Hallowed be Your Name

Great to be with you again tonight, to be blessed by your prayers and your praises, to share in them, and also to share God's word. Please turn with me in your Bibles to Numbers chapter 20, a story I'm sure you've read again and again, but full of significance. Numbers 20, verses 1 to 13. Then the children of Israel, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month. And the people stayed in Kadesh, and Miriam died there and was buried there. Now there was no water for the congregation, so they gathered together against Moses and Aaron. And the people contended with Moses and spoke, saying, If only we had died when our brethren died before the Lord, why have you brought up the assembly of the Lord into this wilderness, that we and our animals should die here? And why have you made us come up out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place? It is not a place of grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, nor is there any water to drink. So Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly to the door of the tabernacle of meeting, and they fell on their faces, and the glory of the Lord appeared to them. Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Take the rod. You and your brother Aaron gather the congregation together. Speak to the rock before their eyes, and it will yield its water. Thus you shall bring water for them out of the rock and give drink to the congregation and their animals. So Moses took the rod from before the Lord as he commanded him, and Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock. And he said to them, Hear now, you rebels! Must we bring water for you out of this rock? Then Moses lifted his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod, and water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their animals drank. Then the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, because you did not believe me to hallow me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them. This was the water of Meribah, because the children of Israel contended with the Lord, and he was hallowed among them. So far reads the word of God, and the Lord be pleased by His Holy Spirit to bless it to our hearts. Even though this may be the last study in the Lord's Prayer, it has been a great joy to do it, and I know each part of our study, its introduction, the beginning address to God the Father in Heaven, and now the first petition are all full of very, very precious truth which I know God has blessed to your heart as he has blessed it to mine. So we come tonight to the first petition, Hallowed be your name. That's the first petition in the Lord's Prayer and as the first it's very important because it tells us that the Christian's supreme concern in life has to be with the glory and the exaltation of God. Indeed, the first three petitions are all about God and constitute a very healthy corrective, because by ourselves we are naturally self-absorbed and self-obsessed. and to become concerned supremely with God and with the glory of God is like emerging from a cramped dark cell into the open spaces of light and fresh air. Moreover, the fact that the first petition is for the hallowing of God's name shows us that this is indeed the most important aspect of God's glory. God's will being done is important for His glory, obviously. The coming of God's kingdom on this earth, where at the moment the ruler is Satan, is very important for the glory of God. But supremely, God's glory resides in Himself. in his name, in his character, and in his being. And so, to pray, Hallowed be your name, is the biggest and most basic request in this prayer. Understand it and make it your own, and you have grasped the secret both of prayer and of the Christian life. You see, there is no gain in becoming the richest man in the world if your name stinks. There is no point in being the president of the greatest nation upon the earth if you yourself are despised. Every ruler wants to leave a legacy by which he will be well remembered and well respected by generations hereafter. So our name, what we are, what we have done, is more important than anything else. And so the first petition of this pattern prayer concerns God's name, not ours. Now as I attempt to expound the first petition, let me begin with the obvious question, what does it mean to hallow God's name? Well, as I've already illustrated or intimated, a person's name is determined by who he is and what he does. A name doesn't mean anything until you know something about the person behind it. So, the letters G-O-D are meaningless by themselves. But when connected to the record of God's words and God's deeds in the redemption of His people, they mean a great deal. No man or woman who looks intelligently at the created world can fail to see evidences not only of the Creator, but also of His character revealed in what He has created. Just as everything we say and we do bears the imprint of our personality, so God's created works and God's words bear the stem of His character, His deity, His infinite wisdom, love and generosity. So David spoke a marvellous word in Psalm 19 when he said, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork. And that is especially true of God's creation of you and of me, of human beings in his own image. But God's creation is no longer a perfect revelation of who He is, because creation, even the creation of man, has been marred and spoiled by the fall. By nature, read in tooth and claw, to quote the poet, as well as by natural disasters and especially by human violence and injustice throughout the earth. Where then can we get a truer picture of God? And the answer is only in God's revealed word. For God has chosen to