Hallowed By Thy Name - Matthew 6:5-15 • James Sutton

Alright. We'll be looking this morning at Matthew chapter six verses five through 13. Let's go to God's word.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly, I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your father who is unseen. Then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans for they think they will be heard because of their many words. — Matthew 6:5-8

Our passage for this morning is Matthew chapter six verses five through 13. Let's go to God's word together.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly, I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your father who is unseen. Then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them for your father knows what you need before you ask him. This then is how you should pray. 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 deliver us from the evil one. — Matthew 6:5-13

We are in week two of our sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount's Lord's Prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught us to instruct us how to pray. Our rationale for doing this series, if you missed last week, is that our church is really weak at prayer. And I think it's because we're not a very weak church. We're a mostly high functioning group of people with advanced degrees who kind of have our act together. And so when it comes to prayer, prayer kind of feels like a waste of time to us. It feels like something that isn't going to get much done. And really it's up to us to get things done. And oftentimes we're able to get things done and we feel pretty good about our accomplishments in life. And so we feel like we're in control. And so we feel like we don't really need prayer all that much. And that's why I think prayer is a weakness for our church and has been for a long time.

We pray every Sunday morning with our friends from Mount Pleasant, and it's an eye opening experience praying with those saints. It's a little different. They're stronger at prayer, I think, than we are. And not that it's about a performance or whatever, but I think they're just more accustomed to running to God with their weaknesses and their need. That's not something that's easy for us.

And this is a perfect sermon for this time because recently I'm feeling less and less in control. More and more we're feeling less and less like we've got it together, that we're able to pull it off. And so although this is a hard time, we feel like this is a really great opportunity for us as a church to really grow in our weakness and therefore grow in our ability to pray. And what better way to instruct us on how to pray than the Lord's Prayer.

The Structure of the Lord's Prayer

The Lord's Prayer for those kids who are watching at home, we've been using this illustration. The Lord's Prayer is kind of represented by your hand. You can kind of remember it, memorize it in this way. The palm of your hand represents essentially who the prayer is addressed to. It's Our Father in heaven. And then there are essentially five petitions, five requests. The requests are: hallowed be your name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. So there's one person we're addressing with five requests.

This morning we're going to be looking at the first petition. Last week, Jeff looked at who we're addressing, our father who is in heaven. And this week, we're looking at hallowed be your name. Hallowed be your name.

I just want to briefly talk about some basic definitions. What does the word hallowed mean? That's not a word that we use all that often anymore. And it's a very archaic word. And yet the ESV uses that word as a translation for the Greek here because there's really no great English equivalent that's currently more used. The term hallowed means to cherish with reverence or to adore.

Most of the time you see this in modern uses—we talk about hallowed ground, or when October rolls around, we talk about Halloween. That gets to some of the archaic nature of this. But essentially all it means is to cherish, to reverence, to adore, to be all about, to be all in on. And it says here that hallowed be your name. Why God's name? Well, the name of God was an intimate representation of God himself. Right?

We see that most clearly perhaps in the book of Exodus when Moses encounters the burning bush, and he encounters God and God gives him his name. That's seen as a very intimate gift, something meant to reassure Moses that God himself is with him, is close to him, is near to him. And the Jews considered themselves to be intimately close to God because he had given them his name. Names essentially are a representation of our very selves and that's how we use them. We often use them as introductions to give ourselves to people. This is who I am, I'm James. The name of God is an intimate representation of Him, and it's something that's meant to be cherished. God's name is meant to be cherished.

You know, when I was a middle school teacher at St. David's School, I met a young lady named Katie Sutton. And there was one day when I was teaching class, the kids were taking a test, and I was sitting at my desk doodling. And you know what I was doodling? Over and over? Katie. Over and over and over again. And some middle school girls, as they were turning in their test, noticed that I was doodling the name Katie. And they started teasing me, and of course, I was immediately embarrassed because this is supposed to work the other way. I'm supposed to catch middle school girls doodling the name of their cherished ones. But I was in love. I was smitten. I cherished Katie's name because I was starting to cherish her.

