March 1, 2025: Hallowed Be Your Name - Matthew 6:9

So we're working our way through the Lord's Prayer.

I will take some time to review if you would turn in your Bibles

to Matthew's Gospel, chapter 6, verse 9.

That's where the Lord's Prayer, one of the places that we find

the Lord's Prayer. But as a reminder to just show

where we've been, where we're going, we've been arguing that

any program of deep and robust discipleship has to include

these different legs of the triangle.

You need biblical literacy, but you also need doctrinal

discernment. You need to know your theology,

your beliefs, but you also need to know something about how to

live the Christian life, spiritual disciplines, holy

habits. And another triangle that I've

been showing, which is important to our vision has to do with the

basics of Christianity. That there is this triad, that

it's been used for thousands of years to teach people the center

of Christianity, the Apostles Creed, the 10 Commandments, and

the Lord's Prayer, which are profoundly biblical and

important for us to gain theological discernment.

And indeed, Martin Luther argued that if you don't know something

about these things, then your pastors are to blame.

They are guilty of a type of negligence.

And I take that seriously, and so does our church.

And so we have been going through series around this

triangle this spring. We're on the Lord's Prayer, but

we've taught before on the Apostles Creed and the 10

Commandments. Today we'll notice a linkage

point, very important overlap between the 10 commandments and

the Lord's Prayer that I'll point out later in this sermon.

GI Packer sees and the Creed, the commands and the prayer, a

way of believing, a way of behaving, and a way of

communing. It's beautiful, very helpful.

Again, understanding that this is not separate from your Bible,

but as a way of understanding and be able to read your Bible

wisely. Also by way of review, I don't

know if you're the kind of person that writes in your

Bible, but I do actually recommend that.

And as we kind of go very slowly through these words, I don't

want to us to miss the forest for the trees.

So how would I mark up my Bible or a printing of the Lord's

Prayer? The first week we looked very

closely at the word Father, and we noticed that this is a

familial term. It implies family, and we talked

about prayer being a family affair, not first of all with

the family of Godfather. God the Father implies God the

Son in whose name we pray, and because of his work on our

behalf, we may have a relationship with the Father.

Besides the Father and the Son, we also have the Holy Spirit who

is animating our prayers and forming us into the image of

Christ the Son, to the glory of God the Father.

So we talked about this being a Trinitarian prayer, though we

are saying in the address our Father, we tied this idea, this

family affair idea to a theology of adoption.

And we looked at the book of Ephesians as a place to learn

this theology of adoption. We are adopted into the family

of God. So let me circle that and jot a

note in the margin. The Gospel a story of

Trinitarian adoption all implied and inside that word Father but

we also talked about prayer being a family affair Part 2

that we're not only in the Trinitarian family of God

adopted but we are adopted into this huge company, this great

family, this brothers and sisters in Christ and so we

looked at this possessive plural first person pronoun our and

talked about the importance of the church as a praying family.

We also looked at and so again, back to your markup, our implies

the church, doesn't it? We also wanted to kind of in the

next week talk about how Father in Heaven represents A2 pronged

notion of God and reminds us of our identity and our

relationship to God. It's interesting how children

that grow up in the White House kind of capture the imagination.

What would it be like to grow up in the White House?

I remember being a little kid the first time I found out that

there's a bowling alley and a swimming pool in the White

House. Super cool.

And your dad's the leader of the free world.

Interesting. And so when we are approaching

God as our Father, we have to consider this, this term of

intimacy. He is our Father, His closeness

all the while not forget, not forgetting that he is the Master

of the universe, the creator of the immensity that we don't know

the first thing about as we point our telescopes into the

heavens. And so we think about Father and

our Father being a heavenly Father, a great Father, a

transcendent Father. And now we are coming close to

finding the preparation that we need as we rehearse our identity

in the adopted family of God. Finding the posture that we need

to present our request to a loving Father who is able to do

all things. This posture of awe and intimacy

together in the address, our Father in heaven.

