LESSON TWO

TAKING GOD SERIOUSLY

"Hallowed be your name."

Before we begin: What does the word hallowed mean? What does God's name represent, and why does
it matter so much?

THE MOST FAMOUS PRAYER IN THE WORLD

The Lord's Prayer is the best-known prayer in the world. No other prayer is known by so many people or
said in so many places in so many different languages. Christians of every denomination recite this prayer
as part of their worship experience. I have already pointed out that the Lord's Prayer is a central document
of the Christian faith. For two thousand years believers have pondered its meaning. Like an inexhaustible
well, the deeper you go in prayer, the more you find. And no matter how long you study this prayer, the
more it reveals to the earnest seeker. Though brief and simple it is also profound—indeed, it is the most
profound prayer ever prayed.

Now it's time to look at the first phrase of the first half of the prayer—"Hallowed be your name." I think it's
fair to say that this phrase is the one that makes the least sense to us, and therefore it is the phrase we
pray the least. Almost all of us will pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," and many of us will pray,
"Deliver us from evil." Still others will pray, "Your will be done," and some will even pray, "Your kingdom
come." But few of us, if left to ourselves, will ever pray, "Hallowed be your name."

In the first place it simply sounds strange. Hallowed is not a word we often use. Our other problem is that
we don't know what it means. Since we don't know what it means, we're not really sure what we're
praying for. Since we don't know what we're praying for, we tend to skip right over it so we can get down
to the part we do understand, like "give us this day our daily bread." Daily bread.
Now that's something that makes sense to us.

But it's of paramount importance to note that Jesus didn't begin with the part we understand—like bread
and forgiveness. He starts with the part we don't understand. There's a crucial point here. Prayer doesn't
begin with our concerns; prayer begins with God's concerns. Or to put it in its simplest form, prayer doesn't
begin with us; prayer begins with God.

So, when we pray to the Father, we are to begin by praying, "Hallowed be your name." Let's look at the
word hallowed. It's not really that difficult. The word itself means "holy" or "sacred." To "hallow"
something is to treat it as sacred and holy and worthy of the highest veneration and respect.

1. The word ‘Hallowed’ means to sanctify, or to revere, or to make and keep holy” (D. Martyn Lloyd
Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, vol. 2 [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1960], 59). This
word gets at the majesty, the holiness, and the grandeur of God Almighty. Holiness, too, is not an
often-heard word in our culture today. But this is a shame, because whether we know it or not, we
are all deeply concerned with holiness. “Holy” simply means to be set apart—something or
someone that is wholly other. To hallow something is to make it the most important thing in your
life. It is to worship it.

2. In this sense, whether we are consciously “religious” or not, we all hallow something. The great
American writer David Foster Wallace recognized this. In a commencement speech at Kenyon
College, Wallace told the graduates that “in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no
such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only
 choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God … is that
pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they
are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. … Worship your own body
and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing,
you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. … Worship power—you will feel weak and
afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your
intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being
found out” (David Foster Wallace [commencement address, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, May 21,
2005], https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf). Wallace’s point is that
whatever you worship, you will serve. It will dictate how you live your life.

3. We all have something or someone that we worship—that we regard as hallowed—in our lives. The
key to understanding yourself, though, is realizing that whatever you worship will completely control
your view of yourself and the world around you. Just as the sun is not only the brightest light our
eyes can see, it also lights up the rest of our world. By its light we see everything else. In a similar
way, whatever we adore most, whatever our hearts most desire, will also strongly influence the way
we approach everything else in life.

So the prayer is this: "Lord, may your name be treated with respect and honor because your name is
sacred and holy." You hallow God's name when you treat it with the utmost respect.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Isn’t God’s name already holy? Why would we need to ask for it to be hallowed? Augustine explains, “And
this is prayed for, not as if the name of God were not holy already, but that it may be held holy by men;
i.e., that God may so become known to them, that they shall reckon nothing more holy, and which they are
more afraid of offending

That immediately raises another question. Why did he say, "Hallowed be your name"? Your name is
important to you. It may not matter to anyone else in the world, but you care about your name because it
identifies who you are.

Think of how much time parents spend naming their children. They spend hours thinking about the
possibilities—discussing, debating, arguing, writing down a first name, then adding a middle name, then
reversing the order or dropping one and adding another.
Names mean something. They communicate history, tradition, and family heritage. They identify us with
our past, drawing across the generations a shared set of values. In the Bible a name normally stands for the
character or the basic attributes of the person who bears the name. For example, Adam means "man," and
Eve means "life giver." Abraham means "father of multitudes," and Jacob means "cheater." In the New
Testament, Peter means "rock," a reference to Peter's
rock-like faith. In Bible times, when you called a person's name, you weren't just identifying him. You were
also identifying his character.

