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“Hallowed Be Your Name”
Praying The Lord’s Prayer, Part 3
Matthew 6:9
Lord, Teach Us to Pray
February 23, 2003
On Valentine’s Day, my wife and I went out to dinner. A word of advice: if Valentine’s Day falls on a Friday, be sure to call way ahead to some place that takes reservations! We did not, and so after stopping at one place and being turned away, we wound up at another, with a wait of an hour and 45 minutes (which ended up being more like 2 hours)!
We were finally seated, and told that Tatiana would be serving us but that she was busy, so the person talking to us asked us for our drink order. After another 10 minutes, a young lady appeared at our table and asked if we were ready to order. I asked, “Are you Tatiana?” And she smiled and said, “Yes,” and proceeded to take our order. That was the last we saw of Tatiana for a while—somebody else delivered our food, and yet another person refilled our water, and somebody else got us more bread. Tatiana did appear two more times that evening: to ask if we would like anything else to drink, and to give us our check.
Not exactly a close relationship with Tatiana. You know, she never asked me what my name was! She obviously was not interested in getting to know me.
I was at a store the other day, and the salesperson took my credit card and swiped it, and, handing it back, said, “Have a good day, Rob.” ROB!? Who’s Rob? My name on the credit card is Robert, but my friends call me
Bob, not Rob. In an effort to appear personal, some stores are training their people to no longer treat customers as business transactions, but as buddies on a first name basis. But, I think I’d rather the salesperson call me “Mr. Robinson,” or not even call me by a name. I am not your pal, this is business—I simply bought something here at the store; I am not interested in hanging out for a while and getting to know you as your buddy.
It’s not that I am not friendly to people in the marketplace. In fact I am notorious for goofing around with waiters and cashiers—trying to get them to smile and enliven their days. It’s just that names are
special.
Most people do not know your name. It is proper to exchange names in certain situations and not in others. With waiters and cashiers, you do not ordinarily exchange names because we do not expect to become friends with them, we are merely conducting business. But whenever we hope to go a little deeper into relationship with someone, no matter to what depth, we tell each other our names.
But it’s strange, isn’t it? I say a one syllable word to you, “Bob,” and you link it somehow to my face, to my voice, to my idiosyncrasies. You do not hear “Bob” and think of a something bobbing up and down in the water. When Matt says, “I’m Matt,” you connect that name him as a person, not to what you wipe your feet on when you go into the house. It is a name, and you link it to a person, no matter how unusual it may sound or whether you understand what it means.
Why? Because names help us to identify somebody as a person. But it is more than a simple identification, or else we would just exchange our Social Security numbers. None of us wants to be reduced to just another number; we want to be identified by our name. Names are personalized little sounds that do more than just identify us; they are a means of accessing our personhood. When you know a person’s name, you have access to them as a person.
We like it when people remember our name. I had a professor at Seminary who seemed to know every student’s name at the school. We were all amazed and impressed! How did he do that? When he walked by you in the hall, he’d greet you by your name, and you felt…special. Names are important. It drives you crazy when you’re telling somebody about a friend of yours and this friend’s name slips your mind for a moment. Who would believe that you’re good friends if you don’t remember his or her name? Names are important.
We have a friend who worked at Children’s Hospital and found that parents give their kids some strange names. She told us that she saw twins who were named (phonetically) “Or-án-jel-low” and “Le-món-je-low,” but the spellings of their names on their birth certificates were Orangejello and Lemonjello.
Eeeks! What horrible names!
When Linda and I named our kids, we tried to come up with unique and meaningful names. We wanted names that sounded good to our ears and had some special meaning to us. We did not want to name the kids something off-the-wall—Strawberryjello was out. Our firstborn is Trey Richard Robinson, “Trey” is both a tribute to God in the Trinity, and that he is the
third “Richard,” my father’s middle name is Richard and Linda’s father’s first name is Richard.
