb in its simplest form which means to separate, set God apart. That's what the word sanctification basically means.

It means to set apart. If you are sanctified, you have been set apart from certain things and certain people, and you have been set apart to God, for God. So there is a dual movement in sanctification or in holiness, set apart from and set apart for.

But how can you talk about God that you can set God apart? Well in this sense my dear friends, oh may the Spirit of God help us to see it. We cannot make God any more intrinsically holy than he is. You may cry and you may work and you may preach and you may pray until eternity has come and gone, if that were a practical possibility.

You cannot make God any more holy than he was from the ages past. But one thing you and I can do, we can set his name and his glory apart in our lives that we give him a place that we give to no other.

That we seek him an honor that we seek for no one else. That we serve him as we serve no one else. And it is known that there is only one Lord God in our lives and he's the one and only. No one comes near to him.

That's what it means to hallow God's name. Now until we are prepared to forego every desire that does not give to God the primacy and the preeminence and the glory which this involves, I believe that Jesus is telling us here we simply are not candidates in the school of prayer.

We're just playing. And you see quite honestly now if we really face ourselves this is why many of us are our failures in prayer. Unless I can honestly say that God's name is the most important thing in my life and in my death by the grace of God.

And I'm more concerned for his glory and his name then I simply cannot pray as Jesus taught his disciples to pray. This is the way into the sanctum sanctorum of prayer and intercession and of communion with God wherein men can bind Satan and rescue the perishing and bring the blessing of heaven and all that we find in the promises bring them down on earth and see them released only here.

Now this means more than is involved in simply giving verbal expression to God's name. You know we can talk about God's name with an air of sanctimoniousness. Now I hesitate I don't want you to think of that as a criticism because circumstances around us are such that I think a little bit of even sanctimoniousness would be better than the kind of thing we have in the world today when God's name is at a discount and he's known to no one as safe as one to blaspheme.

I don't know how you feel but I shudder sometimes when I hear on television or on some of the radios here some of the most uncouth men I've ever heard and they shudder not to blaspheme the name of the Holy One.

God have mercy upon them pray for them. But you and I can mouth the name God or Jehovah with a sense of reverence and a sense of awe. This text asks for something infinitely more than that. You know the Jews that carried that to an extreme degree they wouldn't use the covenant name for Jehovah because they thought it was too holy to be used and bless them.

You know what they did they got two names together and they made a hybrid name out of the two. They took the vowels of one and the consonants well they're not consonants their characters and they wedded the vowels of the one and the characters of the other to make a new name.

They didn't want to mention the name of Jehovah and these were the very people who crucified the Lord incarnate. Pretending an honor you see and yet at the same time they were out for his blood as we saw this morning.

Oh we can be hypocritical my friends we don't need to look to the Jews but this is written of them for our learning. But Jesus is demanding something infinitely beyond that though we could do with a little bit of respect in the very mention of the name of our God before a blaspheming world.

I think there ought to be something about us Christians when we make mention of the name of our Lord there should be something about it that proves that we love him and respect him and honor him as we honor no one else.

We must learn to treat God as altogether different from everybody. Now I am asked according to the scriptures to respect all kinds of people kings and those that are in authority. Let's withhold that honor that the Bible commands of us.

But there is a place due to the very mention of God that should be given to no man, no woman, no group of men, no authority in this world or the world which is to come. Now that is the scale of values that must be employed by everyone who would learn to pray.

God's Glory as the Governing Passion of Prayer

It's the passion for God's glory. Not to talk about it so much though we'll have to talk about it but it's the thing that dynamites my action that creates my thinking that is at the bottom of my feelings and that arouses my conscience and determines my whole life.

Am I really concerned about the glory of God the way I get out of bed in the morning and get ready for the day? A scale of values. We cannot sincerely take these words of the very first petition upon our lips until we have settled this matter in our hearts and we've got to do it for ourselves.

Now let us take seriously the words of the supreme practitioner of prayer then, namely Jesus Christ our Lord. He insists that real prayer must begin with God, with a knowledge of God as our Father in heaven and the kind of devotion to him that puts his name and thus his glory before anything and everything else.

I'm repeating but I'm repeating because I think it has to be repeated. This is to follow in Jesus' own footmarks as he prayed. Now this is what I would have liked to do but it's a study in its own, on its own.

I'm in the habit of asking you to do things these days when you have time and some people are telling me they haven't got any time at all. Well I was going to ask you to do another thing when you have time but you read the Gospels through especially the Gospel of John and see how the glory of God, how the glory of God filled our Lord Jesus Christ's horizons, the horizons of his thinking and of desiring even as the cross was becoming more and more imminent.

In other words he asked for nothing that would not glorify his Father. There is a kind of absolute necessity that this should be so says Jesus. This is not, this is not an optional extra for a Christian, it is, it is an absolute necessity and he shows it in his own life.

But not only does he show it in his own life, have you noticed that this Lord's Prayer is patterned actually after the Ten Commandments. I mean only in general principle now in general outline but it's very important.