We do the same thing today. We all tend to associate certain names with certain emotions. For instance, if
I mention Hitler, you instantly think of Nazi

What pops up on your mental screen when you hear the word God? The answer depends on who you are
and how much you know. For most of us, the word God brings up images of the stories of the Bible—how
God created the world out of nothing, how he parted the Red Sea for the children of Israel, how he caused
the walls to come tumbling down at Jericho, how he enabled David's tiny stone to kill Goliath, how he shut
the mouths of lions so Daniel could get a good night's sleep.
We know God through the things he has done. We hear the stories, and then we refer to the God who
stands behind the stories. God's "name" is his character and his reputation. Let me give you a suggestion
for your Bible study. Take your concordance and study how many times the name of God is mentioned in
the Bible. You will discover that the Bible mentions the name of God hundreds of times. Consider these
few examples:

"Ο LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" (Ps. 8:1). "Some trust in chariots and some
in horses, but we trust in the name of the
LORD our God" (Ps. 20:7).
"He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake" (Ps. 23:3).
"For Your name's sake, Ο LORD, Pardon my iniquity, for it is great" (Ps. 25:11 NKJV).
How about this famous verse? "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." That's found
three times in the Bible—Joel 2:32, Acts 2:21, and Romans 10:13. God's name represents who he is. It
embodies his character. That's why the third commandment says, "You shall not take the name of the
LORD your God in vain" (Exod. 20:7 NKJV). To take God's name in vain means to take it lightly or
flippantly. It's the exact opposite of "hallowing" God's name. Therefore, we might say that to "hallow"
God's name means to take it seriously.

WHAT DOES GOD LOOK LIKE?

Now if you pull all that together, this is what "hallowed be your name" really means. "Lord, may your
righteous character be seen in the world so that men and women will respect you for who you really are.
May your name be made great so that your creatures will give you the honor and respect that is your
rightful due."
Or you could say it this way:

"O God, show us who you are."

We "hallow" the name of God because he is holy and good. We take it seriously because God's name
represents who he is and what he does. We don't take it lightly or flippantly because we don't take God
lightly and flippantly.

When we pray like this, we are asking God to "cause your word to be believed, cause your displeasure to
be feared, cause your commandments to be obeyed, and cause yourself to be glorified."

1. “Hallowed” also communicates the majesty and power of God. Power is a hard word in our culture.
The word has been infiltrated with the ideas of coercion and manipulation. But God’s power is not
like the power of the rulers and abusers of this world. Augustine even described God’s power as
“maternal love, expressing itself as weakness” (quoted in Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to
the Ancient Catechism [Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018], 25). God’s power is not just
quantitatively different from the powers of the rulers of this world, but it is infinitely qualitatively
different. In other words, God is not just the biggest, baddest, strongest guy on the block, but his
power is the power that sustains all else that exists. Everything/everyone else that has power has
their power on loan from the one source of all: God.

2. Ben Myers writes, “True power is not the ability to control. Controlling behavior is a sign of
weakness and insecurity. True power is the ability to love and enable without reserve.” He goes on
to give an illustration of the power of a good parent or a good teacher. These people certainly have
power, but they don’t use it to coerce or to control but instead to nourish others and to help them
grow. “Without the ‘sovereignty’ of a good parent, children have a diminished sense of their own
 worth and their own agency. In the same way, God’s sovereignty is what secures human freedom,
not what threatens it.” God uses his power and majesty in lovingly creating the world, in entering
that world as a weak and helpless baby, and as the saturating presence of God uniting all believers
to Christ (Myers, The Apostles’ Creed, 26–27).

THE UNHALLOWED NAME

Let me stop here and make one simple observation. No prayer could be more appropriate in a sinful
world. For if one thing is certain about the world in the early years of the twenty-first century it is this:
God's name is not being hallowed today.
God's name is not hallowed when . . . a lot of sin and ways of men not pleasing to God.

The same is true in the realm of personal relationships. William Barclay points out that if a Christian under
pressure loses his temper just like a non-Christian does, or if he becomes just as nervous or anxious, or if
he is just as greedy or just as gluttonous or just as cruel or just as materialistic as the man next door ... that
is, if his religion doesn't actually change the way he lives, he shouldn't be surprised that his neighborhood
evangelism does not win many converts.

After all, why be converted to something that is not much different from what you already have?

The very essence of this petition is that in it we pray that God may enable us to show that we are
redeemed, so that in our lives he may be glorified, and so that through us others may come to desire the
secret which we possess. This petition prays that we may be enabled so to show Christ to men that men
may desire Christ.

What would we see if we followed you around this week? Would your life show any material difference
because you are a Christian? Does the fact that you bear the name of Jesus Christ make a difference in the
way you live? That's really the bottom line on this petition.
When you pray, "Hallowed be your name," you are really praying, "O God, help me to live in such a way
that your name is made great in my life. May your reputation be increased in the world by the way I live
my life."

