to John chapter 17. You'll find it on page 903 there in the Bible. Along with the Bible, you may want to have, not too far from you, a bulletin. You can turn to the back there and see the topic that we're going to be talking about tonight. The topic is this. At the end of the service we pray, Hallowed be your name. What does that even mean? And what is it that we are saying when we say, Hallowed be your name? That's our main concern. Notice this idea of glory and honor and hallowing and name here in what we read. John chapter 17 on page 903. Let's give your attention to the Word of God. When Jesus had spoken these words on the night he was betrayed, speaking of the Lord's Supper and the Holy Spirit and so on. When Jesus had spoken these words, He lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. And skipping on to verse 17. Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself that they also may be sanctified in truth. And let's join together in prayer once again. Heavenly Father, we come to you gladly on a beautiful evening. We're rejoicing and glad to see one another. Enjoy the onset of spring. As we come to this topic, the topic of Your Name, I propose, Lord, to come to You reverently, with ears tuned to hear You, and to respond to You. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So, as you look at, Hallowed be Your Name, I don't know, I've always had a problem with that. What's this word, hallowed, mean? I mean, people of a certain age might think it's a Harry Potter reference in one of the titles, Deathly Hallows or something. That doesn't help you. A few of you from this area might think of a local Episcopal church with a nursery school. And yeah, there's a connection that kind of tips you off that other Christians have noticed this word, but that doesn't help you. You might even say, wait a minute, I've got Halloween. And yeah, actually there's a historical linkage there. There's something going on there with the word hollow and Hallow's Eve or something. But that doesn't help you understand what it means. Costumes and candy don't advance you towards understanding what you pray. So having gone to seminary, I pulled out my Greek New Testament and I looked at the word that's behind hollowed. And I noticed two things very quickly. The back half It's weird. It's hard. You're looking at it, like, I'm not sure what to do with that back half. Because the back half is the thing that tells you exactly what kind of verb it is and what it's doing. And this is an imperative. So you want to say you're telling somebody to do something, except, wait a minute, it's a third-person imperative. We don't even have a third-person imperative. We only have imperative. If I say, stand up, you say, well, what is the subject of the sentence? Well, I'm looking at Emma. I'm telling Emma, you stand up. That's second person. But Greek's got this thing where you say an imperative, and it's, let it be so. And we have to kind of rope around to make English do that. But in Greek, you can do that. The third person's passive imperative. And we don't do passive imperatives very easily. So it's, let it be so. All right, well, I can see why that is difficult. And that is how you address a superior. So it's not being rude to God to use an imperative, because there's not a second person. You're not exactly telling him how to do it, you're just saying, um, sir, let it be so. So the back half is tricky, but the front half is easy. As soon as you look at that Greek word, you're like, oh, that's the word for holy. I'm used to that word. Anytime I read the word Holy Spirit, I'm seeing that. I've been to a Greek-speaking country, and they use this word on everything. It's the word for saint. Everything is saint this and saint that over there. It's ayah. So there you go. It's ayah and then this funny ending. So it's the word that they can use for saint. It's the word for holy. And the idea is make it holy. Or let it be holy. And once you realize that, you see that although the English word hallowed sticks out in our English Bible. Like, what is this? That's a central concern in the Bible. God is holy. And so he says, be holy as I am holy. In fact, you could say that's the central problem in the Bible, that God is holy and we're not, so how can the two meet? So it makes perfect sense for him to start the prayer with something to do with holy. or sanctify, or consecrate. All of those are different words that are coming back to the same word in the Greek. All of those things come back here. Consecrate, venerate, sanctify, make it holy. In the Bible, that's something that God does. You get it right at the end of creation. At the end of the creation account, it says, So God blessed the Sabbath day, and He hallowed it. He made it holy. completes that opening account, the first section there of Genesis. And in Leviticus 20, he gives a bunch of laws, and he says, You keep my laws, for I am the Lord who hallows you. So this is one thing that God does. He makes things holy. But look at it another way, something that we do. Before God came down to give the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, He says to the people, Consecrate yourselves. Well, it's the same word. Consecrate yourselves. Make yourselves holy. What he means is, you need to do certain things. Wash your body. Abstain from certain relations. Don't do anything unclean. Do these things. Consecrate yourselves for three days and I will come to you. We have it together in Leviticus 11.44. Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. So anytime you see that word, hollow, or consecrate, or sanctify, you're in this realm of thought. And in the New Testament, you may be just on this single word that then gets translated into these different ways. You need to understand, OK, so this is about making something pure and right and appropriate for God, setting it apart from ordinary human usage to something special for God. We're to consecrate ourselves at times, sometimes Is Israel consecrating their priests, or consecrating their sacrifices, or their temple? In the New Testament, we've been talking about 2 Peter, and how we're made partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world because of sinful desire. That's how it has to be. If you're going to be a partaker of the Holy God, you need to escape from the corruption. You can't bring the corruption together with the Holy God. And that's what's wrong with the false teachers that we talked about a week ago. Here are those who have escaped from the corruption, partakers in the divine nature, and dive back into what is unholy and unclean. This cannot be. So when