His Name Is Holy

He said to them, When you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name…Luke 11:2

The second petition of the Lord’s Prayer is one of surrender, Hallowed be your name. I am quite sure this is the petition that makes hypocrites out of most of us. For we can say, Father with grateful sincerity, but when we pray Hallowed be your name, we say this with the guilty knowledge that, as we pray, there are areas of our life in which his name is not hallowed and in which, furthermore, we don’t want it to be hallowed. When we say,Hallowed be your name, we are praying, May the whole of my life be a source of delight to you and may it be an honor to the name which I bear, which is your name. Hallowed be your name.

The trouble is that we so frequently know there are great areas of our life that are not hallowed. There are certain monopolies which we have reserved to ourselves, privileged areas which we do not wish to surrender, where the name of our boss or the name of our girl friend or some other dear one means more to us than the name of God. But when we pray this, if we pray it in any degree whatsoever of sincerity or openness or honesty, we are praying,Lord, I open to you every closet, I am taking every skeleton out for you to examine. Hallowed be thy name. There cannot be any contact with God, any real touching of his power, any genuine experiencing of the glorious fragrance and wonder of God at work in human life until we truly pray, and the second requisite of true prayer is that we say, Hallowed be your name.

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