A few days ago I spoke with a man who nearly lost his oldest daughter in a terrible car accident. "All my life
I've heard that God must be number one, then your family must be second, then everything else comes
third. When something like this happens, you suddenly learn how true that is," he said.
That's why this request is first. It's fundamental. Before you pray about what you want, you are to pray
about what God wants. What God wants is that his name be made great in the world.

WHO IS ON THE THRONE?

Anything you worship will end up controlling and dictating your life to you. And eventually, as
Wallace observed, the things we worship will “eat us alive.” They will demand that we die for them.
If you serve wealth, you will end up sacrificing your entire life on its altar. If you serve popularity and
fame, you will spend your whole life enslaved to it until it also demands your life. Sadly, though
Wallace knew this truth, his life embodied a lot of darkness and didn’t succeed in living out the
truth. Knowledge is no substitute for clinging to Jesus, the only person we could worship who
doesn’t demand that we die for him but willingly dies for us. This is how God displays his power: he
sends his one and only Son to die a shameful death on a Roman cross on behalf of the whole world
(1 Corinthians 1:18).
But that all changes when you pray, "Hallowed be your name." When you pray it with understanding, you
are really saying, "Lord Jesus, ascend to the throne of my life."
A right appreciation of God's name gives us courage in the moment of crisis. We bear the name of the
Lord. His reputation in the world rests on us. We honor that name and increase his reputation when we
speak up for him before others. And if we're not going to get into the battle for God, then we ought to get
out of the army or change our name.

"COULD GOD SIGN HIS NAME TO THIS?"

In his sermon on this petition, Helmut Thielicke said that you have not learned to pray the Lord's Prayer
unless you pray it against yourself. He meant that the Lord's Prayer sets such a high standard that if we
really understand what we are praying, we will be praying against our own natural tendencies. Whenever
we pray, "Hallowed be your name," we are asking that God's name be made great instead of our own
name. But if you really mean that, you are praying "against yourself."
All too often we pray so carelessly. "Hallowed be your name"—

"But not in my business."

We say, "Lord, anything but that." And the Lord says, "It's all or nothing." We say, "Lord, I can't hallow your
name in this one area of my life. It's too personal, it's too difficult, and it's just the way I am. I'm bitter,
angry, upset, worried, greedy, and I can't use your name in this area because that's just the way I am."
We all have areas where we hide things from God because we know he could never sign his name to them.
But that's really the acid test for conduct, for questionable things, for bad habits, for angry words, for
secret sins, for bad attitudes: "Could God sign his name to this?" When you come to one of those difficult
areas of your life, you ought to ask that question: "Could God sign his name to this?" If the answer is yes,
then go on with your life. If the answer is no, either stop what you are doing or stop praying the Lord's
Prayer. It's really that simple.

A GREATER NAME

As a Christian, I bear the name of my Heavenly Father. Hallowing his name means living in such a way
that I increase his reputation in the world. When I've done it well, people who don't know God will look
at my life and say, "He must have a great God," and God will look down from heaven with a smile and say,
"That's my boy!"
Here is the simple application. It is in the form of a question: What can the world conclude about God by
watching your life? Spend some time thinking about the answer.
When you pray, "Hallowed be your name," you are both the voice and the feet of that
petition. As the very words leave your lips, your life is part of the answer. When you pray
that God's name be hallowed, your first obligation is to live in such a way that God has no
trouble answering your prayer.
GOING DEEPER

1. What is it about the Lord's Prayer that attracts the reverence and respect of even nonreligious
people?
2. What is the first image that comes to mind when you hear the phrase "hallowed be your name"?
Why is this petition difficult for most people to understand?
3. How does the name of God reflect who he is? What does it mean to take God's name lightly, or in
vain? (See Exod. 20:7.)
4. Take the Three Circles test. Draw three circles and put a throne in the center of each one. Where
will you place the cross? Is Christ outside your life, inside your life but not on the throne, or on the
throne of your life?
5. State in your own words what it means to hallow God's name. What items would you add to the list
that begins, "God's name is not hallowed when . . ."?
6. Read Isaiah 6 out loud. How did Isaiah respond to a vision of God's holiness? How did this
experience help him discover God's will for his life?

AN ACTION STEP
Spend an hour studying the names of God in the Old Testament. What do the following Scriptures teach us
about the nature and character of God? Genesis 16:13; Genesis 17:1-2, Genesis 22:14; Exodus 15:22-26;
Leviticus 20:8;
Deuteronomy 32:18; Judges 6:24; Psalm 23:1; Psalm 46:7; Psalm 90:1-3; Jeremiah
23:5-6; Ezekiel 48:35.

PRAYER
Almighty God,
Root out everything in us that is false and untrue. Set our feet to follow where you lead.
May our words and deeds, and even our secret thoughts, bring honor to your name.
Help us to live so that others find it easy to believe in you. In Jesus' name.
Amen.