There's also a sense in which the name of God is radioactive. When Moses encounters God at the burning bush, God tells him, "Take off your sandals because you're on holy ground." The Jews, anytime they would write the name of God, they would destroy the pen that they used to write it, out of reverence and respect. And one of the Ten Commandments is dedicated to this:

Thou shall not take the Lord your God's name in vain

It's meant to be respected. In fact, the opposite of taking something in vain is to hallow it, to respect it, to treat it with reverence. And so essentially, this prayer—hallowed be your name—is an expression, a desire that we would cherish, that we would reverence God in his essence as he's represented himself in his name.

We could go into a lot more detail about that, but I want to make three points this morning very simply about this particular petition. First, I want to note the primacy of this petition in the Lord's Prayer. Secondly, I want to notice the places of hallowing. And then finally, I want to note that this is a petition, not a pledge.

The Primacy of Hallowing

Remember our hand illustration? This petition is the first one. And I would say it's the thumb. Why is it the thumb? Because I think that this petition is served by all the other petitions, and it effectively frames and places in the right place all the other petitions.

Now, I want to be transparent with you. I think we fly past this petition on our way to some of the ones that are later. Oftentimes when you think about the Lord's Prayer, I think our minds tend to meditate on some of the other things—like perhaps "give us this day our daily bread," like supply all our needs. When I was a kid, I was taught the ACTS acrostic for prayer, which in some ways is patterned after the Lord's Prayer and other prayers in the Bible. The ACTS acrostic is adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. And I think I got the idea that it's just impolite to go to God and just say, "Hey God, give me all the things on my gimme list," without first acknowledging that He's pretty awesome, confessing that we're not, and thanking Him for all the ways that He's come through in the past.

So when I was a kid, a lot of my prayers kind of looked like this: "Dear God, You're so powerful and amazing. I confess that I often don't believe that You're so powerful and amazing. Thanks for coming through for me in the past. Now give me a new GI Joe Snake Eyes action figure that my parents are telling me I can't have." That often was the character of my prayers. I was allowing essentially the supplication to frame all of the other parts of the prayer.

There's a reason for why this petition comes first.

The request to have God's name be hallowed is primary and it frames our understanding of all of the other requests. Think about how it shapes our idolatrous hearts, right? If we wanna run past this prayer and skip into this petition, it forces us to stop and to ask that we would actually cherish God above and beyond all of the other things, all the other idols that our hearts chase after. And so by the time we get to "give us this day our daily bread," suddenly the bread just seems like bread, right? It doesn't seem like the reason for the prayer. The reason for the prayer is that God's name be hallowed. That we would have the opportunity to bask and to revel and to cherish and to jot down the name over and over and over again because we are so smitten and taken in reverence and awe with who God is.

When you think about the Lord's Prayer and specifically the "give us this day our daily bread" portion, are you hallowing in order to get the bread? Are you seeing this prayer as kind of an exchange? Like, "Hey, I wanna go into talking about hallowing God, worshiping him, appreciating him so that he'll appreciate me and then give me the things that I ultimately want." Or do you get the bread in order to hallow? Right? The differences radically change the direction and character of the prayer. And all the other petitions serve this request in that way.

I don't think I can explain this better than John Piper did. He said this:

There is something unique about the first petition, hallowed be your name. It's not just one of them. In this petition, we hear the one specific subjective response of the human heart that God expects us to give, the hallowing, reverencing, honoring, esteeming, admiring, valuing, treasuring God's name above all things. None of the other five requests tell us to pray for a specific human response of the heart. If you combine this with the fact that the petition comes first, and that the name of God, hallowed be your name, is more equivalent to the being of God than his kingdom or his will. My conclusion is that this petition is the main point of the prayer, and all the others are meant to serve this one. Now listen to this. The purpose of the universe is for the hallowing of God's name. His kingdom comes for that. His will is done for that. Humans have bread, sustained life for that. Sins are forgiven for that. Temptation is escaped for that.