make himself known chiefly in the Bible. and by means of the names and the deeds of God that are revealed in the Bible through the redemption of his people. In the Old Testament, two names of God predominate. The first name is Elohim, which means God the Creator or the Ruler of the universe. To Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God revealed himself as El Shaddai, God Almighty. But to Moses and to the Jews in the wilderness, God revealed himself in the burning bush as Jehovah or Yahweh. Now, we don't know exactly how that name by which God revealed himself to Moses and the Jews is pronounced, because by the fourth century before Christ, the Jews had come to that point where they felt that the name of God revealed to Moses in the burning bush was so sacred that it should never be spoken. And so in the scriptures they recorded that name only by the consonants J, H, W, H. It had no vowels. And we have no manuscripts which date back to that time or before that time when the name was written fully with its vowels. This was not the case all through the history of the Old Testament. So, today we do not know what those vowels are, and some may call God Jehovah, that particular name Jehovah, some may call God Yahweh, some may think that they are more correct by saying Yahweh, but let's be honest, if you don't have the vowels, You don't know how the name is pronounced, do you? God says to Moses, you shall say to the children of Israel, that's when Moses said to God when he revealed himself in the burning bush, well, who shall I tell the children of Israel? Who shall I tell them has sent me to be their deliverer? And God says to Moses, you shall say to the children of Israel, I am. has sent me to you." And the meaning of those four consonants, which I believe should be pronounced Jehovah, but that's just my guess, my supposition, it means I am. That is its basic meaning. It was God's covenant name to the Jews, proclaiming His sovereignty, His self-sufficiency, and His self-consistency. I am points to the perfection and eternity of God's being. In other words, what God has always been, He is now. And what God is now, He always will be. That is what His name means. With Him there is neither beginning nor end, there is neither change for better or for worse. I am. What He promises, He fulfills. So He is the unchanging God of limitless life and power. And during the course of Israel's history, he revealed himself progressively to the Jews as Jehovah in different circumstances and situations. Jehovah Jireh, as the Lord will provide. Jehovah-Refika, as the Lord who heals you. Jehovah-Nisi, as the Lord who is your banner. Jehovah-Shalom, the Lord who is your peace. Jehovah-Sabaoth, the Lord Almighty. Jehovah-Revi, the Lord is your shepherd. Jehovah Sikerdnu, the Lord our righteousness, and Jehovah Shema, the Lord is there. But of course, we all know that the final and greatest revelation of the name of God is found in the New Testament. in the very person of our Lord Jesus Christ, who by the angel informed Mary and Joseph individually and separately that his name should be Jesus. In Hebrew, the name is Joshua. In Greek, it is Jesus. Both mean the same thing. Jehovah is salvation. His sinless life, His matchless words, His mighty miracles, His atoning death, His glorious resurrection, and His heavenly ascension to the right hand of God, in all of these things we have the greatest revelation of God through Jesus Christ. And yet you know, friends, no word and no names in the Bible are capable of expressing perfectly what God is like. Because our language, our words are finite. They are limited. By the very nature of God's divine being, He is inscrutable. And so there is a sense in which the Bible says God's name is secret. In spite of all these revelations I've been talking about, there is something about the name of God that is unknown. It's still secret. It waits for us to get to heaven. And so there is that wonderful story when Jesus, as the angel of the Lord, appeared to Manoah to tell him that his barren wife was going to give birth to Samson, the deliverer of his people. And Manoah asked the angel of the Lord, what is your name, that when your words come to pass we may honour you? And the answer he received was significant. Judges 13 verse 18, And the angel of the Lord said to him, Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful? And again, it's a very hard word to translate in the margin of the New American Standard Bible, which is regarded by most people as the most accurate translation we have in English. The Margin has seen it as incomprehensible, and the NIV doesn't do any better. It says, beyond understanding. So, in spite of all the revelation in all of these names and all of these incidents, there is something still secret and unknown about God. And because of that, because God's name, God's being, God's character surpasses that of all other beings, human and angelic, it ought to be set apart. Not just to one side as different, but high above. the names, the character, the being of all other beings, human or angelic. And that is literally what the word hello means. It means set apart, to exalt, to lift high above all others. And so God is asking us, when you pray for my glory, The first and chief thing you pray for is that my character, my being is going to be exalted and lifted up in the earth above all other beings. The first petition then asks that the God of the Bible and He only should be given the praise, the honor and the glory which is due to Him alone because of who He is. For the Christian's greatest desire is that God's name, his being and character, should be known, reverenced, loved and obeyed, not only in the Christian's life, but also