you pray it, just remember that. Okay, it's holy. Holify your name. I said that's bad English. But if that helps you, make it holy. If you take holy and make a verb out of it, that's what you say. Holify it. Make it holy. Make it sacred. Sanctify it. Now, what's a little odd is that we don't say, Hallowed be us. That would have its place, but that's not what we're doing in the prayer right here. Nor are we saying, may we, well, you know, hallow us. Instead we're saying, hallowed be your name. Now, what hallowed your name? Has God ruined His own name? Why do we need to pray, Hallowed be Your Name? God hasn't done anything to ruin it. But He has an enemy who has slandered it. When I say I'm the devil, you might just understand it in these terms. He is the one who slanders God's good name. God knows that on the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you'll be like God. He's slandering God's character. He's slandering God's good name. the devil is a slanderer. And so God's enemies slander his name. And anyone who takes God's gifts and then say, oh, thank you so much Buddha, or thank you so much Baal, they also slander God's name. That belongs to God. God gave you that. Don't take God's gifts and praise another. And finally, Believers slander God's name. When carrying his name, we sin egregiously. When representing him to the world, we represent him falsely. Through our sin, we're defaming his name. We are not hallowing it, we're doing the opposite. So when you pray, God, holify your name, make it holy. We're saying, God, clear your name. Clear yourself of all charges. Show everyone that you are pure, that what you do is right. There's a certain zeal for God that you have here. And this is a zeal that you see Moses having. There's a couple of times where the people sin so egregiously that God says, I'm going to wipe out this people. And what does Moses say? He's got to go to. He says, wait a minute, God. What will the Egyptians say about you if you wipe out the people? They'll say that you weren't strong enough to defeat the Canaanites. They'll say that you brought them out with evil intent to destroy them. Moses has a zeal for God's name. And you notice, we're being taught that that's an appropriate way to talk to God, because God relents. God accepts his reasoning. We're being taught about the importance of God's name. Not just within God's people. He's not even pleading about God's name within the people. There won't be any people. He's talking about God's name to the outsiders, to the Egyptians. And we saw a couple weeks ago, we talked about Daniel's great prayer in Daniel chapter 9. Daniel has the same zeal. He says, Lord, act. Lord, deliver your city, for your city and your people are called by your name. End of prayer. He has the same zeal for God's name that Moses has. And we read John 17 so that we could see that hallowing God's name is central – and again, hallowing, what's it mean? Make it holy. Holify it. Hallowing God's name is central to the cross. Notice how he says, glorify your Son. Now, he's saying it just before he goes to the cross. So, when he says, glorify your Son, he's saying, sustain me through the cross and the death and the burial. so that you may exalt me through resurrection and ascension." Glorify your son. He goes on to say, I glorified you on earth, now glorify me. It's like it's the family business for father and son to glorify one another, the two divine persons. When they say glorify, it's a different word than hallow, but it's got the same idea of make it great. Make it exalted. And as you go on to verse 17, then you do get this word, hallow. Of course, you don't see the word hallow, because that's kind of an old-fashioned word. So you only leave it out hallowed now on the Lord's Prayer, because everybody has their way of saying it. But here you have the word sanctify, and then consecrate. So verse 17, sanctify them in the truth. That's hallow them again. That's that same ayah that's holy. Make them holy. Notice that's Jesus' prayer, that we would be sanctified. sanctify them in the truth, he says. That's what he's going to the cross for. And verse 19, for their sake I, he says, consecrate, it's the same word though, I hallow myself that they also may be hallowed in truth. It's that same word twice, they then translate in different ways, they have their good English reasons for it, but that's what he's saying. He's saying, for their sake I hallow myself that they also may be hallowed in the truth, that they may be made holy. We read this morning from Romans chapter 3, and in Romans 3 it says, this was to show God's righteousness, because in his forbearance he'd passed over the sins formerly committed. And the cross shows God's righteousness. It hallows his name by showing how he can be just and merciful at the same time. How he can hate the sin and love the sinner. How he can forgive the sinner, justly, while punishing the sin. The cross glorifies God's mercy and justice together. It hallows his name. I thought this week that I want to change how I preach this before. Because if you've been here long enough, you've heard me preach on this passage before. I suspect this may be the third time for some of you. And occasionally I make comments on individual lines. So we want to change something a little bit. I have before commented that we're to pray, our Father who art in heaven, and then the next three lines are all about looking away from ourselves to God, right? Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done. And so I said, look, Jesus is teaching us in our prayers to, you know, get off ourselves for a while, think of God's glory, and then come back to us with bread and forgiveness and protection. I've said that before, and I think that's correct, but there's another side to it that I saw this week. When we say, Hallowed be your name, what did we just say before that? We said, our father. Now, do you have your father's name? In most cases you say, I have the father's name. In their culture, how do they do names? Everybody's named Simon or John or James, so how do you tell all these Simons apart? Well, we already know Simon Peter's name is Simon, son of John. Or James and John are the sons of Zebedee. And then they have another James, he's son of Alphaeus. Notice how they have the father's name. And we have the name placed on us in baptism. When we say, our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, we are looking away from ourselves to God, but not that far away from ourselves, because we're associated so closely with him. That name being hallowed is also protection for us. It reflects back on us. We're