The prayer that is today known as "The Lord's Prayer" or "The Our Father" was first taught by Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 6, verses 9 through 13:
This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread;
and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors;
and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.
I'll be dedicating one entry each day this week to each line above. The Our Father contains several different types of prayer: worship, surrender, petition, and contrition.
Today I look at the first (in the more traditional language): "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name." This is adoration, a worshipful acknowledgment of who God is. He is Father. He is the one who gives each of us life.
Notice also though that He is "Our" Father. Not "My" Father. I do not pray to Him merely on my own individual behalf. When I pray the Our Father, I am to pray to Him on behalf of all the faithful.
Part and parcel of acknowledging God's identify is praising Him -- acknowledging His exhaulted place far above ourselves, and recognizing that his name is "hallowed," meaning holy, or revered.
That reverence is important. In addition to being an expression of the reality, I think of this first line also as an expression of one's attitude. With what kind of attitude are we approaching God? We cannot pay attention to and understand the meaning of these first words of the Our Father and still approach Him with flippancy.
The words of the prayer after all are so familiar to so many of us who have been hearing them since our pregnant mothers prayed them, that we can zip right through these first crucial words. Perhaps a good practice would be, the next time we pray in solitude this prayer that Jesus taught us, to make a point to say each clause slowly and deliberately. "Our Father," ... "who art in heaven," ... "hallowed be thy name." Think about those words as we pray them. Let them to flow out from our hearts, the same as if we were to tell the love of our life, "I love you. You're beautiful."
It also may behoove us to consider whether we "hallow" the name of our Father in heaven not just as we begin the prayer but in the general practice of our lives. Prayer, particularly the adoration and respect that we pay to the Father, is not merely lip service. It has to be backed up in our lives through our faithfulness to His plan. That's surrender, which is what follows logically. And that's tomorrow.
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