You remember how the Ten Commandments begin? We were told in Sunday school and in the church school where I was brought up that there were two main divisions. The first four commandments have to do with our relationship to God and the last six with our relationship to men and of course that's true.

Do you remember how the Ten Commandments begin? May I read them to you? Then you will see how our Lord Jesus Christ sees there a principle that must apply to prayer as well as to practice in the outside world.

The First Commandments: Exclusive Worship of God

You shall have no other gods beside me. That's exactly what it means to hallow the name of God. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.

Nowhere, no idol, nothing. You shall not bow down to them nor worship them for I the Lord your God am a jealous God punishing the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me but showing love to thousands who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that takes his name in vain. You see the principle God is one Lord. He's one God. He will not have other gods to hold sway in the lives of his people.

He's a jealous God. There is a sense in which in which every man ought to be jealous and every woman ought to be jealous of his or her partner. There is a sense in which jealousy is completely wrong. When I am jealous for something or on account of something that I have no right to.

There is a sense in which jealousy is an integral part of holiness. If I am not jealous of somebody trying to steal my wife's love then there's something wrong with me. God says I'm a jealous God. I betroth you to myself and I will not have it.

I'll follow you into the wilderness. I'll thrash you to within an inch of death. I'll punish you. I'll chastise you because I will not let it happen. That's our God. He will not have us have other gods beside him.

He wants the only place because he's the only true God. You may talk about your Molochs and your Baals and they're still with us and your Mamons and they're still with us. The world has not changed a bit.

Moloch the God of thunder sending the children through the fire. The God of the thugs. Those characters that attack you in the subway. They're still with us you know. And the Baals the sensual gods. And Mamon the material God.

They're all here. I shouldn't be surprised that two at least of them are represented here tonight in some of our hearts. Thou shalt have no other gods beside me says Jesus. Hallowed be thy name. We give him a place we will not give to Mamon.

We will not give to Baal the God of sensuality. We will not give to Moloch the cruel God. The tyrant God. None at all. He alone. He demands to be set apart. That brings me to the last thing and it's shorter.

Christ as the Enabling High Priest

The animating vision that lay behind this. And that I believe the Lord wants us to have from this passage when he taught his disciples to pray. Hallowed be thy name. You see to be presented with the meaning and significance of these words would generally result in considerable depression.

Not to say despair. If we were left at that point. They touch our lives at the very nerve center and we instinctively know that they have to do with an area in which we constantly fall short of the mark.

However much we try. If therefore these words represent something that is required of us in varied truths. If they rightly represent the attitude of adoring worship that must proceed from our hearts toward God.

Then we appear to be doomed to failure since we crash at the very first hurdle. How can we pray if we break down at the first hurdle? Let me let me try and show you the animating vision which I think gives meaning and hope and courage to anyone who wants to follow our Lord here.

At least I want to share it with you as it came to me. And were it not for this. I think there is much here to break one's heart. But with this there is much. Not to break one's heart but to make one's prayer life.

And to cultivate one's communion with God. The first thing I want you to see is that our Lord Jesus Christ is more than a teacher. Now without an infallible teacher we must be forever floundering in the darkness of our own ignorance.

So we need an infallible teacher. And thanks be to God that his son is that. He is the truth. We need the teacher. We need the teacher. If ever there was a time in world history when we need to stress that our Lord Jesus Christ is the prophet sent from God.

It was today. It is today. We need an authoritative instructor right enough. And we have such a person in our Lord Jesus Christ. Even so he is more than a merely infallible oracle telling us the right answers.

Now the point I want to stress is this. Let the epistle to the Hebrews give it to us in all its beauty that we have not an high priest who cannot be touched with a feeling of our infirmities. Or if you want it positively we have a sympathetic high priest.

Now what does that mean? Well in the context in the epistle to the Hebrews it is this. He knows us. More than that he knows us from the inside of his incarnate experience. You see Jesus knew us as a creator.

And he has the creator's knowledge of us. He had the blueprint. And he made us after his father's blueprint. For without him was not anything made that was made. We were made by him. But he has another knowledge altogether.

He became man and he entered into human situations such as yours and mine. So that the epistle to the Hebrews says that he was he was tempted. He was tempted in all points like as we are sin apart. You know there are temptations that come to us simply because we have sinned.

It wouldn't have them had we not already tasted the wrong thing. Jesus doesn't have that kind of temptation because he hasn't sinned in the first place. But he is tempted in all points like as we are apart from those temptations that we have brought upon ourselves by giving in and yielding to temptation.

He knows our frames says the psalmist. But the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews puts that very beautifully. In this context he knows the power of temptation through which we have to go. And therefore he is able to sympathize with us in our situation.

And the word sympathy of course means to suffer alongside as one who understands. Not like a mute or a dumb person. Not like somebody who can't hear our cry or has no idea what we're going through. But he's gone this way.

Are you tempted? He's gone that way. He knows what temptation can be. Now we've got to go further. Jesus is more than a sympathizer. It's all here in the background. We need someone who can sympathize with us.

