4C The Christian Life Means Engaging In Prayer
Stand Firm: Living in a Post-Christian Culture • Sermon • Submitted
0 ratings
· 30 viewsNotes
Transcript
1 Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3 Give us each day our daily bread, 4 and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”
Adoring His Name
Adoring His Name
2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.
While we are rightly thrilled to have unrestricted, immediate access to our heavenly Father— to be able to rush into His presence crying, “Abba! Father!” and spilling out the issues of our hearts to Him— we must also remember that He is sacred and holy. Jesus’ instructions for prayer remind us that we must also come soberly and humbly to our Father’s offering the honor and respect He is due.
Christ’s model for prayer quickly follows the identification of God as our Father with the sobering line “Hallowed be Your name” (Luke 11: 2).
This is not just a casual bit of religious jargon. It’s not a sanctified “Long live the King!” or “God save the Queen!” And we must ensure it doesn’t become like that through familiarity. Rather, this is a statement that recognizes the enormous respect required when entering God’s holy presence.
We looked two weeks ago at the Jews and how they took those cautions to the extreme. They wouldn’t say or write the name of God, so they invented other ways to refer to Him without using His name. They treated the name of God as though it was too holy to even speak, and over time their fastidious honor for God’s name became a form of legalism.
We don’t need to take such an extreme perspective. But in a culture that skews too sentimental and too casual, this is a valuable mandate that our Father’s name deserves and demands our respect. I have to be honest tonight this I think is a real problem in modern Christianity in some circles. The “Jesus is my boyfriend” concept. As His children, we are welcomed into His presence, but we must be aware that we are walking into the Holy of Holies. While there is familiarity, love, and a personal relationship of affection and generosity, it must be balanced with reverence and awe from us.
Think back to Moses and the burning bush, what did God tell Moses to do?
What did God tell Moses when he went to the top of Mount Sinai?
Christ singled out the “name” of God, but the idea is not that we honor that as if it were His title. His name is synonymous with His person— all that He is— manifesting itself in all that He does. So the “name” of God is that which refers to the sum of His character, His nature, His attributes, His personality, and His works.
In John 17: 6, Jesus said,
6 “I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.
What did Jesus mean here?
He meant: “I have manifested You, Your Person, Your power, and Your truth to the men You have given me out of this world. I have put You on display.” Honoring the name of God means honoring all that He is and does.
Think about all the additional names of God that identify particular features of the fullness of His holy character. He is called Elohim, the name that acknowledges Him as Creator— the first word used to name God in the entire Bible. He is El-elyon, “God Most High.” In Genesis 14: 19, we read, “Blessed be Abram of God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth.” He is called Yahweh-jireh, “The LORD Will Provide” (Gen. 22: 14). He is Yahweh-nissi, “The LORD is My Banner” (Ex. 17: 15); Yahweh-ropheka, “The LORD. . . your healer” (Ex. 15: 26); Yahweh-shalom, “The LORD is Peace” (Judg. 6: 24); Yahweh-roi, “The LORD is my shepherd” (Ps. 23: 1); Yahweh-tsidkenu, “The LORD our righteousness” (Jer. 23: 6); Yahweh-sabaoth, “The LORD of hosts” (1 Sam. 1: 3); Yahweh-shamah, “The LORD is there” (Ezek. 48: 35), and Yahweh-meqaddeskem, “The LORD who sanctifies you” (Ex. 31: 13). He is the eternal “I AM” (Ex. 3: 14; John 8: 58). He’s also Adonai, “the Lord.” His “name” is the sum of all those names and the glorious truths they represent. When we pray, we go to Him as Father, but we must be aware that we are entering the presence of the Lord in His fullness.
What does Hallowed mean?
The word hallowed has become archaic and has mostly dropped out of contemporary use. It is usually associated with cloistered halls, long robes, dismal chants, candles, musty rooms, mournful music, and other high church traditions. However, hallowed simply means “to be holy.” Swapping out the two brings a little clarity without losing the meaning of Christ’s instructions. We address God as Father but follow it closely with the reverential reminder holy be Your name. This is not a means of bestowing holiness on God’s name. Rather, it is clearly recognizing His perfect holiness and honoring Him accordingly. John Calvin said, “For God’s Name to be hallowed means exactly that God’s Name is to be held in the honour which is deserved, that men may never speak or think of Him without the highest reverence.” Hallowing God’s name is giving voice to our hearts’ affirmation that He is to be honored above all things.
This high and exalted view of God is essential as we come to Him in prayer. In one sense, it would be easy to let the words “Hallowed be Your name” thoughtlessly tumble out of our mouths without considering their significance. But such casual blasphemy betrays a heart that is still cold to the truth about God and the glory of His character. Put directly, children of God won’t carelessly toss around their Father’s name. When we hallow the name of God— that is, when we afford Him the honor He is due— we are affirming that He is set apart from everything common and profane, and that He is to be prized, esteemed, adored, praised, and worshiped as the only One who is infinitely worthy of glory. In his book The Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer wrote,
“We must think worthily of God. It is morally imperative that we purge from our minds all ignoble concepts of the Deity and let Him be the God in our minds that He is in His universe.”
Hallowing God’s name also means we believe He is who He says He is in Scripture. Hebrews 11: 6 says, “He who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Put simply, we hallow the name of God by faithfully studying His Word to know Him. If we’re not truly worshiping the God of the Bible— if we’re settling for a deity of our own design, built to suit our whims and interests— then we’re only honoring our own imaginations. It is a horrific heresy to redefine God. Hallowing God means knowing and praising Him according to His testimony to Himself in Scripture. If we are to properly honor our Father, we must be passionate, eager students of His truth. We need to echo the words of David in Psalm 16: 8: “I have set the LORD continually before me.”
