Thank you guys. I'll have the snacks.
Just teasing, I want to invite you to just consider the prayer
again. We're in the series on the
Lord's Prayer and in that we're considering how it's a prayer
for every day. And our our passage this week
again is just 4 words. How would be your name?
You know, when we imagined
success? A lot of us have some kind of
large vision of what that might be.
I know I did. When I entered into university,
I had a very defined picture of success, including the car I
would drive, what the property would look like, what life
around the pool in the back was going to be like.
Like, I had this materialistic vision of success that was
really shaping me and shaping my drive.
Some of that came because, you know, my dad was an immigrant.
And so he just captured that North American dream of what was
possible, what he hoped was possible, especially in a
meritocracy where it was supposed to be your merit and
your opportunity to exceed or succeed.
So all kinds of movies through the years on success.
Can you think of a movie on success?
Turn to your neighbor and tell them that movie.
I'm pretty sure that no one mentioned Mahogany from 1975.
It's a Diana Ross film and it is very painful to watch because of
the vision of success that captured her and carried her.
And there's this terrible scene at the end where the person who
loved her most, she is screaming at him and saying I hate you, I
hate you, You're just a loser and you don't want me to succeed
in life. And he pours her whiskey on top
of his head and he turns and he says, let me tell you something
and don't ever forget it. Success is nothing without
someone you love to share it with.
If you ever become Tracy Chambers again, you know where
I'll be. Her vision of success had
radically changed who she is and who she was in that film.
Now, there's a lot of purveyors of success today, and they they
come at us with an old philosophy, A philosophy of
Stoicism, that we should eliminate our desires, or at
least be in total control of them.
We should lift more weight. We should be the last one to
leave the lab. We should be the one who just
perseveres through it all. In fact, they are in some ways
trying to help a generation that feels stuck in the basement.
But here's Peterson. He says you should be a monster,
an absolute monster, and then you should learn to control it.
Here's Haines, who says an outlier will never allow someone
to outwork them. If you're not the hardest
working person you know, then you're not working hard enough.
Oh good, there were no amens. And then, Goggins, it's possible
to transcend anything that doesn't kill you.
I know we know the song. If it doesn't kill you, it only
makes you. At least that's what we're
hoping. That's what we're hoping.
But Jesus actually shows us a different way to the purest kind
of success in our lives, the success that's drawn from who we
were created to be created in communion with God.
So our society and its messages on how to make the world help us
and actually pulls us away from this phrase.
Hallowed be your name. Hallowed be your name, is the
first petition of Jesus because it is the first impulse of his
life. On first glance, this seems to
be far from our personal battles and struggles to get things done
on earth. Hallowed be your name.
However, even a surface reading of the scripture reminds us that
the earth is not a neutral space.
This is a place of great conflict, sometimes subtle but
always intense conflict for the affections of our souls.
Therefore, we need this prayer every day.
Our Father hallowed be your name.
Hallowed be your name the language.
Hallowed be your name. Say it with me.
Hallowed be your name it. It feels sort of strange and
odd. It feels foreign in our mouths,
except for Halloween, And we may be familiar with the shape of
these words, but we're unfamiliar with the depth of
them. We're unfamiliar with the depth
of impact that Jesus anticipated praying this prayer and asking
God to do it would have in our world and in our relationship
with God. So the disciples have asked Lord
teach us how to pray. And so Jesus brings some
relational order to their prayer life by connecting them to a
Father who loves them deeply and cares for them.
And then to correct the most wayward affection of our lives,
4 words. Hallowed be your name.
So first, let's consider the meaning of your name.
You all have one, Some of you have two, some of you have
three. I know some of you even have
four names. And it's very complicated when
you immigrate to Canada because they don't want you to have
4:00, They want to reduce your names.
Our name connects us in some ways to our parents generation,
to what was happening then, and even to the hopes for the
future. A name may connect a person to
the generation that's come way before them and connect them
with some sense of honor to someone in those previous
generations. The name may hold a promise of a
quality of character that's to be nurtured in a child, or your
name may simply tell you what day you were born on.
Right throughout the Bible, names have meaning Nabal.
His name means fool, and he royally lives out his
foolishness. In First Samuel, Isaac means
laughter, and we're connected to the miraculous birth and how
joyful his parents were at him being born.
Sometimes people change their names because of life situations
or hopes. Ruth's motherinlaw, Naomi, when
she returned home, told them. Don't call me Naomi, That's not
my name. It's Mara.
And Mara means bitter, for the experience of the previous
years, living as exile or foreigner out of Israel had
caused her immense loss and grief.
