PRAYER – VALUING THE NAME
9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name, Matthew 6:9
Prayer is a fascinating subject.
I regret that it’s taken me so long to learn from Jesus what prayer is about rather than from listening to others pray.
Take for example praying in Jesus’ name. In our prayers, saying “In Jesus’ name, amen” is rather like an “over and out” ending to a two-way radio conversation, or like saying, “You have to answer me, God, because I prayed in Jesus’ name.” Is that what it really means?
At Mt Sinai, God gave “Ten Commandments” to His people as a guideline for living the best kind of life. The third commandment said that they were not to take God’s name in vain. We have reduced that to getting mad when people at work or on TV say “God!” or “Jesus!” and not doing it ourselves. But is that really all it means?
Part of the covenant God set up with His people was the right to use His name. That means that He gave them power of attorney to “sign cheques” in His name for whatever they needed to get the work that He assigned to them done.
Jesus passed that assignment on to us. “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you…” To do what? Basically, to live like He did to show the world what the Father is like.
There are three ways in which we can take God’s name in vain; we can justify what we are saying or doing wrong by claiming that God “understands”. We do this by rationalising. ”I know it’s wrong to have an affair but I love him and I don’t love my husband any more. God is love, so what’s so wrong with that?”
Secondly, we claim to speak in God’s name things that contradict who He is or give “a word” to people that He didn’t authorise. In our enthusiasm for God, we forget that it is a serious thing to speak for God what He has not spoken. False prophets were severely dealt with in the Old Testament.
The third way is by making demands of God in prayer and tagging Jesus’ name on the end like a magic formula. Jesus gave us a tough assignment – to be like Him in the world so that the world would know what the Father is really like. That means that He expects us to live exactly opposite to the way the world lives.
The world is greedy – we must be generous.
The world criticises and condemns – we must be merciful.
The world wants to be first – we must serve.
The world lives for self – we must die to self.
To pray on the name of Jesus is to be so one with Him in heart and mind that we think what He thinks and ask what He wants so that He can carry out His will through us here on earth. It means praying only what He authorises according to who He is. Praying in His name is to honour Him so much that we would not dream of saying, doing, or asking for any thing outside of who He is.