by all men and angels throughout the universe. That's what we are praying for. Not only in our hearts, not only in the church, not only in the world must his name be hallowed. but in the entire universe, even among all of the angels, good and bad. So the honour of God, as distinct from making a name for ourselves, is to be the greatest purpose of your life and mine. Psalm 115 verse 1 says, Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to your name. be glory. Well that's what it means to pray, hallowed be your name. Now secondly we want to consider together what is involved in hallowing God's name and that's my main point and we're going to look at some ideas under that main heading. How do we hallow his name? Well, of course, there are several different ways in which we can do so, but I have only time this evening to highlight the most important ones. And to begin with, I want to say we hallow God's name when we stand in awe of His being. It's very significant that in one breath, in the pattern prayer, We begin with words of great familiarity, our dear, dear Father in heaven. And with the very next breath, we utter words of deep reverence, hallowed be your name. For it is important, friends, not to become so familiar with God that we forget His transcendent glory, His unsearchable, inscrutable greatness. Although as our Father He is ever so dear and ever so near to His adopted children, as our God He is infinitely exalted above us and must always be given the unqualified honor that separates him from all other creatures, human and angelic. Now, you know, John Wesley and Charles Wesley had an argument over this when John, the older brother, questioned the use of a word that Charles had put into one of his hymns. In the original version, Charles Wesley wrote, oh for a thousand tongues to sing my dear Redeemer's praise. And of course that was perfectly acceptable from one point of view, but John wouldn't have it in his hymn book in that form. He felt that the adjective great far better suited praise than dear. And so they had a right royal row over it as brothers would, but in the end John won and the line had to be changed. Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's name. Becoming God's children takes away our terror of God, but never, never, never our reverence and our respect and our awe of Him. We must always keep a biblical balance between those two things. And then again, secondly, I think to hallow God's name is to show respect and obedience for His Word in our hearts, not just in our heads. There are many people whose heads are crammed full of wonderful and learned thoughts about God, but they do not go down to their heart. And those who profess to be God's people, but who dishonor Him, the scripture says, these people honor me with their lips, Jesus said. These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. The heart, of course, is the center of any person's life. It is there that the direction of our life is determined, and our basic commitments are decided. But to what is our heart to respond? And the answer, of course, is God's Word, because we can never separate, in our sinful state, God's Word from God Himself. And in Psalm 38, verse 2, there is an amazing statement that, if you haven't underlined it, and you do underline key phrases in the Bible, special phrases, here is one you ought to underline, where David says, you have magnified your word above your name. Now how can that be, someone asks. Why should God's Word be put above his name? And the answer is quite simply, because it is only by proper respect and obedience in our heart for God's Word that we can possibly honour God. We may sometimes think, well, I'm honoring God by doing this, and in our minds we may think we are very correct, but if it conflicts with what is taught in the Word of God, then it is not honoring to Him. It is the Word of God that shows us how best we are to honor Him. And a striking illustration, of course, is the passage we read from the Old Testament. The sad example of Moses and Aaron at Kadesh in Numbers 20. It's one of those unhappy incidents recorded for all of us today, as Paul says to the Corinthians, as an example, as guidance, and as instruction of what not to do. And when the time came for Moses to die on Mount Neba, after being allowed by God to see with his own eyes the promised land into which the Jews under Joshua were about to enter, God then, before Moses dies, reminds him why he was being denied this great privilege. He'd led them all through the wilderness, 40 years. But now, why is he being denied the privilege of going with them into the Promised Land? I mean, that was a big thing if you had led a difficult people for 40 years. But God says in Deuteronomy 32, verse 51, Because you trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah, Kadesh, Because, listen, you did not hallow me in the midst of the children of Israel, you shall see the land before you, though you shall not go into the land which I am giving to the children of Israel." In what way then did Moses fail to hallow the name of God in this incident? The answer is he failed to respect to revere and implicitly obey the word that God had given him. The children of Israel were desperate for water in the wilderness of Zin, and they took their frustration out upon Moses and his brother Aaron. And so Moses seeks God's help and God says to him, take the rod and gather the congregation together. Speak to the rock before their eyes and it will yield its water. Thus you shall bring water for them out of the rock and give drink to the congregation and their animals. God's instruction was that Moses should speak to the rock in order that it might produce water. But instead, Moses