We move on now to the next part of the prayer, The first

petition of the prayer. There are 6 all together.

The order is important. Our Father in heaven hallowed be

your name. And we consider the order of the

petitions. This is the most important

petition, the foundation and summary of all of the petitions

that calibrate and focus our hearts and minds.

For all of the petitions that come later, our first concern is

for God, for His Kingdom, for His will.

Now we're ready to ask Him for our personal needs, Our Daily

Bread for forgiveness, etcetera. So we're going to talk about how

those are important that that ordering is important to even

shaping our lives. The prayer is not only our

communication with God, but God communicating with us,

questioning us is God, Dan, right now your most important

chief and your most important priority.

And so as I pray for God to make holy his name, I'm not only

praying for the advancement of his reputation, I'm also praying

that that will be true in my own life.

Hallowed be your name. What does that mean?

That's kind of a, a weird word, hallowed, isn't it?

We don't use it probably anytime except when we're praying the

Lord's Prayer. And I think that that's

appropriate because the word means to make holy, emphasizing

the otherness and the sacredness and the set asideness of God and

his unique perfections. So I think it's appropriate to

use a, a weird word for that, that we only use when we're

talking about this. The word itself conveys what it

means, a setting aside, a sanctifying aspect.

Friends, I think that the most important things in our life are

often taken for granted, almost always taken for granted.

For example, I bet for most of you so far today, this morning,

having given one thought about the oxygen content in the air

that you're breathing. Breathing, praise God, I don't

have to worry about that. Be very stressful.

I'm pretty sure most of you haven't given awakened thought

this morning about the ongoing faithfulness of your internal

organs, your heart beating, your gut digesting, your lungs

breathing. These are very important matters

that we take for granted all the time.

If you enjoy a good reputation, your reputation is similar.

It's something that you're able to take for granted.

But if you didn't have one, your life would become a hellish

nightmare that is hard to imagine.

Loss of good reputation, many believe, is worse than death,

and in fact, many will commit suicide in order to escape the

shame. Your reputation is fragile, we

tell kids. Growing up all the time takes a

lifetime to earn one, just a minute to destroy it.

It's true. That's wise.

It's fragile. It's not only our own to carry

with dignity and honor and respect, but it's also a

communal construct. What does that mean?

That means that you carry a little bit of my reputation

around with you, and I carry a little bit of your reputation

around with me, like a beautiful, expensive China

teacup. And based on how we handle it,

we can harm it. That's one thing for our

reputation. If we suffer damage, what does

that do to our own happiness and our flourishing in the world?

But what happens if God suffers damage to his reputation?

Devastation orders of magnitude beyond imagining.

What happens when God is slandered, lies given in his

name, ideologies propelled according to his wishes,

purportedly terrible things. The first petition, hallowed be

your name, means that we pray that God's reputation comes

first in our attitudes, in our words, and in our deeds.

Friends, we need God's reputation to be our chief

concerned. This is the secret to life, our

prime objective and the only thing that can make us truly

happy. And yet it's hard to believe

because the devil has been whispering since Eden that he's

not what he says that he is. I care deeply about Deidre, my

precious wife's reputation when it comes to women.

She needs to be my chief concern, and for our marriage to

work, I need to be her chief concern in her affections, in

her words, and in her actions. And our joy is wrapped up in

that prioritization. Friends, the only way we can be

truly happy and fulfilled in life is if God's glory is our

chief end, that we may magnify that, exemplarize, be examples

for that speak about that We glorify God and enjoy Him

forever. So what is this?

What does this mean? Let's unpack it a little bit.

What does it mean? I've been alluding to some of

this in the introduction. Hallowed is a weird word.

It means to make sacred to me, to mean to make holy, to have in

the highest place to be recognized as most important

hallowed be your name. What is this?

What's the what's the name part? You know, and Shakespeare's

maybe most famous play to you, Romeo and JJ's on the balcony.

