7. Let Your Name Be Hallowed
The first thing that Jesus tells us to ask for when we pray is that our Father’s Name be hallowed. Do you think that is important? But what exactly does that mean?
It could be a prayer that all people everywhere will recognize who God is and give Him the worship and service that is due Him. It could also mean that we who pray this prayer should recognize and remember that everything we do (and ask for) should be for the glory of God. And just what exactly does that mean?
Years ago I worked at a store in Chicago
I called a Christian organization that would be able to offer some of the things that I couldn’t, and this man was to follow through with them in some way. The man came into the store the next day or so looking for money. It became clear shortly into our conversation that he had lied to me about something.
When I called him on it, he acted like it shouldn’t really matter in some way. I told him that, when he lied, he broke his trust. How would I ever know if he was telling the truth? How would I know that he was telling the truth if he told me that he would start telling me the truth? I told him there was nothing more that I could do with him at that point. He left, and I never saw him again.
Did you ever notice how people often say things they don’t really mean, and everyone seems to know that they didn’t mean it? “I’ll call you.” “Let’s get together after the first of the year.” “Can I borrow a few dollars?”
Do you think God cares what people think about Him? Do you see Him explaining Himself after every earthquake or hurricane that ruins countless lives and destroys millions of dollars worth of property? Do you see Him at funerals or hospitals trying to answer all those people who ask “Why?”
People wonder a lot of things about God, and many people refuse to believe there even is a God because of all the things they see in the world. Do you think it matters to Him what they think?
It may not look like it, but I believe the answer is Yes. And not only is it important to God, but it should be important to us as well. And it is also an important part of prayer, particularly when it comes to prayers being answered. And I don’t mean the yes-no-or-later kind. I mean the kind where we need to hear from God, and only one answer will do.
I hear a lot in churches today about people trying to manipulate God, if that is possible, of people who are said to make demands of God, where the roles are reversed, and we expect God to serve us and not the other way around.
I think their very choice of words shows the strong feelings that are aroused, but there is a concept here that we don’t want to miss in our prayers. And the Bible gives us plenty of examples to show us just what is meant.
There was a time when God appeared to Abraham and told him of His plans to destroy the cities of Sodom
But it wasn’t simply a prayer where he asked God for this and asked that, if it be His will, He would grant it to him. No. He talked to God like a lawyer would talk to a jury, like a salesman would talk to a client, like a legislator would talk to the assembly. He was making a case. He knew what God wanted to do. He knew what God was going to do. But he made his case anyway. He tried to convince God to do otherwise. And how?
He appealed to God’s reputation, His holiness, His righteousness, His Name. He asked God to spare the city if there were 50 righteous people living in it. But His prayer was not merely asking. He expected that God would do this, because He expected that God would do the right thing. And to destroy the righteous with the wicked is not the right thing to do. And God agreed with him.
But Abraham wasn’t finished. He continued his prayer by trying to see how far he could go. Would God spare the city if five were missing? He finally got down to ten, where God said He would spare the city if even only ten righteous people were found.
Was Abraham coercing or manipulating God in any way? How can anyone even do that in the first place? Abraham went to God with reasons why simply destroying these cities would not be the thing to do. Basically it was one reason. Destroying the righteous with the wicked is treating them both alike. And the Judge of all the earth will do what is right.
When Jesus said that we are to pray that God’s Name be hallowed, I believe He was speaking out of a tradition from the entire Old Testament of how God does what is right, because He is God, the Creator and Judge of all the earth, and that is what a God should do.
And when Jesus describes a man who goes to his friend at midnight, and when he says that we should keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking, I believe this is how we are to do that. It’s not that we just keep saying the same things over and over again, like little children throwing a tantrum in a grocery store. But like good lawyers, we are to gather our evidence, whether from reason, Scripture, nature, anywhere we can produce reasons to bolster our case, and the clinching point is the glory and Name of God. And then with the boldness of a man who comes to your house at midnight, expecting you to help him, like the lawyer who makes his summation before the jury, we stand before God fully expecting that God will do what is right. And we believe that what we have asked is right.
Consider the case of Hezekiah.[2] He was the king over Judah when the Assyrian army came to take over Jerusalem
So Hezekiah took that letter to the house of God and spread it out before the Lord, as if to make sure that God could see what the king of Assyria had written. Hezekiah told God he wasn’t surprised that the gods of the other nations couldn’t deliver their people, because they were no gods. But he asked that God would deliver His people, so that everyone would know who really was the true God. And He did.
Today we would ask God to deliver us, if it was His will. And if it wasn’t, we would pray that we would be good slaves or peaceful martyrs for His sake, as a testimony to the enemy. Hezekiah didn’t see that as an option. The false gods couldn’t deliver their people, so the true God would. Let the world see who is the true God. Or, let God’s Name be hallowed.