We also hallow God’s name when we conform our lives to His Word and His will. We can’t expect to honor God in prayer if our lives are actively dishonoring Him. Churches today are full of men and women who claim the name of Christ but reject Him with their lives and tarnish the testimony of His church. As He warned in the Sermon on the Mount, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter” (Matt. 7: 21). Our prayer is not just that God’s name would be honored in our words but that His name would be magnified and glorified in our thoughts and actions. We desire to live as Christ instructed in Matthew 5: 16: “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”
Hallowing our Father’s name means we can approach Him in confidence and that we do so on our faces, in humble recognition of His holiness.
Advancing the Kingdom
Advancing the Kingdom
2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.
After defining the proper reverential relationship to our Father, Jesus gives us a third instructive phrase in His model prayer: “Your kingdom come” (Luke 11: 2). The vain repetition of the Pharisees and the scribes, who sought to somehow badger God into doing what they wanted, is a far cry from what our Lord is telling us here. This emphasis on God’s kingdom puts the focus on His sovereignty, which is critical in our prayers. We recognize God as a loving Father, as the source of everything we need. We recognize God as sacred and absolutely holy, and we pursue His glory. And we recognize God as utterly and completely sovereign. Immediately after the celebration of intimacy and the celebration of worship comes submission. “Your kingdom come” is another way for us to say, “Do whatever advances Your kingdom.”
The kingdom of God was a central reality in Christ’s preaching. Simply put, God’s kingdom is the sphere over which He rules. In that sense, there are two kingdoms of God. The first kingdom is His universal kingdom: God is the ruler of the entire universe.
3 And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, “Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, O King of the nations!
19 The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.
But God’s authority over His creation is already absolute—it cannot increase or advance. Instead, the petition “Your kingdom come” has God’s redemptive kingdom in view. This speaks to God’s sovereign authority over His people, who are His subjects by virtue of salvation. Jesus came preaching the good news of God’s kingdom. Throughout His ministry, Christ called sinners to Himself, proclaiming,
17 From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
The King was gathering His people. So in this petition, we are asking the Lord to build His kingdom. We are praying for the advance of the gospel and the salvation of the elect.
As we see from Christ’s teaching, there are multiple dimensions to God’s redemptive kingdom. In Matthew 8: 11, He spoke of its existence in the past, noting the presence of Israel’s patriarchs “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” He also referred to the kingdom in the present, telling the Jews, “The kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17: 21). While commissioning the seventy in Luke 10: 9, He instructed them to proclaim, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” But because Israel was looking for a Messiah to institute a political kingdom, they failed to appreciate the arrival of God’s spiritual kingdom. Christ also pointed to a future fulfillment of God’s kingdom in His Olivet Discourse. Looking ahead to God’s judgment and His millennial reign, He said,
34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
With those dimensions in mind, praying that God’s kingdom would come is a shorthand way of saying, “God, do whatever it is that brings the fullness of Your redemptive purposes to fulfillment.”
In the parallel instructions found in Matthew 6, Jesus said:
10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
What is transpiring in heaven? Heaven is consumed with the exaltation of God, the worship of Christ, and the presence of holiness. It’s where God is praised and worshiped by holy saints and angels, and this is a prayer to bring such heavenly features down to earth. The church is to be the place where heaven comes down, not the place where the world comes in. That is what we pray for: “Lord, bring Your heavenly kingdom down! Build Your kingdom! Exalt Yourself! Exalt Your Son!” Only the true church can be the answer to this prayer.
Notice that no personal requests have yet been made. By now, we should be so lost in wonder, love, and praise that, without even saying so, we gladly yield our temporal concerns and needs to His wisdom and provision. We can’t truly pray “Father, hallowed be Your name; Your kingdom come” if we’re merely coming to Him to have our needs met. The opening petitions of Christ’s model prayer are meant to get our eyes off our plans and fixed on God’s glory and His eternal purposes. We’re expressing the desire for God to glorify Himself by building His kingdom. We’re praying to align with His sovereign will in seeing those whom He chose in eternity past come to Him in salvation.
One might argue, “If God already knows what He is going to do and whom He is going to save, what’s the point of praying for it?” While some who take that cavalier perspective believe they are celebrating God’s sovereignty, they’re actually making a mockery of it. We pray for God’s kingdom to come, first and foremost, because He instructed us to. Furthermore, we pray this way because it connects our hearts with God’s eternal purposes. Did the Apostle Paul indifferently sit back and assume the elect would eventually come to faith? No, he was a passionate pursuer of the lost, saying,
3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
Jesus knows the hearts of men (John 2: 25), but He still wept over Jerusalem’s unbelief (Matt. 23: 37). We should celebrate God’s sovereignty without letting it stifle our zeal for intercession or using it as an excuse to refrain from reaching out with the gospel. As Paul wrote in
11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience.
Ultimately, we pray for God’s kingdom to come because we believe the promise of James 5: 16— that “the effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.” We’re not hoping to change God’s mind or bend His will to ours. We’re praying that He will glorify Himself in the salvation of lost sinners, that He will usher in His eternal kingdom, and that He will use us to do it. Our prayers are a true spiritual means in the accomplishment of His will.
ADVERTISEMENT