And she says what's in a name? She's worried about Romeo being

from the wrong family. What's in a name?

She says that which we call a rose would by any other word, by

any other word, would smell as sweet.

Is she right or wrong? You decide over lunch and of

Avonlea does not agree. She says, I do not believe, I

don't believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a Thistle

or a skunk cabbage. And thinks words matter, that

names are important. We agree.

What is a name? A name is a sacred symbol of a

person's essence. It carries their personhood as a

sign. And along with this idea comes a

couple of other very important biblical words you can think of.

Holiness is that which you can't see.

Think about the sun for a second.

We can't see you and I, you're not even supposed to look at the

sun, right? They tell you that when you're a

little kid, don't stare at the sun.

It's so bright and it has a core.

You can't see it. So we talk about holiness being

that sort of invisible, mysterious essence of a person

or of God. And yet there are things that

are visible as God chooses to reveal himself.

There are these revelations that emanate out of his mystery.

And we call that glory. We call that the Shining.

And if you want to think about human beings, we have sort of a

mysterious essence. But then we have ways that that

mystery of you is made visible, principally your body.

I look at you and I'm like, oh, there's Elijah.

Great. I can recognize his mysterious

essence by the glory of his beautiful, handsome face.

You did well. I'm a good job, but besides the

visibility of your, of your person revealing something about

your essence, your name is super precious and important too,

because it carries with it, when your person isn't around, the

idea of you and your unrepeatable, beautiful mystery.

And so we care very deeply God about God and about one another,

about names and images and likenesses.

It's a big business in college sports, big business everywhere.

We're talking about sacred things.

And here's where the prayer kind of lines up with the

commandments. What does Jesus tell us to pray

about? First, the holiness of God's

name. What do the commandments say?

First set of commandments protecting and commending and

reminding us about the holiness of God's name begins with this

introduction. He says who he is.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of

Egypt, the House of slavery, the Redeemer.

Remember Me. And then he goes on to say

what's expected now, just like a good marriage.

I'm not going to gossip about my wife.

I'm going to protect her name. You should do this with God.

You should have no other gods before me.

I don't want any other women before Deidre.

You should not make for yourself a carved image to worship it.

When I preached this text before, I said it would be super

weird if Dan got a cardboard cut out of Deidre and made it the

object of all my affections carrying around the grocery

store and everywhere I go. Huh, madness.

So it is with God. Should not take the name of the

Lord your God in vain. It isn't something to lie in his

name, to defraud, or to get what you want.

And as much as I see Deidre's name as sacred and special in

the last commandment, in this great grand first table of the

law, it talks about keeping God's day sacred as a way to

protect all of it. And we'll talk more about that

next week as we talk about the Kingdom and the will.

Hallowing God's name we've talked about a little bit in a

positive way. What would it mean in a negative

way? The opposite of hollowing God's

name would be to profane or make common his name, to slander it,

to besmirch his reputation maliciously gossiping, dragging

through the mud, defaming, cursing, blaspheming,

misrepresenting, impersonating in order to defraud, invoking in

order to manipulate, starting to sound like the devil, the great

adversary, the accuser, the slanderer, the sin before eating

the forbidden fruit is a slander against the name of God.

He's not good. He's holding out on you.

I got a better idea O this hallowing.

What does it mean? We want to talk about our

attitudes and our words and our deeds.

Let's talk about our attitudes. First of all, Romans chapter 1

Romans 1 · chapter mention

actually names the problem of a wayward heart with reference to

God's reputation. Look at Romans 121 and

following. For although they people knew

God, they could see him in the things that God had made.

They did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.

And because of this failure of adoration, this failure of

Thanksgiving, they descend into a futility, A foolishness that

ends up in idol worship. Keep reading.

But they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish

hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise.

