Hallowed Be Your Name: What Are You Really Worshiping? | The Prayer That Changes Everything

All right, we're gonna start off our Father in Heaven.

You guys remember from last week?

If you're here, we're gonna recite it together as a church.

I'll help guide us in in terms of the pacing for this prayer.

Okay, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but to deliver us from the evil one.

Amen.

You may be seated.

See, we've been walking through this prayer for a couple weeks now, maybe three weeks now, I'm not sure.

This is the prayer Jesus gave when his disciples asked him, teach us how to pray.

And we are intentionally taking it slow, one line at a time, because I don't want us to just say it.

I want us to really learn it, learn to pray it, learn what it means.

This is this is about helping to form and nurture and foster healthy prayer for us individually, but also culturally as a church.

And again, to remind you, the prayer begins with an address, our Father in heaven.

And then Jesus gives us six requests.

This morning we're gonna be talking about the first one: hallowed be your name.

Now, notice.

Notice where Jesus starts.

He doesn't start with, you know, God help me or fix this.

I need this.

No, his first request is about God's name.

And hallowed be your name isn't it isn't merely a statement that God is holy.

It's a prayer, it's it's it's Father, cause your name to be seen and treated as holy in me, among us, and in this world.

And if you're like me, you've probably said those words maybe a thousand times without really knowing what you're asking, without really knowing what you're saying.

So, this is our focus this morning.

We're gonna slow down on these words, and we're gonna ask really three questions.

Whose name is this?

What did we do to it, and what did God do about it?

Okay, so we start with the name.

Whose name are we talking about?

Now, here's the thing you gotta know.

And look, if you if you miss this, you you're probably gonna miss the whole prayer.

Okay, in the Bible, a name isn't just a label, a name stands for the whole person, everything you know about them, everything they are.

Okay, let think about it like this.

If I were to say some random stranger's name to you, a name you've never heard of, well, it's gonna mean nothing to you, right?

It's it's just a sound.

But if I say a name of somebody you love, somebody who's been good to you, the name isn't just a sound anymore.

You hear that name and the whole person comes up, their face comes up, how they treated you, what they did for you, the name brings about the whole person in your mind.

The name brings the whole person with it.

That's what name means here in this verse.

When Jesus says, hallowed be your name, he's not talking about a word that you spell.

He's talking about everything God has shown us about who he is.

His name is his character, his name is his reputation, his name is everything of who God actually is.

And let me tell you, thank God that he didn't leave his name blank for us to fill it in on our own, because we would mess it up every single time.

In fact, there's a there's a there's a moment in the book of Exodus, Moses, and some of you are familiar with this story.

Moses, he's up on a mountain and he says to God, show me who you really are, show me your glory.

And and when he asks this, you almost you almost would think that God would answer with like fireworks and power with a list of everything he can do.

I mean, I know we would do that, but God doesn't do that.

In Exodus 34, God says his own name out loud over Moses, and it's not a list of powers, it's a description of a heart.

It says, the Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

And yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

See, that's the name: compassionate, gracious, patient, overflowing with love.

And the text says he won't just wink at evil either.

In other words, he is holy all the way through.

He is also loving all the way through.

He's both of those things at the same time.

Church, I need you to start to see this, that this is the name you and I were built for.

This is the name we hallow.

Tim Keller described hallowing when you when you when you hallow something, he described it as treating it, you know, treating that something as sacred and ultimate, making it the supreme aim of your life.

That's what hallowing something means, to treat it sacred and ultimate, the main aim of your entire life.

In other words, so to hallow God's name is to treat God as the most important, the most beautiful, the most weighty thing in your whole life.

Not just one of ten things, but the thing.

And listen, we're talking about the God who made everything, every star, every ocean.

We're talking about the God that made you.

That's the God we're talking about.

And one day, this is the name that every single knee in heaven and on earth will bow to.

That is who God is: compassionate, gracious, mighty, patient.

He is worth everything.

And you hear all that, and we know all that, and we learn all those things, and you think if that's true, and it is, you you you think, you would think he would be the first thing we reach for every morning, the first thing on our minds.

You would think that we would we would build our whole life around this God.

But friends, be honest with me.

Most mornings, he isn't the first thing.

Something else already took that place.

Something else grabbed it first, way before you you even rolled out of bed in the morning.