Our twins have special names as well. Joel is a biblical name that means “The Lord Yahweh is God.” Kaira is feminization of the biblical Greek word
kairos which means “the opportune time”—our twins were a big surprise and seemed to be a great burden at that point of our hectic life, but we submitted to God’s will that he does everything at just the right time, so we named her Kaira: the perfect, opportune time.
Names represent the uniqueness of a person and the fact that we are interpersonal creatures. Names establish relationships; they are the step in our quest to connect with another person. When I give you my name, I open the door to relationship.
1. Yahweh
Every person has a name; God has a name. When God introduced himself to Moses, he told Moses his name. The name he gave him is Yahweh. In Hebrew, Yahweh looks like the verb “to be.” Thus in Exodus 3:14, we see that God introduces himself as “I am who I am.” In other words, “I am the One who exists eternally.”
But his name is not “To Be,” or “I Am.” That is the etymology of the name, but that is not all there is to God’s name. I’ve been in Bible studies and I’ve read scholars trying to understand what God’s name means in Hebrew, but that is, I think, missing the bigger point. God’s name is not just “I Am.” God’s name is Yahweh—kind of like Kaira’s name is not “Opportune Time,” it is Kaira. When I hear the word “Kaira” I think of my little cute sweetheart. “Yahweh” is a
personal name—like Bob or Matt or Kaira or Shelley. Its Hebrew derivation matters less than the fact that, like other personal names, it offers access to God as a person!
God has given us his name! But we humans have a silly way of changing that which was supposed to be a spiritually intimate privilege and making it into a religious, distant thing. When the ancient scribes would write the name of God, YHWH in the Hebrew Bibles, they would not write in the vowels that would go with Yahweh, but the vowels that go with the word Adonai—signaling to anybody reading the Scriptures out loud that they should not utter the sacred name of God but substitute “Adonai” instead. Adonai is the Hebrew word for the title, “The Lord.”
This disappointing trend is carried forward into our English translations, where we do not read God’s name, Yahweh, but a title for Yahweh: “The
LORD.” When you read your Old Testament in a modern English translation, you have to be aware of the device they use to identify the name of God: they render it as
“LORD” (in all capitals, as opposed to “Lord” with lower-case letters to translate the Hebrew word Adonai).
Many people in older generations know God’s name as Jehovah. This is what you get when you take God’s name Yahweh, and transpose the vowels of Adonai onto it as it appears in Hebrew manuscripts (with the “y” being pronounced as a “j” and the “w” pronounced as a “v.” Yahweh = Ya-ho-wah = Je-ho-vah).
But God’s name is not “The LORD,” it is Yahweh. Anybody knows that God is “the Lord.” But only God’s people were given access to God and know him by his name, Yahweh. God gave his name to a people with whom he wanted to develop a relationship!
We, as the People of God, are in the line that flows directly from those ancient Israelites. We are the ones who have been given the great privilege of being in relationship with God! Yahweh is his name! He wants you to know him—not just know about him, as if he were somebody else’s friend. Oh no! He wants you to know him in a very real and personal way!
We live in an age in which God had said this to the prophet Jeremiah:
“I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the
LORD, (Yahweh)’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the
LORD (Yahweh).” (Jeremiah 31:33b-34a)
That is what Yahweh has always wanted from his people—a personal relationship of knowing each other. Yahweh wants to be our God, and he wants us to be his people. Through the prophet Jeremiah, he foretold of a time in which this would happen in all its fullness—when the People of God would
really know Yahweh!
When we pray to God, it is because we are on a first-name basis with him—we really know Yahweh! And we pray with the attitude of “Hallowed be your name,” for the name of Yahweh is not just any name, it is a holy name, a special name—nobody else has the name of Yahweh.
Nobody else is like our God. I do not take the fact that God gave me his name lightly; I do not take it for granted. It is an awesome privilege to be able to pray to God by name! He is not just a distant no-named entity; he is Yahweh! And he invites me to know him! How awesome is that? We live in an incredible time of wonderful privilege in the way Yahweh has given us access to himself!
