Matthew 6:9- Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Good morning!

I hope you all have had a great start to the summer thus far. Before we dive into today’s passage, I want you to know we are going to change the schedule of the blog up a bit. Instead of Monday-Friday, we will be posting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from here on out. We want to be sure to post quality content and having one day per staff member will allow us to do this more effectively. As we mentioned from the beginning, these devotionals are not intended to be a substitute for your personal Bible reading and devotions; rather, they are to encourage deeper and further reading. I pray they have been a blessing to you. With that said, let’s get into today’s passage.

Jesus, again, points us towards prayer. It’s clear that prayer should be a normal pattern in our life for He states, “pray then this way.” As I mentioned Friday, prayer is not something “we just get around to.” It should be a part of the normal rhythm of our day to day and thankfully Jesus teaches us His strategy.

It’s clear that Jesus’ prayers were different. One of my favorite passages in the Gospel is when the disciples ask Him to teach them to pray in Luke 11. Personally, if I were one of the twelve, I’d be asking, “Hey Jesus, is there any way you could show me how to walk on water? How about the fish and the bread multiplication? Any way you could show me how to do these things?” But here is what they saw in Jesus’ life… when Jesus prayed, amazing things happened. In other words, prayer equaled power, and now Jesus is teaching us that we could experience these things in our lives and gives us the recipe to do so…

How do we start? By “hallowing” God’s name. “Hallow” is not the most used word in our everyday language… so just for clarification, it means to sanctify. “Sanctify” means to make holy or treat as holy; therefore, when God sanctifies us, it means that He makes us holy. But when we sanctify God, it means that we treat Him as holy and that is exactly what Jesus is teaching here! Treat the name of God as holy!

So what does it mean to “treat God’s name as holy?” One of the practical ways we can sanctify God’s name is through obedience. When we break God’s commandments, we profane the name of God. In other words, we “take God’s name in vain.” As followers of Jesus, our goal should be to bring glory to God in all we say and do; so when we pray that God’s name be “hallowed,” it’s a request to God to enable us to live a life that brings Him glory!

My encouragement for you this week is to simply pray…. there is power in prayer! The good news is the one we’re praying to teaches us how!

-Taylor