Which brings us to the second question.

What did we do to the name?

You see, there's a word in the Bible for it.

The word is profane.

To profane something holy is to treat it like it's garbage, to drag something sacred down into the dirt and treat it like it's something common, like it's nothing.

And look, you don't have to look very far to see it.

I mean, our whole culture, if you think about it, our whole culture profanes God's name every single day.

I mean, in fact, his name has become a curse word.

Somebody stubs their toe and comes out the name of the God who made them.

Right?

Somebody is shocked and they scream, Jesus Christ, like it's a swear word.

I mean, think about that.

The most beautiful name in the universe.

The one who spoke the stars into being.

And people use it to cuss.

That's profaning the name right out in the open.

But that's the obvious version.

Here's what I need you to see this morning.

Profaning God's name isn't just something out there that other people do with their mouths, it's something in here, too.

It's something we do with our hearts.

See, because here's something the Bible teaches that many people haven't heard before.

Every single human being is built to worship.

Whether you're a Christian or not, you are made to worship.

Worship isn't merely a religious thing that people on people do at church on Sunday and that's it.

Worship is what your heart does every single second of every single day.

Your heart is always bowing to something, it is always building its life around something.

So the question isn't never whether you worship, because you do.

Everyone in this room does.

Again, whether you're a Christian or not, you worship.

So the question was never whether you worship.

The real question is, what do you worship?

What do you worship?

And look, that's what that's the thing we did to the name.

We took the worship that belongs to God and God alone, and we handed it to nearly everything else except God.

You know, if you think about it, there's usually one main thing.

Well, look, life, this world, culture, our sinful flesh.

There's a lot of things our heart gets pulled towards to start to devote our lives to and worship other than God.

But usually, if you really dig in, if you really dig and get to the core, to the root, there's usually one main thing that runs your whole life.

It's like the master password on your phone.

I don't know about you guys, but I basically have one password that I use on everything.

Right?

It's the one that doesn't just open the app, it opens everything.

It opens my bank account, it opens my phone, it opens my messages, it opens my email.

I know it's not a wise thing to do, but that's what I do, right?

My main password, if someone grabbed that password, if someone found out that password, my whole life is behind that password.

They would know everything about me.

That's the master password of my life.

Your heart likewise has a master password.

There's usually one thing where if you have it, you feel okay.

But if you lose it, your whole world falls apart.

See, for some of you it's money.

For some it could be control.

For others, it could be that one person's approval.

For some it's a romantic relationship.

For some it's it's the drink or the high.

For some, believe it or not, it could be your kids.

Look, whatever the thing is, that's what you actually worship.

Whatever, if it if it was taken away, your life falls apart, that's what you worship.

Not the God you sing about on a Sunday morning.

It's the thing that would cause you to fall apart on a random Tuesday afternoon.

See, I'm what I'm trying to get at here, we were all designed to worship.

We're all made to worship, we were all built to worship.

We're all we're all built to worship God.

You see, only God is big enough to sit at the center of a human life and hold it together.

So when you put something else in there in its place, it can't do it.

When you put something else in the place to hold your life together, it's gonna crack under the pressure.

It's gonna crack under the weight.

Why?

Because you have asked a created thing to do what only the creator can do.

In other words, let me put it this way.

Contrary to what many of you might think, you are not failing to worship.

You're worshiping all the time, you're worshiping just fine.

The problem is you're worshiping something too small to hold your life together.

And understand this: whatever you worship, it doesn't just sit there, it shapes you.

You slowly turn into it.

You know, some of you may know the character Gollum from The Lord of the Rings.

I think we have a picture of it.

This is Gollum.

Yeah, creepy, right?

Little creature, big eyes, crawling around a cave with his gold ring, stroking it.

You know, he's whispering this that common, that famous whisper, my precious.

Right?

If you've seen the movie, this is Gollum.

But he didn't always look like that.

He started out an ordinary guy with a life.

I think we have a picture of that too.

But he got that ring and he loved it.

He loved it, he worshiped it, he devoted his life to that ring.

And the loving it is what wrecked him.

It twisted him up, hollowed him out.

And by the end of it, he didn't even remember his own name because his worship of this ring took that away.

You see, you become what you worship every time.

You become what you worship every time.

But there's something more I need you to understand.

This prayer Jesus taught us.

