Prayer as Adoration
Notes
Transcript
What is prayer all about?
What is prayer all about?
It isn’t a coincidence that this prayer model that Jesus gave us starts with addressing God and putting him in his rightful place. You’ll notice all of verse 9 and 10 deal with addressing God and His glory, His kingdom, His will.
All of those things should make prayer for us a focus on God FIRST and our wants, needs, desires should always be secondary or further down.
We talked last week about how God is our Father and how since He is in Heaven, then He has all of the resources available to accomplish what He desires to carry out. He is OUR Father and He cares about us.
But, know this - God desires worship. God is more concerned with the worship of Himself than He is with our desires and needs. Why is that? Why would God be more concerned about His Glory than He is about us and our needs? Well - very simply put - God knows that we can only think about things rightly when we are focusing on Him as our primary object of worship. Think there are any other things for us to worship these days? I think so.
I think this is summed up best by Matthew 6:33 “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you”
You see right there - that’s it. We worship HIM first, we glorify Him first, we magnify Him first. Everything else comes second! A distant second!
That’s why God is so concerned for His own glory and His rightful place in our lives and as we are concerned here tonight - our praying. Let’s read this whole model prayer for context.
“Pray, then, in this way:
‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
‘Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
‘Give us this day our daily bread.
‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’
Primarily tonight I want to focus on this phrase “Hallowed be your name”
I submit to you tonight that this phrase right here is the essence of all worship and all prayer. It should be the very theme of our Christian life. Our life should be summed up by “hallowing God’s name”.
What does it mean to “hallow” This is surely an old-time word that has lost it’s meaning today in our time.
The greek word is “hagiazo” which means “to sanctify, or make holy”. It means to revere, to sanctify, to lift up, to be kept or made holy.
So, literally this means here that we are “sanctifying God’s name”, we are lifting His name up as Holy, we are reverent towards God and all that He is.
And I think this is a good transition from the first part of verse 9 where it talks about God as “Our Father” to making sure we are reverent to His name.
It’s good to think of God as “our Father”, but we also need to be respectful and reverent right? I mean, don’t you see kids nowadays being disrespectful or irreverent to their parents in public? I mean, just downright disrespectful in general! It’s appalling to see how kids don’t respect their parents today. I’m sure it’s been that way since the beginning of time, it’s just that I’m getting older and I see it more.
I want my kids to come to me when they need something, but I can’t be their “buddy” in the sense that they can treat me in the same way they treat their friends you know? There is a certain respect that parents have to claim with their kids, no matter how close to them they are. They respect them because they are their parents.
O magnify the Lord with me,
And let us exalt His name together.
Magnify HIS name. That’s what we are after here. It is a burning desire that David had that everybody would bow before God in adoration and praise because He is our KING! You don’t disrespect the king right? What happens if you disrespected the King in these times? Not good.
Is this the highest good and the most important thing to us in our lives that we magnify and glorify God for His rightful place in our lives? I suggest that it should be. Our prayers should be saturated with praise and adoration of God for who He is.
The Jews in this regard were very good. They esteemed God’s name with honor and they guarded it’s holiness. The Jews felt so serious about esteeming God’s name that they wouldn’t even say the letters together. They wouldn’t even say the name out loud.
They were so careful that they took two common names for the Lord in “Adonai” and “Elohim” and combined them to make the word “Jehovah” so that they didn’t use the literal YWHY that spelled God’s name.
They took this serious. This may be the one and only thing that they had covered in this Sermon on the Mount.
Here, Jesus is saying in this prayer that we should treat God with the highest respect and glorify Him in His rightful place in our lives.
I wonder, do we do that like we should? Do we honor Him in every part of our lives?
There is a phrase often repeated in the OT
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
Fools despise wisdom and instruction.
This is what Jesus is saying. The way to know true happiness, true peace, true righteousness, true blessing in this life is to “fear the Lord”
What does it mean to “fear the Lord”. It doesn’t mean fear like we know the word to be used. It means a reverential awe. It is likened to the story where Moses went up on the mountain and when he came back down after being in God’s presence, his face shone. His face was literally shining because of the presence of the Lord.
To fear the Lord is to behold him in a great awe that is second to none. We are to go to Him as Father, and revere Him as KING. What a privilege.
Look at these petitions as we see them here in this prayer if you would. There are 6 petitions.
hallowed be Your name
Your kingdom come
Your will be done
Give us daily bread
Forgive us our debts
Do not lead us into temptation
What do we see with the first 3 petitions? They are all about God. They put God in His rightful place in our prayers. We are asking for God to keep His name holy, for His kingdom to come, and for His will to be done.
I’m telling you right now, if we inserted more of that in our prayers, then we would see greater fruit in our spiritual lives.
“I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world; they were Yours and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.