It became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God

for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and

creeping things. And the writer Paul says it's a

failure of gratitude and honor. And so before we ever get to

words and deeds, we have to look at the heart, because it's

possible to have pretty good words and pretty good deeds and

have a rotten, stinking heart. And indeed, the fall itself is

not only the result of a slander, but a a result of Adam

and Eve failing to be grateful for everything that they had in

paradise. They wanted more, and they stole

it. The fall was instigated by

slander and perpetrated by ingratitude.

Gratitude, my friends, is at the center of the Christian life.

If you meet a mature Christian, they are a thankful person.

They can't help it. It comes bubbling out of their

mouth. Thankful for God, thankful for

what he's doing, thankful for the community of faith.

It just comes bubbling out of them.

Gratitude is central and necessary to vindicating God's

name and reputation in our lives and in the watching world.

Gratitude indicates a heart change, a realignment of our

most important allegiances, and it's evidenced by other closely

related activities that are overflows of a grateful heart.

We've been talking about some of them this morning, praising God,

thanking him, blessing him, an aspect of gratitude.

Also, the Bible talks about zeal, or a great energy, a

spiritual fervor, A kindled heart, alive, full of love for

God. Animated by praise, this then

affects the words that we say and the deeds that we do right.

And so if there is a a, a, a hallowing of God's name and a

heart full of gratitude for what He's done for us, then we

represent Him well in the world. With our words.

You speak truthfully. As individuals, we want to

represent Him well in our witness and corporately as a

church. We care about God's reputation

in this community and in the world, and care for His hallowed

name. Is a prayer too, for the lost,

who don't yet know it, or who have heard it and reject it.

In our worshipping idols, we want to tell them the good news

with our words, but our words are nothing without the

obedience that accompanies them and supports them and proves

them. So we want to have words and

deeds. They're mutually informative and

reinforcing our individual deeds of love and mercy from the Holy

Spirit, but also our deeds as UCC in the community and in the

world, but also as we go out to the nations doing deeds in the

name of Jesus Christ to those who need humanitarian care as

well as the gospel. May his name be enhanced in the

world. So we talked a little bit about

our hearts. We talked about our words.

We talked about our deeds. Now we just need to look briefly

at how this all comes to a head in the gospel.

The slanderer maligned the name of God, and God in his gospel

not only redeems and rescues sinners, but he vindicates his

reputation in the world. How?

By sending his Son, perfect image of the unseen God, the

Word of God, perfect representation of the Father as

the agent of redemption, to restore this lost reputation.

In fact, it's his principal concern, the thing that animates

his whole mission. What does he pray?

In John chapter 12, verse 28, he says, Father, glorify your name.

John 12:28

And it goes on in that text to talk about what he's going to do

to restore the name of God to its rightful position, it's

Creator and Redeemer. It's going to be accomplished

through the humiliation and then the subsequent glorification of

the Son. And his reward for this is that

he is given the name above every name.

Beautiful. So we've talked about our

attitudes and our words and our actions and how Jesus is

involved in in is causing this very mission of glorifying the

Father. Now let's ask ourselves some

really practical questions about how we're going to do this.

How are we going to do this, friends?

How are we going to pray this request?

Well, the first thing to notice is that we are praying in the

name of Jesus. He's not alone or he's not.

We're not alone in this prayer. When we pray our Father he, we

pray in the name of Jesus the Son and we pray with him to God.

Hallowed be your name, so you play in Jesus name.

We're also praying by the power of the Holy Spirit.

So we pray it. How do we pray it?

We pray it in the name of Jesus by means of the Holy Spirit.

Finding a theme here. But then remember, it's not only

a prayer for God to do things, it's also a prayer for him to

work in us. It's a prayer for

sanctification. Look, maybe I have a crummy

attitude. I don't feel very thankful when

I say hallowed be your name. I say, God, change me.

I'm believing the lies of the serpent.

I'm tempted by lesser loves. Hallowed be your name.

Restore my gratitude, my my zeal.