There is a primacy to this first petition. And so as we pray, CTK, remember the importance of this first petition that we beg God to give us more capacity to revel and bask and rejoice and worship him for who he is.

The Places Where God is Hallowed

Hallowing is a whole person exercise. It's a head, heart, hand act, but it does primarily grow out of the heart. Showing up for worship and reading liturgy in a dull, lifeless way is crushing for what we mean by worship and hallowing God's name. There should be an engaged, whole person engagement in an appreciation for God. It's what we were created for. The confession says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Our worship is something that is meant to encapsulate all of us in how we approach God.

The first place where God is hallowed is our own hearts. I can't help but think about the prayer that Paul prayed in Ephesians chapter three:

He prayed that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the strengths what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

That passage references an ever expanding notion of the greatness of the love of Christ. The character of God functions the same way. He's so inescapably unknowable because he's so vast, so big, so amazing, so wonderful that it says here, just talking about the love of Christ, it surpasses knowledge. It surpasses knowledge and yet Paul is praying that you might know this knowledge that surpasses knowledge. You think about that, right? There's this ever expanding character of God, infinite aspects to him that are just magnificent and wonderful. There's no way we're going to ever run out of things to praise him for.

And so this request that "Lord, hallowed be your name" is essentially a request: "Lord, need into our hearts a greater appreciation and excitement for the discovery of who you are that never ends, that is constantly ongoing."

There's also a sense in which I think that the places where we're asking God to be hallowed is the world, other hearts, right? In the Philippians chapter two sense, we're praying that every knee would bow, every tongue would confess. That the greatness of God, that His being cherished wouldn't just be something that we do as an individual exercise, it'd be something that spreads throughout the world. Right? This is why we're committed to things like evangelism and church planting and why we're always kind of pressing people like, tell people about how amazing God is in this gospel that you have, because we want to invite other people to the party.

Since COVID, I haven't been able to go to the movie theater and see movies. Movies are something that I love. I so appreciate movies. And every now and then a movie comes out that really just taps into something. And it's kind of one of my favorite things is just talk people into going to really great movies. Why? Because if I go see them by myself, and I have Fridays off a lot of times, and so back before COVID, a lot of times I would go see movies by myself, which I know is weird, but I have time. I go to see a movie on Friday by myself and it's just incredible and I just want to share it with somebody.

The last movie that was like this for me was the movie Knives Out, right? Which has already been used as a sermon illustration by me. I kinda get stuck on these illustrations. But I love that movie so much. I talked to my father-in-law into going to see it and talked to him about it. I couldn't wait for Katie to go see it. There were all kinds of friends at church that I wanted to see about it. I wanted to bring it up in a sermon so I could talk to you about it. And part of the reason that I wanted to do that is because for me, there were aspects of that film that pointed me to Christ and to God. And there was a sense of celebrating that film was, in a way, celebrating God, was hallowing His name. Right?

So when we pray that God would be his name would be hallowed, right, we're not just praying for ourselves, we're praying for others because God is so big that it's just not sufficient for me to celebrate him by myself. I want the whole world to celebrate, to be invited to the party. I want it to be an incredible time of hallowing that involves more than just me.

This Is a Petition, Not a Pledge

Alright. So those are the places of hallowing. A final point for this morning is to note that this is a petition, not a pledge. It's easy to look at this and to think about that ACTS acrostic prayer and to think that really what Jesus is instructing us to do here is as we're praying to our father in heaven to worship him. And it's certainly a good thing to do to worship God as we're praying to him, to adore him, to magnify his name, to recognize how majestic and amazing he is in our prayer and to acknowledge that. But that's not what's happening. Not in this prayer.

What Jesus is modeling for us is not an ought, not a you ought to praise God. It's not designed to make us feel guilty as often I think prayer does for us. Jesus isn't saying hallow God's name perfectly then move on to your request. He's modeling a request for more capacity to hallow.

