DAILY BYTE
To understand this part of the Lord’s Prayer – ‘Hallowed be your name’ – we also need to understand the term ‘hallow’.
Hallow is not a word we use much these days but it means to sanctify or make holy. The Greek word for hallow is ‘hagiastheto,’ and is the same word used by Jesus in his great prayer of John 17 where he asks God to sanctify or ‘hagiastheto’ his people into God’s ways.
The term means to relocate or reorient people into a new reality ... God’s reality. To make sacred the various spaces of our lives by God’s name.
So when we pray this part of the Lord’s Prayer, we need to know that we are praying that God’s name (remember yesterday’s discussion – this means God’s essence, character, nature and way of being) be sanctified, made real, and given highest priority within our hearts and within the realm in which we live, move and breathe.
This is a hectic part of the prayer! To gloss over it, without paying proper attention to it, is somewhat dangerous.
If the Lord’s Prayer is compass and map, if it is a signpost taking us to deeper places, then it is this line that turns us around and challenges our core motivations for living.
Keeping God’s name hallowed is not about stopping swearing as we sometimes tend to think, but more about how we live. We hallow God’s name by how carry that name into the various spaces of our lives.
As today’s focus reading reminds us – we are Name Bearers. That deep within our souls, the place where our identity springs from, there is written something sacred and holy – the name of God.
We carry the name of God on our souls!
There is this wonderful story in the book of Genesis where Jacob spends the night physically wrestling with God, and at the end of this experience has his name changed to ‘Israel’. Israel, of course, means ‘God contends’ or ‘the God wrestlers’.
From Jacob onwards, God’s people – Israel – literally bore his name.
The earliest Christians liked to call themselves ‘The Way’ – people called to walk in the way of Jesus reality, but perhaps it is significant that the name Christian eventually took hold as a description, for as you probably know, the term Christian means ‘little Christ’s’.
We are literally and metaphorically Name Bearers! We carry God’s name within our souls, it is part of our very essence.
So when we pray in the Lord’s Prayer – ‘hallowed be your name’ – we are praying that we would live in a way that is true to that name.
PRAY AS YOU GO
Loving Lord, you have written your name on our souls and so we carry it with us wherever we go. Help us to learn to live in a way that does honour to your name. Amen.
FOCUS VERSE
Jeremiah 15:16
When your words came, I ate them, they were my joy and delight, for I BEAR YOUR NAME, O Lord God Almighty.
