The Lord’s Prayer: A Reverent Prayer
Matthew 6:9
My mother’s youngest sister, Aunt
Christine was one of those relatives most families have, the one who constantly
causes raised eyebrows.
She’ was married four times. In fairness, I should tell you she was
married to the same man twice.
Unfortunately, she also divorced him twice. Of her three husbands, the one I knew the
best was my Uncle Timothy. She married
him when I was in junior high school.
You may have heard me mention my
Uncle Timothy as “my Chinese uncle.” You
see, he was born in Hawaii to parents of Chinese descent and raised. Uncle Timothy remembered his mother holding
his hand as they ran for shelter when the Japanese bombers flew over their home
on the way to attack Pearl Harbor.
Uncle Timothy introduced me to soy
sauce on scrambled eggs instead of catsup.
He taught me a few words in Hawaiian, which I’ve forgotten, except for
“humuhumunukunukuâpua`a.” It’s a fish.
He had a lot of jobs in his life.
He was in the Air Force when my Aunt Christine met him. Then he became an engineer, the kind who runs
a train. He then managed a Chinese
restaurant in Houston. For a long time
now, Uncle Timothy and Aunt Christine have lived and worked in Las Vegas. A few years ago, when the Southern Baptist
Convention was meeting in Vegas, I mentioned to a fellow pastor that I had an
uncle living there. “Is he a pastor,” my friend asked. (I think he was hoping I’d put him in touch
so he’d get a free tour of the city or maybe an invitation to preach.) “No,” I said, “Uncle Timothy is a blackjack
dealer.”
But, I digress. Back to my Aunt Christine. My aunt has a habit of trying to change
people’s names. It started with her own. One year I remember her visiting and
announcing that she was now “Tina.” I
can see “Tina” coming from “Christine.”
But, very soon after that she announced she wanted to be called
“Judy.” I’ve not seen her in a long
time, so I’m not sure what she calls herself these days.
Aunt Christine was not content simply
changing her name. She decided her
husband, my uncle, should no longer be Timothy (or “Timmy,” as she called
him). He would be called “Bob.” Now, Uncle Timothy was a patient man and he
allowed himself to be transformed into Bob.
Before long Aunt Christine decided “Bob”
wasn’t distinctive enough. She
campaigned to change “Bob” to “Link,” after the character on “The Mod Squad”
(the old show, not the new one). Uncle
Timothy had had enough. He refused to
change. Maybe he could foresee more
changes coming as new shows came along.
Frankly, as the years came and went, I would have hated to introduce him
as Uncle Fonzy or Uncle McDreamy.
My Aunt Christine never knew what it
meant to honor a person’s name. She
would have never understood the meaning of this prayer.
In the Bible, the name does more than
identify a person; it speaks of that person’s character and personality, so far
as it is known. So, God’s Name stands
for who God is. God’s Name is all that
God is.
Lots of people try to change God’s
Name. That is, they try to portray God
in a way that contradicts what the Bible says.
They want their renamed God to be more palatable. Such people may talk about God—whom they have
reshaped to their own liking—but they are not “hallowing God’s Name.”
The word translated as “hallowed”
comes from a verb that means “to treat a person or a thing as hagios.” Hagios is an adjective usually translated as
“holy.” A key to understanding the idea
behind the word “holy” is to remember that it’s basic meaning is “separate,” or
“different.” Thus, we keep the Sabbath
“holy” when we treat it differently than other days, when we see it as separate
or unique from other days of the week.
Barclay has this meaning in mind when he translates this petition from
the prayer: “Let God’s name be treated
differently from all other names; let God’s name be given a position which is
absolutely unique.”
Reginald Heber’s familiar hymn hints at this meaning when it says, “only
thou art holy, there is none beside Thee, perfect in power, in love, and
purity.”
Before I move on, let me point out
that something important happens here.
So far in this series of messages on
the Lord’s Prayer, we’ve seen God as Father.
I’ve stressed his caring love and provision for us. I’ve described him as the ideal father, a
father unflawed by failure, unlike any of our earthly fathers. God is a father unlike any we have ever known
among human fathers. He is a father who
would draw us close to himself and remind us that we are treasured.
Don Miller tells of a friend named
Nadine who is a descendent of Scottish royalty, a member of the Stuart
family. She grew up in a home surrounded
by servants. She was raised by a nanny. Nadine was not allowed to speak to her
parents unless they first gave her permission.
She must have thought her parents saw her as an inconvenience necessary
to carry on the family name. What a
different picture the Bible presents of God, who wants a relationship with
us.
When we speak of God’s name being
hallowed, we seem to be presenting a very different picture of God. In the words of Isaiah, this God is “high
and lifted up.” God possesses a majesty that
seems unapproachable.
A God who is close to people is said to be
imminent, while a God who is remote, removed from his creation, is said to be
transcendent.
The picture of God in this prayer
joins both his imminence (“our Father”) and his transcendence (“who art in
heaven”). Theologian John Macquarrie
sees this as a distinctive element of Christianity. He argues that the religions of the world can
be separated into those that so stress God’s immanence that God loses all sense
of distinctiveness from the Creation and those that so stress so stress God’s
transcendence that he becomes remote and aloof.
Pantheism is an example of the first position; deism, an example of the
second. Hinduism falls among those religions
that stress immanence; Islam falls among those stressing transcendence. At the center, according to Macquarrie, is
Christianity. God is the Holy Father.