And she says, I'm Mara, I'm bitter.
One of Jesus's disciples, Simon. We actually know him as Peter
because Jesus changed his name. Jesus says, hey, from now on
we're going to call you Peter, which means rock.
And then Jesus went on the transform Peter.
So that in that disciplining community, Peter was changed
from a man who was always shifting according to the winds
and the tides to actually be a man who was a rock who could be
counted on in the faith community.
So a name, A name we know to ask what's in a name, we know to ask
that. And the marketers who are
running ads, the influencers always trying to add a plus to
their life or to a product, are always trying to get us to
associate a name not just with a product, but a reputation with a
kind of character so that the ads value to our life to meet
our deepest longing and fears. I remember thinking as a kid
running track, if only I had better shoes, I could run
faster. It wasn't true then.
It might be true now. So a name is more than a line on
a certificate. It's more than A tag.
It holds the character and reputation of a person.
It holds that in our minds and likewise to the name of God.
So Jesus prays our Father, hallowed be your name.
So to know the name of God or even the nicknames of God is to
be presented with stories and histories and lives in the
Scripture who know something of the character and the eternal
truth of God. In our service today we read
Psalm 23 and within that Psalm are descriptors that are all
connected to the names of God or the nicknames of God.
The Lord is my shepherd. And it then goes on to describe
God as provider, peace, healer, righteousness, help, banner,
sanctifier, everlasting, and our inheritance.
And that's Psalm 23. We run through it without
actually connecting all those descriptions to the names and
nicknames of God. Now we sang some of them, and
you all tried to hold the beat as we sang of Jehovah Rafah,
Jehovah Nissi, Jehovah Shalom. These are all those references
to God the Lord as our healer, our defender, our peace.
Hallowed be your name. Now you've you've seen the
situations where someone gets mad at someone because they're
talking about their wife and say you get her name out of your
mouth, right? But here God is Jesus is praying
and saying hallowed be your name, particularly in our mouths
and in our hearts. And so Daryl Johnson says this
word. Hallowed is actually the word
holify, make holy, holify. So we're going to use that
little phrase today in reference to hallowed.
The word hallow means to make holy, to holify.
Now that's complicated for us as well, because what does holy
mean? If we were to ask people on the
street what does holy mean? They'd probably say, well, I
think it means pure or clean. That's what holy means.
But then the word holy also gets stuck on to other things as a
expletive, so holy and then we add something to it and so then
it's stuck on to show that we're shocked or maddened or mind
blown in some ways. And so I don't think Jesus
necessarily, but perhaps he does have cleaned up and shocked, or
maybe awakened in mind because Jesus uses the same word in John
17 where he prays. Sanctify them by the truth.
For I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified,
that is, hallow them by the truth.
Sanctify them. Hallow them.
Holify them, just as I holify myself that they might be
holified. The holifying work of Jesus
reflects an Old Testament concept of holy, which means to
be distinct from, to be separate from, to have a quality of
differentness that is holy. Now you can be sure that most of
us starting in Grade 3 didn't actually want to be different.
We kept looking around, starting in Grade 3 or so to figure out,
well, how can we be like everybody else?
How can we have and be the same as others?
And we felt our difference and we just wanted to be same.
And it really becomes intense by the time you're 15.
And so to pray this prayer, hallowed be your name, Holify
your name in us as a people and even on the earth as it is in
heaven. God says be holy, for I am holy.
It's important for us to consider how perception makes it
difficult for us to truly reflect the character of God,
that our perception of God, God is already holy, so His name in
our mouths and minds and hearts must reflect and carry the
weight of this reality, of this character and of his precious
value. So it is a problem of our
perception and our knowledge, and it is possible to have the
wrong perception of God. So while we may know someone's
name, if we have the wrong perception of them, of the
person, we've attributed something to them that is not
true, and we're on track for some major misunderstandings.
Just ask married people. The story I'm telling myself is
that you didn't want to cook dinner tonight, so you came home
late and now I'm starving. What?
Tell that to the traffic on Main Street, right?
Wrong perception. The story we're telling
ourselves and we miss we do this to God all the time.
In fact, research does demonstrate that we have a
tendency to project unto God all kinds of biases, even our
politics. And so we need to remember that
we live in a space that is not neutral.
The powers and principalities are particularly keen that we
misperceive God, that we have the wrong perception of God.
And from the beginning in Genesis we see the snake that
approached Eve and Adam and called into question.
First, God's word, did God really say you must not eat from
any tree in the garden? Do you see what he did there?