not praying for something that's entirely outside of ourselves. When he's hallowed, then that honors his people. If my father has a good name, then if somebody says to me, oh, so you're an Edgar, then I feel like probably this is a good start to the relationship. On the other hand, if my father is very effectively slandered, and then someone says, oh, so you're an Edgar, I'm not so sure about where we stand here. This may not be good. We say, Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be Your name. We look away from ourselves, but not that far. We are still implicated in this to some degree. This is some protection for us, you might say. Hebrews 2.11 says, He who sanctifies, and back on our word again, hallowed, make it holy. He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified, all of one origin. Therefore, Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers. You notice that's that word, hollow, again. Okay? He who sanctifies. Jesus, he hallows us. We are hallowed. We all have the same origin. So he calls us brothers. When we say, Father, hallow your name, you say, that's something that we're saying out of love for Daddy. You know, it hurts you if your dad is maligned. And perhaps you get impatient with Mom and you want to complain about Mom, but is somebody else supposed to complain about your Mom? No. You probably ought to watch it yourself. So you see here how you have this connection with your own parents, and you want them to be respected. You're proud of them. You want them lifted up. That's a little picture of this. Father, hallow your name. We want it for him because we love him. We want it for him because it's his concern, so it's therefore our concern. And we want it because it involves us. because we're in Christ, we're called Christians. As partakers of the divine nature, we're concerned that the divine be honoured. So when you say, Hallowed be your name, which means, make it holy, we're praying for God to clear his name, to glorify and exalt himself. G.I. Williamson says, of course, God is going to do this anyway. This isn't something that if we don't pray for it, it's not going to happen. God's going to do it anyway. But we pray so as to begin to align ourselves with Him. To align ourselves with, you could say, the family purpose that we see here in John 17. When Jesus says, Glorify your Son as I have glorified you in the earth. And we're not to pray for one thing and then live for another. We're not to pray, Hallowed be your name, and then dishallow his name with our own lives. So as we're called by his name, and we're praying his name would be hallowed, there's then a back implication on us. You might have sometimes wondered, okay, so I get to pray for bread, so things that I need for this life, and I pray for forgiveness, so, okay, there's justification, and I pray for protection. When do I pray for God to sanctify me? And I think we pray for it twice. At the end with, leave me not in a temptation, I'm going to keep temptation in mind as something to keep away, that's sanctification, as I ward off temptation. But we're also praying for our sanctification here at the beginning. As we say, hallowed be your name, and we are your people who are called by your name, we're also praying that we would be hallowed, that we would be sanctified also. Having prayed for it, we're to strive for it. Hallow your name. Let us glorify you. And we need to reckon with this. God is often glorified in His people's endurance. God is often glorified in His people's suffering. Why don't martyrs bail out and deny Christ and just ask for forgiveness later? Because they are determined to hallow His name. And His name is hallowed and sanctified by their refusal to deny Him even to death. They sanctify His name as much as they can. And it's not for us to talk about martyrs and then not be willing to suffer for His name. If we're not willing to suffer for His name's sake, then we don't hollow it very far. It's just words that we say. if we're not willing to suffer for His namesake, to obey His Word when it is difficult, to stay the course in the face of opposition. We pray, Hallowed be Your Name. We're praying not only that God would make His name great in the world, we're also praying that we would do our part to hallow that great name. So how should we be different as a result of praying again and again Hullify your name. Sanctify your name. Hallowed be your name. One thing that we're being told is that we need to bring our prayers in line with our purpose. This is question 101. And after 100 questions, we circle back to the beginning. Because always the beginning, it's like, what's the point of life? The point of life is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. So, a hundred questions later, here we are. How are you supposed to pray? You pray, Hallowed be your name. Well, what is that all about? It says there on the back of the bulletin, in the first petition, which is, Hallowed be your name. We pray that God would enable us and others to glorify Him in everything. And that He would dispose all things to His own glory. Since our reason to exist is to glorify God and enjoy Him, then the way to pray is, Hallowed be Your Name. Glorify Yourself. Make our prayers fit that purpose. We're praying that God would vindicate Himself completely. We're saying, God, stop every mocker, defeat every enemy, keep every promise, be seen for who You really are, the majestic and awesome and gracious God. God vindicate you so. God reverse all the damage the devil has done in slandering your name and bringing evil into your creation. Reverse it and sanctify and hallow your name. And having prayed that, we can go on and pray for all that is in our heart, except that we can't pray anything that would be contrary to this. We can't pray, hallowed be your name, and then pray for something that would not hallow his name. It gives us direction and guardrails for the rest of all of our praying. Hallowed be Your name. And let us make every prayer and everything that follows on that an aspect of reverence for God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You that You have taught us to pray, that You have commanded us to pray, that You invite us to pray, We thank you that you direct us to enter into the family business of bringing glory to our Creator, and glory to the Father and the Son, by whom we are made and redeemed. Help us, Lord, to be to the praise of your glory. Help us, Lord, to have that holiness that we must have to see you. And we pray that you will glorify your name in us and in all the world. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.