Tuesday, September 4, 2012
The Lord's Prayer Part I - Talking to the Father about the Father, Part 22 of 50
TEXT: "In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name." (Matthew 6:9)
IDEA: We can hallow God’s name in many ways in our lives.
PURPOSE: To help listeners realize the many different ways we can reverence God’s name.
Someone has observed that a good sermon or a good lesson has to answer at least two basic questions: “What?” and “So what?”
What do you think that means, and do you agree with it?
We have been thinking about the first petition in the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be your name.”
I. What are we asking for in this request?
Our prayers will not make God more holy any more than water can be made wetter.
Martin Luther observed, “We cannot add to the holiness of God’s name nor take from it, any more than we can add to the brilliance of the sun by lighting a candle or wipe out its existence by raising an umbrella.”
We are praying for ourselves as we pray: May you be God to us as we pray.
II. So What? How can we do that? Kent Hughes in his book on the Lord’s Prayer suggests several ways in which we can reverence the Father in heaven.
We are careful not to profane God’s name in our speech. We don’t take His name lightly.
We reverence God’s name in our private and public worship. Is God’s name truly lifted up when we gather for a “worship service”? How?
We reverence God’s name when our beliefs about Him are worthy of Him.
We cannot honor His name if we don’t understand it or don’t try to know it or Him. We may be honoring another god whom we have created.
To hallow God’s name means to acknowledge God for who He is, namely, GOD.
We honor God’s name when we live in a manner that reflects that He is “our Father in heaven.”
We show that we really do have a heavenly Father that we trust, in contrast to others in our society gripped with fear and anxiety.
We model this by the way we live God’s fatherliness to others.
How could we reflect the Father to others in the ways we relate to them?
