DAILY BYTE
So this is it. Heading the list, central, overarching and all-encompassing. The first thing that Jesus tells us to ask God to do in the Lord’s Prayer is to cause God’s name to be sanctified – to be made sacred and holy.
This little line in the prayer that we tend to throw away or hardly notice is actually dangerously profound in that it challenges our core motivations for living.
Who is this life of mine all about?
Me?
Or God?
As Dallas Willard writes: “This request is based upon the deepest need of the human world. That human life not be about human life. And that nothing will go right in it until the greatness and goodness of its creator is grasped and lived. That his very name be held in the highest possible regard. Until that is so, the human compass will always be pointing in the wrong direction, and individual lives will suffer from constant and fluctuating disorientation.”
We can only find the essence of who we are, the deepest part of us, when we realise that God’s name is written on our souls, and when we choose to bear that name out in our lives in a way that effects our environments, and changes our worlds.
So never again may we say these words lightly, or gloss over them!
Instead, may we partake of them and let them sink deep into us.
As we pray them may they be compass and map for us, may they reorient us and may they change our deepest motivations for living – that our lives not be about us, but about God.
PRAY AS YOU GO
So truly, O God and Father, may your name be hallowed within us all.
Amen.
FOCUS READING
Matthew 6. 7-9 NIV
And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
"This, then, is how you should pray:
" 'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name