He's not just an oracle. He's not just a teacher. He's a sympathizing teacher. But he's more than a sympathizing teacher. The knowledge of an understanding mediator is precious in the extreme. But it is inadequate.

In and of itself it is incomplete. That's what we need to see. We need to see the teacher as well as hear his lesson in the matter before us. For he is the enabler as well as the sympathizer. He empowers the obedient.

Now this is where the good news comes in you see. There's no good news yet. Until you come to this point there is no gospel in anything I've been saying. Save in the sense of instruction and information.

But this is the good news. Our Lord who taught this is more than teacher, more than sympathetic teacher. He is one who is able to enable us to do what he calls upon us to do. And now the whole Christian affair sinks or swims with that.

He empowers his obedient disciples so that his every lesson is actually capable of being practiced. You see this puts me in a corner. I would like to turn to my Lord sometimes. I don't put it like this and probably you don't.

But if we were to speak the language of our heart we would want to say yes yes but what you're asking me to do is not really practicable. You know me. You know how I failed. You know my weaknesses and you know all the circumstances.

Salvation and the Glory of the Father

Many readers of Scripture it seems to me, poor readers, miss the point. And about the only thing they see when they read the New Testament is that Jesus came to save sinners. Now you say that's very important.

I agree with you. I agree with you most wholeheartedly. Where would we be if he had not come to seek and to save that which was lost? Oh my good people I don't want to minimize the significance of what I'm saying now.

Jesus came. Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost. But that's about the only thing that some people see. What he did for men. Men in their poverty, men in loneliness, men in sickness, alienated from the Father, men in their lostness.

They were all his concerns and he did something for them in all those circumstances and many more. He spent the bulk of his time in meeting such needs and in alleviating human suffering of one kind or another.

And yet, I'm going to be bold enough to tell you tonight, that was not the strongest emotion or concern of his life. There was one superlative quest which had precedence even over these things, namely his concern for the Father's glory.

You notice it everywhere when you've seen it at all. It assumed prime place in his teaching. Of course, whether he was condemning Pharisee hypocrisy or announcing the principle governing prayers in our text, it was the evident motive behind many of his miracles and inspired many of his actions such as cleansing of the temple.

You've made my Father's house into a den of thieves. It was his Father's glory, the zeal of thine house that devoured me, he says. In his personal life, he seemed to evaluate everything by its capacity to glorify the Father and it culminates in this.

Even as the cross was right there, he turns to the Father and he says, Father, he says, glorify your son. In order that your son may also glorify you. This is remarkable when we ponder it. Knowing that he was to die by crucifixion, knowing the awful humiliation that was coming his way, yet he did not ask to be released.

Why? Because there was something that was more important than life. It was to die the death that was atoning and saving. But I want to go further. It was not simply to save men, but the salvation that is heralded in the Bible is a salvation that is wrought with due respect to the glory of God.

Now, what I would like to do would be this, would be to turn now to the epistle to the Romans in chapter 3 and notice that passage where the Apostle Paul speaks of God as being justifier of the sinner and also at the same time remaining just.

These are the words in the King James, that he might be just and the justifier of them that we leave in Jesus. Now, can you see what Paul is getting at? Why did God the Father, as we're told there in Romans 23, hand Jesus over on the cross?

Why did God set him forth, place him there for God did it? Paul is quite clear about that and the Old Testament is true. Why did God do that? Deliver up his only Son. Why did Jesus agree to that? Now, the basic answer to that is this, that Jesus would only save lost sinners in a manner that at the same time brought honor and glory to his Father.

Oh, my friends, this is tremendous if we can get the significance. He's not simply out to snatch men as brands from the burning period. Oh, he's out to snatch men as brands from the burning, every kind of burning, but they must bring honor to his Father.

His Father must be glorified in the salvation of rebels, otherwise there is no salvation. Neither does it end there. If I was expounding this theme as such, I would have to go on to say what happens when he comes into the life of a man or a woman.

For if any man be in Christ Jesus, there is a new creation. All things are passed away. Behold, everything has become new and all things are of God who has reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ. He makes men new and what's the characteristic of the new men or the new women he makes?

This, that they learn increasingly to do the will of God and to honor the Father's name. John the Baptist's cryptic statement had much more in it than might seem on the surface. When he saw the Lord Jesus, he told his disciples, he must increase and I must decrease.

Inscribing God's Glory Into the Christian Life

The two things can't take place together. I've got to go off for him to come on. I've got to go under for him to come through in his glory. I'm concluding. Hallowed be thy name. It is said that when Ptolemy Philadelphus was building the famous lighthouse on the pharaohs of Alexandria in North Africa in the third century BC, he requested the architect to curve his name, that is Ptolemy's name, into the structure of the lighthouse.

He wanted future generations to know that the generosity that provided the lighthouse on the pharaohs, and it was very necessary in the light of the number of deaths that had been experienced at sea at that point, it was very necessary.