The Lord's PrayerSample

Praise

Hallowed be your name

Most of the phrases of the Lord’s Prayer are utterly straightforward, but one that requires thought is hallowed be your name. The New Living Translation says ‘may your name be kept holy’, which helps. It may also be of assistance to know that in the Bible, to talk about someone’s name is to refer to everything that they are and represent. Actually, we are not far away from this in English when we say that someone ‘dragged my name through the mud’ or ‘your name got a lot of praise in the meeting’.

To hallow God’s name or to ‘keep it holy’ is, at its simplest, to honour or praise God in such a way that he, and everything about him, is lifted up above everything that we are. It is to remind ourselves that God should be elevated and raised up high above everything else. We need to do this because there is a sort of ‘spiritual gravity’ loose in the world that tends to drag everything downwards, including God. This dragging down of God can occur at every level. For instance, an individual might confidently state that because they were ‘doing God’s work,’ any criticism of them was to attack God. In the same way that I presume most of us would refuse to deliberately walk over our country’s flag, so we need to be very careful about doing or saying anything that might smear or contaminate God’s name. A lot of damage has been done to Christianity by people demeaning God’s name through attaching it to questionable ventures. 

It’s important to remember that the Lord’s Prayer starts off focusing on the Lord himself. In the Ten Commandments we see that the first four commandments are about how we relate to God and the remaining six are about how we relate to human beings. The Lord’s Prayer has a similar pattern and it’s another reminder that true prayer should be focused on God and not us. 

To begin prayer by lifting God up in praise and honour is an excellent way to start, for several reasons:

• Praising God reminds us of the reality of the universe. We are surrounded by all sorts of authorities and individuals who claim to be masters of everything that affects us. To praise God reminds us that, whatever daily pressures we face, it is God alone who is ultimately in charge.


• Praising God reminds us of who he is and, by implication, who we are. Even if through Christ we can know God as our perfect parent; when we come in prayer to God we can never sit down before him as equals. Praise doesn’t simply lift God up; by humbling us it puts us in our right place.


• Praising God allows us to have the right focus. To praise our heavenly Father at the start of our prayer is to make it God-focused. It is like orienting a map along with the compass so that it points to true north. So powerful are our own personalities and concerns that it’s very easy to make ourselves the focus of our praying and so distort what we say with the result that our prayers become little more than shopping lists. Without anchoring our prayer in praise there is always a danger that we come to see God as little more than someone who can respond to our needs. We create an idol in which he is simply the great supernatural doctor, the heavenly bank or the shopping mall ‘in the sky’ and an individual whose purpose is little more than to simply heal our ills, enrich our wealth or supply all our wants. 


• Praise reminds us who God is. Many Christians neglect the Old Testament and this is unfortunate because it is in those pages that the foundations are laid for the New Testament ideas of who God really is. In the Old Testament we see God as Shepherd, King, Judge, Redeemer, the Holy One and so on. Biblically based praise gives us a richer and deeper idea of who God is.


• Praise lifts God up and elevates him. The old Sunday school rule is wise and good: ‘little God, big problems; big God, little problems’. Praise lifts up God!