To Encourage You

Matthew 6:9 “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

When you pray, how often do you begin your prayers in the way Jesus told us to?  Are the first words out of your mouth about your problems, your needs, and the problems and needs of others, or is it about the greatness of our God? 

There is so much packed into the opening sentence of what we call “The Lord’s prayer” that we can’t possibly plumb the depths of it.  In our prayers Jesus told us to begin by acknowledging the “hallowedness” of God’s great name, i.e., His being.  The word “hallowed” means to venerate, to regard with great respect, to regard as holy.  “Holy” means to be set apart.  It carries with it the sense that God is “other” than us. He is high above us. As the prayer states, He’s in heaven, and as God has told us, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).  He’s high above us in that where we are sinful, He is absolutely sinless and pure. While we are weak, He is infinitely strong. While our knowledge about just about anything is extremely limited, He is omniscient. There is nothing that He doesn’t perfectly comprehend.  There is nothing that He doesn’t know. And He’s known it from all eternity!  While our perspective, abilities, and influence are so very limited because we are so very limited, His perspective, abilities, and influence are unlimited because of His infinitude.  His presence is everywhere, all the time, and His power is almighty and undiminished no matter how much of that power He exerts.  He never tires. He never sleeps.  And so, Jesus has told us to think in these terms first when we pray.  It’s this mindset that is a game changer, for it places all our needs and problems within a perspective that is true and that God wants us to understand.  No matter what we face, no matter how overwhelming our need, no matter how we can’t see our way out or through the situation we are in, if we will but begin our prayers by hallowing the name of our infinite God, our problems will begin to shrink, and our way to peace in the midst of the storm will begin to dawn on us.  And though He is so far above us, so holy, so vast, yet we are reminded in the prayer Jesus taught us that He is the Father of all who have placed their faith in Him.  He loves us. He knows us. He is perfectly aware of all our needs. Even before there is a word on our lips, our Father knows it altogether (Psalm 139:4).  He is that awesome. He is that intimate.  He is that involved in every aspect of our lives.  And so, He would have us to begin our prayers by setting our minds on the greatness of His being and the awesomeness of the relationship we have with Him, rather than the greatness of our need. 

May the Lord help us to do just that.