And you think about this introduction to the prayer when he talks about the hypocrites being contrasted to the way that we should pray. Right? The hypocrites love to show off their ability to hallow God. Right? They wanna babble on and on like the Greeks. Right? With more and more robust and kind of majestic ways of describing the amazingness of God in an effort to show off, right? Hey, I've got this down. I have figured it all out. God doesn't like being approached by a group of people who claim to have him all figured out and have the ability to praise him in all the ways that he might ever want. Right? As an infinite God, we're never gonna get there.

Right? The Christian, in contrast, Christ is driving us towards a posture where we long to beg God for the capacity to hallow him more. And because Christ hallowed him perfectly, we can. We can pray in his name and be trusting that God is going to transform us to change us more and more into Christ's image. And that prayer that Paul prayed that we would have strength to grasp the height and depth and width and breadth of the love of God, we can do that. Right? Because Christ has done it.

If you think you've arrived as a hallower, your prayers will be empty because there will be no more need for you to spend time with God. In fact, you'll have a tiny God. And as a result of your tiny God and your lack of desire to hallow him further, you have no need of eternity to praise him. Right? You think about that. Eternity. The point of eternity is to be with God. To further explore forever and ever the greatness and wonder of who he is.

As the song "Amazing Grace" says: when we've been there ten thousand years bright shining as a sun, we'll have no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun.

I was preparing for the sermon and talking to my wife about the posture of this petition—the desire to hallow God's name more. We were talking about how it's similar to what happens when people lose loved ones. You're around somebody and oftentimes you get caught up in all the things you're trying to accomplish with them. But then when they pass away, all of a sudden people start to say things like, "I was so caught up in the things we were trying to do. But now that they're gone, I just wish for one more day with them. Not to do anything specific, but just to spend time with them."

That's the posture of the first petition of the Lord's prayer. Not that we would try to be convincing God to do certain things necessarily, but we would want to grow in our longing and understanding of our need to be with him. That we would want to be with him for eternity.

Let's pray that as we grow in our ability to pray, we'll go humbly before God asking him to expand our appreciation for him and our desire to be with him.

Prayer

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Lord, help us to camp here. Help us to see all of the things that are going on in our lives, all of the things that you have sovereignly ordained as opportunities to grow in our knowledge of the wonder of who you are. Help us to approach you and cherish your name, reverence your name.

Lord, it is an incredibly intimate gift that you've given us yourself. And we rejoice that through Christ Jesus, we can have the fullest expression of what it means to have your name. We can have you because we are one with you in Christ Jesus. Lord, help us to bask in that. Help us as we bask in that to see the cares and concerns of this world fade away. Help us to rightly place our affections not on the things of this world but upon you. And help us, in the result of that, to just rejoice and to celebrate.

Lord, we thank you and praise you that you are a God who hallows your name. Hallow your name, O Lord, in our hearts and in the hearts of those around the world. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Tithes and Offerings

During this time, normally in our worship service, we'd take up our tithes and offerings and I just want to point out that this is a way—not a way in which we just very practically fund the church and all of our exercises, though it does do that—but this is an act of worship, a way in which we cherish God.

I remember a time when I was at St. David's where we were having a time of worship and I saw a bunch of high school students as they were singing take out their car keys and throw it up towards the front of the room. It became obvious what they were doing—their cars, right? The principal thing of importance to high school students. They were throwing that at the feet of God as they were singing praises. It was one of the coolest visuals that I've had of worship.

So as we collect our tithes and offerings, virtually or however you choose to give, recognize that this is your way of rightly positioning the things of this world before the ultimate thing for you as believers, which is a holy and righteous and merciful and amazing God. There are lots of different ways that you can give. Those will be on the screen, and we'll sing as a final song offering up to God our worship and praise of him.

Benediction

May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, and may you be filled with all the fullness of God.

May you go in that fullness. — Ephesians 3:17-19

Amen.