Remember, he didn't say my father.

He recited it as our father.

Our father.

Why is that important?

See, the name doesn't just get profaned one heart at a time, it gets profaned by a people together.

I mean, that was the story of Israel in the Old Testament.

God gave them his name to carry.

And how did they live?

Well, they bowed to idols, they cheated the poor, they shed innocent blood, they took the name of the Holy God, our holy God, and lived like it was nothing.

So what does God do?

He judges them, he lets their enemies take them, and he scatters them out of the land off into the nations.

Then what happens next?

Because then even in exile, when they're scattered, God's name gets dragged down.

I want you to hear the words in Ezekiel chapter 36.

Ezekiel 36 · chapter mention

And wherever they went among the nations, they profaned my holy name.

For it was said of them, these are the Lord's people, and yet they had to leave his land.

The nations are looking at these beaten, scattered people, and they don't think their God is, you know, must be holy.

They think their God must be weak.

So the name gets profaned twice.

First, by how the Israelites lived, and again by what their sin cost them, the outcome, and the nations watching.

I mean, what does this tell us?

See, this is critical.

The outside world learns a lot of its theology by watching us.

Your neighbor is often deciding who God is by watching how the people who carry his name actually live.

And an entire church can profane the name just as much as a single person can.

We can say his name is holy and then we live like something else matters more.

We can make church about being comfortable or about it pleasing my tastes and my preferences.

We can sing hallowed be your name on a Sunday and then spend the rest of the week showing West Palm Beach a God who is small.

And look, I'm not standing up here as a clean picture perfect saint.

There have been Sundays, if I'm if I'm really honest with you guys, there have been Sundays where I have cared more about how my sermon landed than whether God's name was made holy.

There are Sundays where I cared more about how many people showed up than what you know than whether the people who did show up left loving Jesus more.

I've stood in this very spot carrying the name of God and quietly wanting my name to look good instead of his.

Can anybody make a whole church, a whole city, actually hallow this name?

Somebody can.

You go back to those same people in Ezekiel, the ones who dragged God's name through the mud in front of the whole watching world.

God has just said that the nations look at my people and they think less of me.

So so brace yourself because here it comes.

What are we gonna expect God to do?

Well, we expect him, he's gonna wipe them out, right?

You guys paying attention?

Nah, he doesn't wipe them out.

He doesn't do that.

He could have done that.

No, he says, it is not for your sake, people of Israel, that I'm gonna do these things, but for the sake of my holy name.

And then listen what he promises to do for them.

Listen to what he promises to do for the very people who profane his name.

Listen to what he says.

He says, I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.

I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

I mean, do you see that?

God shows the world that his name is holy.

And he does it not by wiping out the people who profaned it, he does it by washing them.

God cleans up the very people who dragged his name through the dirt.

And catch this last line because in all honesty, it really is the whole sermon.

He says he'll he will he'll be proved, he will be proved holy through you, the people, before their very eyes.

Through you, the people who profane the name become the very people who show the world how holy our God is.

I want you to know something else.

I want you to notice how deep this problem goes.

It wasn't merely bad behavior, it was a heart problem.

A heart of stone.

See, that's actually the answer to the question we couldn't answer.

Why can't we just, why can't we just stop?

Why can't we we make ourselves worship the right thing?

Because it was never a behavioral problem.

It's a heart problem.

And a heart of stone can't fix itself.

A stone heart doesn't need a better plan.

It doesn't need a stronger pep talk.

It doesn't need you to grit your teeth or try harder.

On a Monday.

A stone heart needs to be replaced.

And God doesn't say, you know, try harder to love me.

No, He says, I'm going to take the stone out myself.

And I'm going to put in its place a heart that's alive.

I'm going to put my spirit inside you.

Church, I want you to understand this.

You don't fix a dead heart.

You get a new one.

And it's a gift from God.

Now.

Some of you may still be wondering, well, okay, but how?

How does my heart actually let go of the thing I've been worshiping my whole life that's not God?

The thing that isn't God.

I brought this old pastor from a long time ago up before his name is Thomas Chalmers.

He figured out something about the human heart that I think is I think is exactly right.

He said, you can't just empty your heart by a wrong love by telling it to stop.

I mean, you've tried that.

We've all tried that, right?

You can't just empty your heart of a wrong love by just telling it to just stop it.