We are the people of God, the children of God, to whom God has covenanted Himself to us in innumerable ways throughout history, and His Name is hallowed as His people call on Him for those things which He has promised to us.
Moses knew about all this as well. At least twice God expressed His desire to destroy the nation of Israel
And just what did Moses say when he asked God to spare them? He appealed to God’s reputation, or His Name. He told God essentially: “Look. You said You were going to bring this people into this great land of Yours. If You don’t, what are the nations going to think? You make these promises, and then You can’t keep them. God, the whole world is watching to see what You are going to do.”
In the first case, He also reminded God of His covenant and promises to the nation’s forefathers. “God, you gave Your word that You would bless this people and bring them to this land.” And we need to do the same when we pray. We need to remind Him of His promises, His covenants, what He has done for other people in the past. Not that He forgot. It’s just that it is important to pray with faith; and when we know what we believe we can expect from God, our faith will grow as we become convinced that, surely, God must do what we believe He will.
I know that many people reading this will still object. They just can’t believe that God can be this accommodating. They believe that people who pray like this are just up to no good. They can only be asking for selfish things like bigger houses and newer cars.
Yet this same Jesus in the same context talked about the grass of the field and how Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like these, and “will He not also do the same for you, O ye of little faith?”[4]
The problem here is that God has indeed promised many great things for us, if we could but believe Him for them. We read the promises at face value and think, surely, He can’t mean this literally. It must be a figure of speech, a hyperbole, an exaggeration for effect. He must be talking about heaven or spiritual blessings, but certainly nothing that you can pin God down on and say that He has to do this particular thing. That would be making God serve us rather than we serving Him. Or would it?
We have gotten the notion somehow that prayer is simply making our requests known, and then God just does whatever He wants to do. The role of faith then just seems to be the ability to believe that whatever happens is God’s will, the best thing that God has for us, and to be able to smile in the midst of any of life’s circumstances after we have made that prayer.
No, that is not what faith is and that is not what prayer is. We have already seen that prayer can and may even more often than not involve what we saw earlier where the man came to his friend’s house in the middle of the night and had the audacity and the persistence to get what he came there for. I think God is quite pleased with these sort of prayers. It shows we take His Word seriously. If God makes some grandiose promise like He is going to bring this nation of Jewish slaves to some promised land, we should expect that that is exactly what He should do.
And if God says that He will clothe us greater than Solomon in all his glory, because He clothes the grass of the field like that, faith in God fully expects that God has to keep His Word.
The fact is that life often looks very different from what we think it should, if God kept all these promises. We then have to decide what that means. Some will insist that we have misunderstood the promises. They either were given to another people for another time, or they are metaphors, hyperbole, or tangible representations of some spiritual reality.
I propose another option. We may need to take our Bibles and lay them out before the Lord, like what Hezekiah did. We may feel the need to point out the particular passages to the Lord. Oh, He knows what they say, but it can really clarify in our minds what the issues are. Like Moses, we may need to point out that people are watching to see if God can do what He says He will.
His Name is at stake. We want and are praying that every creature, every created thing will honor and acknowledge the Lord and give Him the worship due His Name. We want His Name to be hallowed. And He does too. And the fact is that our prayers can hallow His Name as we pray for and receive the things that show His glory.
Our problem is that we have lost a sense of what those things are.. I wrote a much longer book on healing for that very reason. We can’t figure out today whether God healing a person or leaving the person to die in their sickness brings glory to God. I will leave the discussion of that question to the other book, because there is no short answer.
But this prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, was given us partly to show us those things that God wants to give us. These things are not always immediately forthcoming, so we may often need, like the man at midnight, to pursue and persist until these things come to pass. One of the ways that we persist in our prayers is to make the case how this prayer “hallows” God’s Name. Abraham did it, Moses did it, and Hezekiah did it.
We may wonder why this is necessary. I think it is probably more for our benefit, to clarify in our minds why this prayer should be answered as well as bolstering our faith. But I don’t believe that this is just some spiritual exercise that God has chosen to put us through. I believe that in some way it corresponds to the necessary relationship between a Creator and His creatures. For our purposes it is enough to know that this is important. It makes a difference, both in how we are to pray and how we may see our prayers answered.
Too often we are like that friend who went to his friend at midnight. Only instead of being persistent, we think to ourselves: “Yes, you are right. You are in bed. What was I thinking? Never mind. I am sorry that I thought you should do this for me.” When we had to persist, or insist, or desist, we desisted. Somewhere we have been disappointed, and we think the Bible can’t mean what we thought it did mean. But this is why we have to be taught how to pray. Like everything else in life, it comes with directions. All we have to do now is read them and follow them.
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