Rekindle afresh a love for Jesus, for his name in the

world. So we're praying for our own

attitude to have reverence and gratitude in zeal.

But we're also praying for our words to be true and wholesome.

So often we commit sins of speech who contain the tongue.

It's a restless evil full of deadly poison we mess up every

day. Lord, hallowed be your name.

Protect the words of my mouth and my speech.

Be holy. And if I'm not, when I'm a real

stinker and I'm causing harm, protect those people from me,

Lord, Purify my lips as you did Isaiah's.

But not only am I asking him to purify my attitude in my words,

I'm asking Him for deeds of love and mercy.

Help me to advance your reputation with holy deeds.

Let me remember your name as I go out from this house into the

world. I know one of my good friends

used to tell her kids as they were leaving and going out.

Remember whose you are. Remember whose you are.

You carry a name with you. You carry a reputation with you.

And it constrains your ethic as we remember whose we are.

But it's not only a prayer for ourselves, for our individual

sanctification. It's for the prayers of the

glory of UCC in this place, in this moment in time, that our

doctrine will be pure, that our deeds will be compelling, and

that we will have influence in this little community, but also

in the waving of all of the students that go out from this

place. So there's just a little slice

of UCC in there that they will be name Hallowers wherever they

go. May it be true of our church.

So it's a prayer for ourselves, for our sanctification.

It's a prayer for our local church family.

It's also a prayer for outsiders, my friends, because

they don't know Jesus. They're blasphemers, idolaters,

and they need to know. So it's a prayer for evangelism

and for the success of the gospel to make unbelievers and

God haters into worshippers who bless his name.

So it's a prayer for outsiders. Friends, pray this petition

hallowed be your name with fervor.

The results may surprise you. As we really recalibrate our

hearts and our minds and our loves, and we recenter God's

priorities over our desperately felt needs, it makes those needs

somehow seem a little bit smaller and a little bit more

manageable. Because we've reminded ourselves

already that God's got this. He knows the end from the

beginning. He even understands my

suffering. And I want to, I want to end on

this note of how God care. And our prayer for God, making

His name big and great, His reputation big and great in my

life and in the life of the world, gives tremendous comfort

to my own suffering. And it teaches me what I ought

to do when I don't understand the chaos that's going down all

around me. And that fear that he may not

know or that he may not be good, and that all this horrible stuff

is just so absurd and awful. This prayer for His glory helps.

Packer shows us in such a beautiful way with such few

words, how the prayer for God's glory can help us change the

question that's tormenting us and say you're suffering.

If you ask why is this happening, you may or may not

get an answer. You're probably not going to get

an immediate answer. Packer says very pastorally, No

light may come. No light may come.

But if you ask, how am I to glorify God now, there will

always be an answer. There will always be an answer,

friends. The madness, the absurdity of

your situation, the whispering slanderer who says, see, I told

you God's not good, just curse him and die.

Just curse him and die. And instead you get this.

There's pain in the offering. I will bless the name of the

Lord though he slay me. I will bless him that there's a

higher concern greater than even my own life.

I will bless him. Lord hallowed be your name and

the very practical thing to do next.

That next little step may be clarified by asking the

question, how am I to glorify God now?

Very powerful petition. The summary and ground for

everything that's coming next to conclude, the devil is a

slanderer. He slanders the name of God.

Jesus restores God's reputation and invites us to do the same as

we pray with the church. Hallowed be thy name as our

chief concern. I've been concluding by inviting

you to pray out loud with me the Lord's Prayer.

If you don't know it, that's OK. Maybe over the course of weeks

you'll learn it. And also I let people know when

we get to the confusing part. If we don't know if we're

supposed to say trespasses or sins or debts, we're going to

say trespasses because that's the way my grandma taught it to

me. So I invite you to pray now with

me, and then we'll sing a song of response.

Let us pray. Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done

on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day Our Daily

Bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those

who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but

deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and

the power and the glory forever. Amen.