And then, second to question God's character, you will not
certainly die. For God knows that when you eat
it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing
good and evil. And so a wrong view of God calls
into question God's trustworthiness, God's goodness,
God's holiness. And in this instant, even the
completeness and goodness of Adam and Eve was called into
question. Oh, you're not really enough for
this world. Oh, you're not really enough for
a relationship with God. And so when their perception of
God and themselves was tarnished, they were capable of
directly disobeying God and entering into a deathly way.
You know Jesus told a parable of how wrong perception of God, in
this case a manager can have. In the parable of the talents,
one manager buries his money and avoiding any risk, and when the
manager returns he gathers all those to whom he entrusted his
wealth. And this one comes last.
Master, I knew that you were a hard man, harvesting where you
have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered
seed. So I was afraid and went out and
hid your gold in the ground. Here it is.
And the manager says, you wicked servant.
So you thought I was a hard man. Why didn't you just invest it at
the bank? Then I would get a little bit of
interest. Jesus is showing us there that
when we have the wrong perception of God, we might not
even be operating according to the perception we have, but
instead we're just being driven by fear and not love.
When we have the wrong perception of God, Fear and
apathy rather than love and trust mark our lives.
Jesus teaches directly on the ways of lies and the spin that
Satan the devil has on a group of people.
He said to this group of people who were denying that they were
enslaved to sin, they were denying, hey, we're not sinners.
And Jesus says, look, you are unable to hear what I say.
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out
the father that your father's desires.
He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding for the
truth. For there is no truth in him.
And when he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a
liar and the father of lies. Do you know when we're most
vulnerable to lies, to the lies of the powers and principalities
and the lives of Satan? When we feel hurt, has anybody
here been hurt? Then we've all had those moments
of intense vulnerability to the lives of the powers and
principalities. Darkest.
Dr. Marcus Warner observes that when we're wounded, the devil,
the powers and principalities come along and seek to sow lies
into our hearts and minds. These take root and then we make
some kind of pronouncement or vow about who we will be and our
place in the world. For example, we may say, when
hurt, no one will ever see me weak again.
I will never let anyone close to me where I'm vulnerable again or
I see now that God can't be trusted because this terrible
thing happened to me. I had a a strange moment when I
was about 16 years old where for the first time I worked up the
courage to sing a solo at church.
Our music minister had brought me through that choir and was
discipling me and said, Craig, you have a voice you could sing.
And so we worked on a song. It was the touch of the master's
hand and it told a story. At the end it was okay, but I
was walking down the hall and one lady in the church, she came
up to me and she put her hands on her hips and said, well,
Craig O'Brien, I thought you were just a stick in the mud.
Ah, and I felt wounded. I felt wounded and and I walked
away in that moment and what crystallized in my heart was
never again will anyone think I'm a stick in the mud and I
became very driven for achievement.
It's like that type A personality just went Bing and
it was on and I was hard in my heart.
It was always lurking there behind me, that vow and creating
some kind of poisonous fruit. And poisonous fruit becomes a
stronghold that holds you and it holds me and it keeps me and us
from being who God is really and created us to be.
They take on a life of their own.
Perhaps one of the stories of the greatest strongholds is in
Genesis Chapter 11. There, in the story of the Tower
of Babel, pride and the all consuming desire to make a name
for themselves was dominating that city.
Come, they said, let us build ourselves a city with a tower
that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for
ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered
over the face of the earth. Did you notice that it wasn't
just ambition, but it was also fear.
They were being driven to avoid weakness, to avoid
vulnerability. Are you hoping your degree will
do that for you? How are strongholds to be taken
down? Not by taking hold of the
poisonous fruit, but right by returning to the vow.
By returning to uproot the lie, By returning to seek healing for
the wound. When strongholds come down, a
deep desire for the name, the reality, the character, the
presence of God must occupy us, or something else will again.
We must return to the truth about God.
We need to pray. Our Father hallowed be your name
on earth in here as it is in heaven.
So now we're asking the Father for deliverance.
Now we're asking the Father for healing.
Now we're asking for the Full disclosure and reality of who
God is. Strange thing is that when you
have that in your life, you may also share in God's pain.
You may share in God's anxiety that His name is not cherished
among the nations that is profaned even by those who claim
his name. That the reputation of God is
tarnished and the true character of God is even hidden rather
than made clear and cherished. This is our problem too, in the
history of the Church, isn't it? And so we share in that pain.
When we pray, our Father hallowed be your name.
And this is the nature of Jesus's prayer, teaching his
disciples to address a root problem, our pride taking over
our hearts, our minds and our relationships.
Do you know worship is very connected to this prayer.
When you say our Father hallowed be your name, we're joining
Jesus in the ultimate concern of his life.