It doesn't work.

It just doesn't work.

It might work for a little bit, but it fades.

So what does Chalmer say?

He said, the only way your heart ever lets go of an old love is when a greater love takes hold of it.

He called it the expulsive power of a new affection.

I'm gonna read that again.

He said, the only way your heart ever lets go of an old love is when a greater love takes hold of it.

I mean, think about it like this.

You don't get rid of darkness in a room by fighting it.

You don't start swinging at darkness.

You don't try to wrestle darkness in the ground.

What do you do?

You open the curtains and you let the sun pour in.

And the darkness doesn't put up a fight, it just goes.

Because something greater filled the room.

That's how God frees your heart.

Not by yelling, you know, stop loving that thing that's not me.

But by showing you someone so much more beautiful.

That thing that you've been worshiping, when you when you look at God, that thing you've been worshiping starts to lose its grip.

When you see him, the grip of that old love loosens.

I want you to understand is you don't change by by trying harder.

You change by seeing something more beautiful and then learning to live out of that new love.

That's how you change.

Because when you finally see him, when you when you really see him for who he is, what he did, and what it cost him, obedience, it's not gritting your teeth anymore.

Why?

Because you you just want him, you want to please him, you want to follow him because of that love.

And because you want him, here's what here's the amazing thing.

Because you want him, you start to fight whatever pulls you away from him.

And look, I can tell you from my own experience, I've tried the other way.

I have preached, hey Rajiv, just stop doing the wrong thing.

Just stop it.

I've tried to preach that to my own heart a thousand times.

I'll tell you, it works great for about 45 minutes and then I go back to worshiping the wrong thing.

The point is, you cannot argue a heart into new love.

You have to show it something worth loving.

So God shows us, He shows us at a cross.

So here's the most beautiful thing in the Bible.

And I don't want you to miss this.

The night before Jesus died, he is standing at the shadow of the cross and he prays out loud.

And do you know what he prays?

He prays the exact prayer you prayed this morning.

He it he says, Father, glorify your name.

In other words, hallow your name, make your name holy.

It's the same prayer.

And then the after after that, the voice comes out, comes down from heaven, and it says, I have glorified it.

And I will glorify it again.

Church, I want you to, I mean, do you understand what this means?

At the cross, God shows us more clearly than anywhere else what his holy name is like.

At the cross, two things are happening at the same time.

Two things you would think could never go together.

God's holiness is honored all the way through.

Because your sin is not swept under a rug, it isn't waved off, it isn't ignored, it is judged, it is poured out, and it's paid for in full on Jesus.

So God's holiness is honored.

And at the same time, God's mercy is poured out all the way through.

Because the very people who profaned the name, us, you and me, we get washed clean and we got and get brought home to our Father in heaven.

His holiness satisfied, his mercy poured out.

Both happen at the same time in one moment on the cross.

See, the moment God's holiness is displayed most clearly is the same moment sinners are saved.

So I want you to hear this.

Some of it, some of you are some of you have have have spent your whole life trying to build a good enough name for yourself.

Trying to be trying to be the good mother, or or trying to be them the man who is finally gonna make something of himself, you know, that after everybody thought less of him, everybody wrote him off.

Or maybe you're you're the the strong one who who never lets anybody see you crack.

See, Jesus doesn't come to help you polish up your name until it's finally good enough for God.

No, he comes and lays his own name over yours so that when God our Father looks at you, he sees you through the lens of Jesus.

The name you profaned becomes the name that saves you.

The wounds that should have landed on you landed on him.

And look, if you've never trusted Jesus, this would be the time, this would be the place where you begin.

Not by trying harder to hallow God's name.

No, you need a new heart that God has promised.

So you turn from your sin and you trust Jesus.

And when his name is over yours, it starts to change you.

And when it starts to change you, you start to grow and realize that you don't have to build your life anymore on money or control or approval or your own reputation.

In Christ, you are finally free.

You're free to love, you are free to repent, you are free to obey, you are free to rest because your life is standing on someone who won't move.

But it doesn't stop with you.

See, because God, He's not finished displaying the holiness of his name.

And one day, the whole creation is going to see it.

There is a day coming.

The book of Revelation pulls back the current for us and lets us see, lets us get a glimpse.

There's a day when every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, all of them, all of them together, is are going to sink to the one on the throne and to the lamb who was slain.