spoke to the people, he spoke with anger, because he had taken their insubordination personally, as against him. Instead of realizing what every leader of God's people should realize, that whatever contention you have is basically focused at God. but you are the visible person, you are going to be the brunt of the contention. And Moses forgot all about that, and he thought, this is all about me. And so he spoke to the people, and then he struck the rock, not just once, but twice. So we read in Numbers 20 verse 10, And Moses gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, Here now, you rebels, must we bring water for you out of this rock?" You can see Moses is angry. He's exasperated with these people. He's taken it personally. And instead of drawing attention to God and saying, the Lord has heard your cry and he's commanded me to speak to the rock and it will bring you the water that you are crying for. What does he do? He draws attention to his own dramatic action on their behalf and he conveys to them a sense of his own personal power by smacking it twice. Notice the word, we. Aaron and I. Must we bring water for you out of this rock? Then Moses lifted his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod and water came out abundantly. Friends, we do not hallow God's name. when we do things that we think may be honoring to God, but are not in obedience and compliance with God's direction in His Word. Moses went beyond what God had commanded, and he drew attention to himself rather than to God. And then thirdly, to hallow God's name is to show respect and reverence in the way we use God's name. The third commandment says, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. And we can do this, first of all, by sheer profanity. by using the name of God as an expletive, or as a swear, or a cuss word, which is something that is being commonly done today, not just by men, but by women even in the working place, and also by children in school. Again, we can fail to hallow the name of God not only by profanity, but by perjury, by using God's name to give a veracity to a statement which we are making, which we know is dubious or false. And this can happen not only when we are under oath in a court of law, but also when we are in the court of public opinion. Jacob, you remember, was guilty of this when his father was about to die. Isaac asked Esau to go and hunt for some wild game so that he might have a dinner of his favorite dish before fading away and dying. Rachel, the mother of the twins, was determined that Jacob should be the one to receive the Father's blessing rather than Esau. And she was right. But she went about it in a way that did not hallow the name of God. So taking advantage of Isaac's blindness, she encourages Jacob to deceive his father by impersonating his twin brother Esau. And when Jacob presented his father rather quickly with goat meat, which tastes, believe you me, I know, very similar to venison, Isaac asked, how is it that you have found it so quickly, my son? And Jacob replied, listen, because the Lord your God brought it to me. Now, to deceive his father was bad enough, but to use God's name in such a way to guarantee what he had said was a worse sin. Now, we are guilty of this in little, or in small I should say, or greater ways. It's something that does happen. I'd like to give you an incident, a true incident that happened when Leland Hayward was negotiating with Baroness von Trapp for the film rights to the film The Sound of Music. and he really tried his best to be as generous as he could, and he said, we'll portray you in the best possible way, and I'm prepared to give you 10% of all the profits, which was quite a cut. And of course he expected an immediate and very grateful acceptance. Instead the Baroness replied, my dear Mr. Hayward, I never make any decision like this without first the help of the Holy Ghost. So if you will excuse me for a moment, I will go to my church and consult the Holy Ghost. Well, an hour or two later she returned and with a smile she said, Mr. Leland, Mr. Hayward, the Holy Ghost says 15%. Now we may smile at that, but it was a very sinful thing to do. We do not hallow God's name when we use it to conceal our pride, or our greed, or our selfishness, or merely to justify doing something that we are not really sure the Lord wants us to do. Oh, the Lord told me to do this, but really we are not sure. And then fourthly, to hallow God's name is to honour Him by our worship. In true worship, as we know, our preoccupation should be with God Himself and not with ourselves. The test of worship is whether it pleases God or whether it pleases us. We have lost sight of the priority of God's honour if after a service we are more taken up with the music or with some celebrity which has been invited to the service, a baseball player, a football player, a basketball player, than we are with the question, was God pleased with the service? Was God glorified in the service? Again, God's name is not hallowed when worship becomes an excuse for exercising our spiritual gifts for our own personal enjoyment or for our own personal enrichment, which is what the people, the Christians in Corinth were doing. They were being spiritually edified by speaking in tongues without an interpreter, and they just went on speaking in tongues and personally enjoying what they were doing, speaking in a foreign language without knowing that language, and they were lifted up and they were excited about it, but nobody else could understand what in the world they were saying because there was no interpretation. And again, they were doing it in a disorderly way, which was not hallowing to the name of God. Everybody was speaking at the same