Missionaries who have brought the
gospel to cultures where one view of God or the other is dominant have
discovered this picture of God who is both imminent and transcendent is
appealing. More than twenty-five years
ago, a modern classic in spiritual autobiography appeared. It was written by Bilquis Sheikh. It’s the story of a young Muslim woman who
found her way to Christ by reading the New Testament and discovering a new
picture of God. It’s called I Dared to Call Him Father. We should never forget that Jesus presents us
with a picture of God who is both fatherly and holy. Such a God’s name should be hallowed.
What do we mean when we pray, hallowed be your name? Ultimately, we are praying that God be
regarded with reverence.
Being reverent doesn’t simply mean we
use our “quiet” voices when we are in church.
In fact, the volume of our voices in church may be the least important
indicator of our reverence. For some, a
hushed voice in church may be an attempt to keep God from noticing they’re
here. I think we demonstrate our
reverence when we remain true to the following hallmarks.
Reverence affirms God’s existence. The Bible begins
with a grand assumption: God
exists. It nowhere offers any reasoned
proofs that God exists. When the
psalmist says, “the heavens declare the glory of God,” the attitude is “but,
what would you expect.”
That grand assumption is challenged
on every front today. Atheism is the
theme of many best sellers, like Hitchens’ God
is Not Great. Some embrace atheism
because they buy its arguments; some
embrace it because atheism gives a nod to their life-styles.
This is not the place to marshal the
evidence for God’s existence or to argue that it is at least as reasonable to
affirm God’s existence as it is to deny God’s existence. Instead, let me simply say that real
reverence calls on us to shape our lives in light of that grand assumption.
Reverence affirms God’s special relationship with humankind.
Many of us in the 21st century order our lives in light of
another assumption, one not so grand: All
of us are the product of random, unguided change over time, evolution, if you
will. Intellectually we may not buy all
the Darwinists are saying, but it is impossible to move in our culture long
without encountering the implications of this assumption. Those implications
shape our medical, social, and sexual morality.
They impact our values and our sense of identity.
Real reverence will see God as our
Creator and us as his creation. Real
reverence recognizes that our identity is only fulfilled when we have a
worshipful, submissive relationship with that Creator. Real reverence celebrates the worth of each
individual as created in the image of God.
Reverence affirms God’s acts on our behalf. Those who first learned this prayer from Jesus could only
look back on their nation’s history to review what God had done for them. Of course, that list was impressive. God had created a nation from a couple of
nomads who were too old to have children, for whom the promise of a child
seemed like a joke. God had rescued that
fledgling nation from slavery in Egypt, using a tongue-tied runaway prince
armed only with his shepherd’s staff.
God gave that nation a moral code that outshone those of any of their
neighbors. God repeatedly protected that
nation as it wandered through forty years of tutoring in the wilderness. God brought that nation into a land of its
own, where it would flourish and become the envy of the surrounding nations.
Now, we Christians may look back and
see what God has done for us in Christ Jesus.
Through his death and resurrection we may have peace with God. We may know him as Father now and have hope
for a future in his presence.
Reverence seeks to honor God in life and word.
The one who prays this prayer should determine to live the prayer. Martin Luther’s catechism asks, “How is God’s
Name hallowed amongst us?” The response
is, “When our life and doctrine are truly Christian.” Perhaps Luther never intended this but he
seems to be saying that for Christians, we “hallow” God’s Name when our actions
and our thoughts live up to our name, Christian.
A name is sometimes associated with a
person’s reputation. We speak of an
individual’s “good name.” A local
builder promises quality in the homes he builds because his family’s name is on
the product. It isn’t going too far to
suggest that when we pray “hallowed be thy name” we are praying, “Keep me from
doing anything that will besmirch your reputation, bring dishonor to your good
Name.” In Romans, Paul lays a frightful
indictment against some of his fellow Jews who were guilty of a haughty
hypocrisy: he said, “Those who are not
Jews speak against God’s name because of you.” [1] What a tragedy if any Christian
should live in such a way that someone thinks less of God because of them. It’s appropriate for us to pray that that may
never be said of us.
Those who pray this prayer know God
as Father but maintain the attitude or mindset that the OT calls the “fear of
the Lord.” Those who fear the Lord
recognize God for who He is and order their lives accordingly. He is to be taken seriously.
Conclusion
Reverence involves not only seeing
the Father as he is but also seeing ourselves as we are.
As we take God seriously, we are to
take ourselves seriously. Sometimes we
see ourselves as having little quirks, character flaws that only help to make
us interesting. That’s not taking
ourselves seriously. When we do, we will
see ourselves as sinners who have no business approaching a holy God. Yet, this God invites us to come. So, we come to him with humility and hope.
On another occasion, Jesus told a
story about two men who went to the temple to pray.
10“Two men
went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. 11The
Pharisee posed and prayed like this: ‘Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like
other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax
man. 12I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.’
13“Meanwhile
the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look
up, said, ‘God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.’”
14Jesus
commented, “This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God.
Which of these men showed true
reverence? Which one took God
seriously? The Pharisee seemed to be
saying, “God, I’m doing you a great favor being one of your people. I’m a real asset to you and your work.”
There’s no reverence in an attitude like that.
The lowly taxman approached God with a very different attitude; he
seemed to be saying, “God, there’s nothing in me that would make you want to
give me a second glance, but I’m hoping what I’ve heard about you is true—be
merciful to me.”
When we come to God with that kind of
humility, we are hallowing his Name.
Sinner like us must come to God
humbly, knowing he is a God of serious holiness. At the same time, sinners like us can come to
God hopefully, knowing he is a God of serious grace.