When Jesus was 12, he traveled to Jerusalem, as his parents had
made the habit of going every Passover.
But on that one, when they returned to Galilee, Jesus
stayed behind and Jesus remained in the Temple.
Three days later, Mary found him.
Can you imagine the anxiety of parenting in that moment you
find your kid and there's this rush of release, but there's
also this. I just want to pinch your little
head off because it is just overwhelming.
And in that moment, this is what she says.
Son, why have you treated us this way?
Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.
And just like every 12 year old Jesus says, why?
Why were you searching for me? Didn't you know that I had to be
in my father's house? Or about my father's business,
my father's life? It was his ambition that the
Father's name would be hallowed, you know, Later his family would
encourage him, Hey, you, you should hurry off to Jerusalem
and make a name for yourself. And there was even a group that
said, Jesus, let's hurry you over here and turn you into our
king. And they wanted to make him king
by force, but that was not the Father's way of hallowing his
name. So Jesus says, Father, glorify
me in the presence with the glory I had with you before the
world began. Jesus always returned to his
relationship with the Heavenly Father, and therein is his
greatest joy. Notice, he says in that prayer
in John 17. I'm coming to you now in Jesus's
pathway to coming to the Father is going to be the cross, he
says. I'm coming to you now, and I say
these things while I'm still in the world, so that they may have
the full measure of my joy within them.
I have given them your word, but the world has hated them, for
they are not of the world as I am not of the world.
This is what happens when we pray, hallowed be your name.
We're like strangers in the world, Jesus goes on.
My prayer is not that you would take them out of the world, but
that you would protect them from the Evil One.
What does the evil one want? To do?
So lies into our hearts and minds.
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth.
As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world
for them. I sanctify myself that they too
may be holy. This is the ambition that takes
Jesus to the cross. Not that Jesus loved suffering.
In fact, the vision of that compelled him to say, oh,
Father, take this cup from me if there's another way.
But Jesus loved the Heavenly Father, and so he always
returned to that joy in relationship.
In Hebrews, the writer says, For the joy set before him, Jesus
endured the cross scorning at shame, and sat down at the right
hand of the throne of God. And so every day when we pray
with earnestness, our Father Hallow, your name on earth as it
is in heaven, we can be sure He will He will start in you, and
He will start in me. And He will take all the
delights and all of the hardships of this world to
refine us by holifying His name in us, by displaying the
character of Jesus in us, no matter the circumstance, so that
we will begin to grow up as his people.
If we're praying the Lord's Day, Lord's Prayer every day, we must
give thought to our lives and the relationships at home and at
work with the Holy Spirit. As NT Wright says, it is not
enough to say one's prayers in private, maintain high personal
morality, and then go to work to rebuild the Tower of Babel.
What's happening on Monday? Earnestly pray Our Father,
hallowed be your name. You know where I'm going.
Your name be hallowed, not mine. So the pro script and the
watermark of our lives needs to be this.
This life was lived for the glory of God.
To God be the glory. Let's pray the Lord's Prayer
again. Our Father in heaven, hallowed
be your name. Your Kingdom come, your will be
done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today Our Daily Bread, and forgive us our debts, as we
also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
Amen name. And you're getting some of the
depth of this. He's going to start to answer.
So 15 years ago I shared that story of the stick in the mud
and after the service a a woman came up to me.
She was probably almost 70 and she said, I know you think that
was a word of death, but it's actually a word of life.
I said, oh, she had my attention, right, right.
Then I was listening and she said that's a word of life as
well. You felt it and took it as a
word of death, but it's a word of life.
For I am part of water and stream restoration and we are
always taking sticks and sticking them in the mud.
And they grow to be trees, great trees beside that stream,
holding and conserving that land and restoring it to what it was
meant to be. So she said, you go and be a
stick in the mud. Yeah, I felt like cheering.
I felt like I was had just been released from something I had
carried with me for over 20 years in my body, in my mind.
And so today we want to invite you into prayer that if you're
like, yeah, I've I've got that word of death, I've got that
lie. That's there.
And me, oh, you'll never change. Oh, things will never be
different. Oh, I must be this.
What word or vow is carrying you?
We want to invite you to meet with our prayer team.
They'll be down at this end and over here.
And so after our blessing. If you would like prayer, just
make your way down to see Sarah or Susan here to pray with you
today. Let's give a blessing to each
other. If you would put a hand on the
shoulder next to you, and let's offer this blessing now.
May the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your
whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord
Jesus Christ comes again. God will make this happen, for
he who calls you is faithful. May the grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ be with you. Amen.