“Now I’m turning you over to God, our marvelous God whose gracious Word can make you into what he wants you to be and give you everything you could possibly need in this community of holy friends.” – Acts 20:32 (The Message)
The past two weeks, I have written about the value of praying the Lord’s Prayer regularly. Now I’d like to look a little more closely at what we are praying for in using this prayer. The prayer is divided into seven parts or petitions. This week let us consider the first petition, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
At first look, what we see is simple giving praise to God. We address God as Father and we say that God is holy. In some ways, this is a standard way of giving praise to God. But much more is going on in these words; we are praying for a deep personal need as well. We are saying more than, “God is good.” With these first words of the prayer, we are asking God to do something amazing in our life. We are asking to be transformed. To understand this point, however, we must look back at the Third Article of the Creed and how Martin Luther understands its meaning. This is where Luther explains what it means for us to be made holy. He talks about the church as the holy community.
For Luther, the Lord’s Prayer runs backward from the Creed. In the Creed, we start with God the creator, then we move to Christ the redeemer, and finally to the Holy Spirit who makes us holy. That is not the way we experience God, however. It is first the Holy Spirit who comes to us, giving us faith. In coming to faith we become part of God’ holy community of the church, transformed into loving God with our heart, mind, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves. We cannot come to such faith on our own though. We cannot make ourselves holy. The Holy Spirit comes to us and makes us holy.
In this first petition of the Lord’s Prayer, then, it is not that we are proclaiming that God’s name is holy. Indeed, God’s name is holy on its own. God’s holiness does not depend on us. Therefore it makes no sense to pray that God’s name might become holy. Rather, what we are asking is that God’s name become holy in us. In other words, this is not just about God in heaven being holy. This is about God being holy in our lives. We are asking here to be made holy. We want to see the presence of the holy God in our lives here on earth. We want to experience the holiness of God that is in heaven become real in our lives.
The holiness of God in heaven is seen on earth in the life of Jesus. In praying this first line of his prayer, we are asking to be more like Christ. We are asking to be transformed into God’s people, able to experience God around us and witness to God’s love to others through our words and our actions. The deep need that we are praying for is to be filled with the Holy Spirit. That is indeed asking God to do something amazing in our lives.