A day when no one ever profanes the name of God ever again.

Prophet Abakak says the day is coming when the earth is going to be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the water covers the sea.

Church, that day is coming and nothing is going to stop it.

His name will be hallowed perfectly everywhere forever, whether the world likes it or not, it is the surest thing in the entire universe.

And here's the wonder of it.

Remember what God said back in Ezekiel?

Proved holy through you before their eyes.

That's still true today.

Because he washed you, because he put a brand new heart in you, he pulls you into it.

He makes his name holy in this world through a people, through a washed, cleansed people, through a new hearted people, right here in this church.

Listen, you don't start the Halloween.

You could never could.

You're joining it.

You're joining something that has already started, that is unstoppable, something that already started long before you even got here.

So when we pray, hallowed be your name, we're not making something out of nothing.

I mean, we're in a little church here, you know, near Belvidere Road.

But what are we doing?

We're picking up the song that the whole universe is gonna be singing forever.

And we're letting West Palm Beach hear it early.

See, you and I, we get to we get to start now.

We get to participate with God with what he is doing by hallowing his name, by making his name holy and sacred throughout the entire earth.

We get the taste of it today.

We get to be the place that that where this city, the people of this city, get to see his name made holy.

So this morning, as we started last week, we're not gonna be just talking about this.

We're gonna actually be praying it.

And remember, Jesus didn't teach us to pray, my Father.

He taught us our Father.

He taught us to pray, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Church, here's what I want us to actually remember.

The world has seen enough people who merely say they believe in God.

Let's let the world see a people who truly adore Him.

Amen.

So that's what we're gonna pray this morning.

That God's name would be hallowed in me, in our church, and in our city.

Can I ask everyone to stand with me for a moment?

I'm gonna pull you guys out of your comfort zones, whether you like it or not.

I want you to find two, three, four, five people around you, your neighbors, if you're in one pew, just look to the back of you or walk over to other people.

We're gonna pray as a church.

Because I don't think that any of us on that day when we come face to face with God, I don't think any of us are gonna boast, hey, you know, God, the best attribute of me was my prayer life.

I was so great at prayer.

One place I never needed to improve upon.

I don't think any of us are gonna be able to say that.

So together we're gonna learn to pray together.

We're gonna pray, Father, hallowed be your name.

But we're gonna do it in three directions.

In me?

God, would you make your name sacred in me?

Make it be the supreme aim of my entire life?

Then would you do it for our church?

Would you hallow your name in our church?

Let our church be a church, a group of people who make your name sacred in all that we do.

And then in our city, we pray for West Palm Beach.

We pray for your neighbors, for coworkers, for friends, for family members, for people who don't know Jesus.

We pray that God would be hallowed, that these people would see God's beauty, experience his mercy, and come to know his son Jesus.

So let's get uncomfortable.

And let's pray, Father, hallowed be your name in me, in our church, and in our city.

Let's all pray together.

Our Father in heaven, our Father, you are so near to us.

You have made a way where we can have a personal, intimate relationship with you.

You care about us, you care about the details in our lives.

You demonstrate your fatherly love towards us as your adopted children, as sons and daughters to you.

You are our Father in heaven, sovereign one, all-powerful, majestic.

You are a God who is who is present everywhere.

You know everything, you are in control of all things.

You hold up this entire world together by your hands, you hold up our lives together by your hands.

You are mighty God, and we get to call you Father.

You are so set apart, you are so high above us.

Thank you for doing that.

And Father, would your name be hallowed in this place?

Would your name be the most sacred thing in our lives?

Would you, God, be the thing that we center everything around?

Let every single detail, every single aspect of our life, let our entire heart orbit around you, not the other way around.

And Father, let your name be hallowed in our church.

Let us be a community where the world outside, as they form their theology about you, as they form their opinions and views about you, they through your people see how beautiful you are, see how gracious you are, how merciful, how patient, how mighty, how majestic, how overflowed with love you are.

And God, thank you for allowing us to partner with you as you hallow your name in West Palm Beach, as you hallow your name across our country, as you hallow your name around the world, until we come to that moment where every single person on heaven and on earth will bow to you, and your name will never ever be profaned again.

You are our Father in heaven, and we hallow your name every second of every day of our lives.

By your grace and by your spirit.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

May be seated.