time, and their worship was completely chaotic and off-putting to unbelievers. So Paul urges them instead to do everything in the worship service decently and in order. so that any outsider coming in will immediately sense the presence of God, fall down in worship and say, God is truly among you. And then fifthly, to hallow God's name is to bring credit to Him by the way we live. And I think this is what Jesus is referring to when he says, let your light so shine before men. that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven." No son who loves his father wants to disgrace the family's name, but rather counts it the greatest compliment when someone says to him, you are a credit to your father. Do you know that in the early years of church history it's reported that many slave owners particularly looked out for Christian slaves because they knew they were the hardest working and the most pliable and the most courteous of any slaves to be bought upon the market. And you know, such slaves, without maybe realizing it, were hallowing God's name. People may not read God's word, but they read our lives. Our behavior either brings credit or shame to our Father's name. And then finally, to hallow God's name is to show how much we love our Christian brethren. There is just one God and Father of us all, and there is only one family of God. Love for one another, then, has to be a priority in our relationships with one another. And so Jesus, our elder brother, spelt this out in the upper room the night before he died, the night he was betrayed. when he washed the disciples' feet, as I said this morning, and then went and sat down and said to the disciples, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Even as I have loved you, so you must love one another, because by this All will know, all men will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. So honor is not brought to God's name when divisions occur in his family over secondary matters, over silly matters, whether people wanted that color carpet in the church or not, or whether the pulpit was going to go into the center or on the side, or whether there was to be no pulpit at all. And so it goes on and on. Divisions which are the consequence of pride, jealousy, revenge, selfishness, and so on. God's name is praised when we settle our differences and learn to accept one another just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. Now as I conclude, I want to remind you that the spirit which hallows God's name is called in the Bible the fear of the Lord. Listen to Isaiah 8 verse 13. The Lord of hosts, him you shall hallow. Let him be your fear and him be your dread." Now, as strange as that may sound, it is very true. For as the Bible often says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of learning and knowing how to honour and serve God in the best possible way. You see, an unconverted person's fear of God is the fear of being punished. God's children, however, fear to offend their father, to disappoint their dear father in heaven. The fear of unbelievers is prompted by unworthy, unhallowed thoughts of God. The fear believers have arises from a proper understanding of his character and an overwhelming love and desire as his children to please him, not to grieve him. So this first petition of our Lord's Prayer, Hallowed be Your Name, agrees perfectly with the first question in the Shorter Catechism. What is man's chief end? And the answer is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. You see, God's chief end is to promote His glory in everything He does. As God, He can have no higher motive, goal, or ambition than that. But He has also made it so that when we seek His glory, we find our highest and greatest joy and satisfaction. I ask, do you believe that? Do I believe it? Because the devil has brainwashed us so well that many Christians continue to think that God's will is always unpleasant. and that you have to be a kind of martyr to do it. But in living the Christian life, duty and delight always go together. And friends, if we will only look back upon the previous years in our Christian life, we will see this is so. Our greatest delight was when we obeyed God. in the best possible way. And it will be even clearer, I believe, when we get to heaven, to give ourselves to hallowing God's name as our lifelong task can only bring increasing joy and satisfaction. And I think this is why John Piper's books have been so popular over the years. More than anyone else he has brought out this theme. of joy and delight in God and in honoring and exalting God. So let's pray. Our gracious God and Father in heaven, we pray that you will bless this first petition of the pattern prayer to our hearts Forgive us for sometimes caring more about our own reputation and our own name than for yours. Our Father, we are so puny, and within dwelling sin we are so imperfect, whereas You are absolutely perfect. Your greatness is incomprehensible. It is unsearchable. And you, your being, your character is higher and above every other creature in heaven or on earth. So Father, we pray that you will give us increasing understanding of the greatness and the perfection of your name, so that we may truly hallow it in everything we do, exalt it, lift it up, so that everyone sees that it is indeed higher and greater than everyone and everything else. And Father, we also pray that your holy and wonderful name may be known and reverenced and respected not only in our own life, in maybe our own family, or our own church, or in our own town, or in our own country, but throughout the entire world as the gospel is preached to every nation. and to every creature. For Jesus' sake we ask it, who taught us this prayer. Amen.