This time in which we live came about through his Son, and he has a name as well.
2. Jesus
“Jesus” is actually the Greek translation of the Hebrew name Joshua, or more closely transliterated as “Yeshua” (again, the “y” has been traditionally pronounced as a “j”). The angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her to name her boy “Jesus.” The name actually is a combination of words: “Ye” is a shortening of Yahweh, and “shua” means “saves.” In other words, Jesus’ name means “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh delivers” and that is exactly what Jesus came to do—save us from the penalty of our sins—which is the cutting off of a relationship with God. We need deliverance: Yahweh is holy, pure, righteous. He wants relationship with his people. But his people are sinful, impure, unrighteous—slaves to sin and therefore bound to death. So Yahweh delivers us (through Jesus) so that we can have that relationship with him, so that, as he had said through Jeremiah, “I will be their God and they will be my people.”
Whereas the name Yahweh was very unusual, the name Jesus was very common. “Yeshua” was as common in the Hebrew world as “Jim” or “Michelle” is in our world. The commonness of the name shows God’s incredible humility in fully participating with us in our common existence. Here is God, the Almighty Creator, the Sovereign Lord, becoming one with his creations—that is an almost unfathomable thought.
But he had a purpose in doing so: as Paul told the Colossians, “Christ is the visible image of the invisible God”
(Col. 1:15).
And to the Philippians, “He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form. And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying a criminal’s death on a cross”
(Phil. 2:7-8).
And then we read in Hebrews, “Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—Jesus also became flesh and blood by being born in human form. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the Devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he deliver those who have lived all their lives as slaves to the fear of dying” (Heb. 2:14-15).
It is now common practice to end our prayers with “In Jesus’ name, Amen.” When we pray this, it is not a magical incantation, like “Open Sesame.” We are saying that we are praying to a person in the name of a person. Jesus is our intermediary to God. And it is because of Jesus, and only because Jesus, that anyone has access to God in prayer. It is Jesus who taught us The Lord’s Prayer, our model prayer. And he tells us to pray, “Hallowed be thy name.” In a sense, while we hallow God the Father’s name, we must always remember to hallow Jesus Christ’s name. We must remember how hallowed Jesus’ name is as well.
“At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
(Philippians 2:10-11).
What a name! That is why those who are so flippant with using Jesus Christ’s name as a swear word had better rethink what they are doing. Hallowed be thy name!
And because Jesus is the Son of Yahweh, he can reintroduce us to Yahweh in a very personal way. He tells us that we can call Yahweh not just by his name, but by an endearment.
3. Father
Jesus opens the Lord’s prayer by telling us to pray to “Our Father.” That is God’s name to his children.
My name is Robert, my friends call me Bob, but my children call me “Daddy.” And that is what Jesus tells us we can call Yahweh. Abba, Daddy.
What a special name that is! Father is a name to be hallowed in our hearts—we are to set it apart in our hearts as a special name of endearment. When we address God as Abba, Father, we are praying to Yahweh in a very special relationship as his very loved children.
As we learned last week, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”
(1 John 3:1)
That is why I pray, “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name. Thank you for lavishing us with the love of a father for his children. May I live my life treasuring the name of my God—Yahweh, Jesus, and Father!”
What kind of God is our God? If you had any doubt that God has opened himself personally to us, it should be eliminated by the fact that God has offered us his personal names! What else can that mean, but that God wants to be known? He not only tells us his names, he invites us to use them!
And he not only gives us his name so that we can know him, he knows us and each of our names as well. You see, if you know God, Jesus says God has written your name in the book of life
(see Revelation 3:5).
If you meet Jesus, he will introduce you to Yahweh, and you will call Yahweh “Father.”
Then you are God’s children, you are the people of God, and you will know God!
And you will pray, from the bottom of your heart,
“Hallowed be your name!”
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