In and Within 9 Hallowed Be Thy Name

[HKHaugan]

In and Within 9 Hallowed Be thy Name

We are still thinking about the Lord’s Prayer as a set of teachings rather than a recitation of a structured prayer. What the Lord is teaching here is that real prayer is opening our mind, heart and spirit to intimacy with the Father. That’s when prayer takes off. Our mind, heart and spirit are the image of God, the reflection of His creative mind, His loving heart and His humbling Spirit---Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As they are One, Jesus is calling us to find our personal inner unity of mind, heart and spirit by starting in prayer to the Father.

If we want inner unity,---‘peace of mind’, a confident heart and a faithful spirit---that kind of unity begins with abandoning our insecure self-consciousness and being totally transparent before the Father. This is one reason Jesus teaches that those who seek to save their lives will lose them but those who lose their lives for His sake will find them. Jesus shows us this in His prayer in Gethsemane when He prays to the Father to ‘let this cup pass from me’ and then, as only He could possibly pray, ‘not my will but your will be done.’ Total release of self to the Father, that’s the teaching. Total release of self to Jesus is the Father’s instruction to the disciples.

This is not only a release to the Father it is a release of self from the world to ponder the spiritual reality of the Father’s dwelling place---Heaven---our destination and destiny. From what we can glean from His instruction here is that Heaven is first a relational experience with our Father, His Son Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Of course as you go through Scripture there is the presence of angels and all those who have entered through faith. Revelation 21 and 22 give us an even more glorious picture but our human limitation can only sense a taste, a glance and a glimpse of John’s incredible vision. Suffice it to say that what we can understand from our humble perspective is that Heaven is a spiritual relational structure. Take Rev. 21:22-23 for instance, “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God and the Lamb are its temple...the glory of God give it light and the Lamb is its lamp.”

So what can we say about Heaven but that it is a spiritual experience of spiritual relationships, which is a spiritually eternal structure---the Lord God and the Lamb as its eternal temple. This is what you are entering when you enter your closet, close the door to the world and pray, ‘Our Father who art in Heaven…’

But that’s not all. Jesus teaches us to do more---hallow the name of God. Hallow comes from the Greek root word, hagios, meaning holy. But here it is used verbally, hagiostheato, meaning to make holy, to sanctify, to set apart. It urges us to actively and creatively lift up and glorify the name of God. It has the sense of activating one’s consciousness as to the unchangeable pure, perfect, complete and extreme otherness of God. He is the Creator, the Holy Other whose holiness is beyond description but can be experienced with humble adoration and worship as ‘The Holy One.’ His name is Father. He is our Holy Father. Let that sink in.

Jesus as God the Son has given us the invitation and encouragement to enter His Holy Presence. He wants us to think, ponder, consider, meditate on His Father and our Father and how each of us is a loved child of this One, Holy and Eternal Father in Heaven. If that doesn’t rock your boat, shake your heart and cut the umbilical chord to the world, nothing will.

O Lord God how Holy is your name, Father, eternal Father, Heavenly Father, gracious Father, loving Father, forgiving and compassionate Father, God and Father of our Lord Jesus, there is no one like you, there is no one beyond or before you. You are Father of fathers, God beyond idols we fashion, perfect beyond whatever we think is perfection. Here I am, a shadowed image of your likeness, yielding and yielded, yet knowing that at any moment I can recede into the darkness of sin and leave You in the dust of my arrogance. Yet you are always there ready to hear my plea, my prayer, my lostness, my foundness, my foibles and fantasies and even yet, while in your Holy Spirit, you allow me to experience your closeness…….hallowed be thy Name…….!!!