A Greater Righteousness (14)

Greeting

Good morning! My name is Joel Cossins, and I’m the pastor here at Libby COTN. I’d like to welcome all of our guests here today, especially to those of you checking us out online. Hello! If you’ve not yet visited us in person, I look forward to the day we can welcome you to our fellowship. You should know when you visit, you will most likely be invited to stay after, as we have a potluck every Sunday after the service—unless otherwise noted. So, come hungry for an encounter with JESUS and bring your appetite for food, as well!

Announce text: Matthew 6:5-15

Key Text: Matthew 6:5-15

Review

The idea of a name carrying weight is one most of us understand intuitively. Growing up, many of us were told — by a parent, a grandparent, maybe a coach or a teacher — that our name meant something. That how we carried ourselves reflected on more than just ourselves.

No doubt, you might recall a kind of conversation that sounds something like this: “When you walk out that door, you carry this family’s name. What you do out there — how you treat people, how you work, how you live — that reflects on all of us.” Does that sound familiar to anyone? Perhaps some of us heard sayings like that and felt the weight of it— heard it as pressure. Perhaps others heard it as pride. But all of us understood the point: a name is more than a label. A name is a reputation. A name is a story.

The ancient wisdom writers understood this too. Proverbs 22:1 puts it plainly:

Proverbs 22:1a NASB95

1 A good name is to be more desired than great wealth ...

And Ecclesiastes 7:1 echoes it:

Ecclesiastes 7:1a NASB95

1 A good name is better than a good ointment ...

In a world where, at the time of these writings, ointment — oil, perfume — was incredibly valuable, both medically and socially, that is saying something. Your reputation is worth more than your most valuable possessions.

Now, think about this: Have you ever known someone — maybe a family member, a friend, a colleague, or a respected member of the body of Christ — who carried a respected name, but lived in a way that dishonored it? Maybe it was a family name that carried generations of integrity, and someone came along and threw it away. Or a business name that stood for quality, until someone cut corners and destroyed what took decades to build. There have been a number of church leaders — especially recently — who sadly fit this mold.

There is a particular kind of grief that is experienced when this happens. Because when a name falls, it doesn’t fall alone. Everything connected to it — every relationship, every memory, every person who ever proudly bore that name — feels the weight of it.

Now imagine — if you can hold this thought for just a moment — that we are talking not about a family name, not about a business, but about the name of the living God. The name of the One Who created the heavens and the earth. The name of the One Who called a people to Himself, bound Himself to them in covenant, and staked His Own reputation on their faithfulness.

What happens when that name falls into disrepute? What happens when the people who carry it — who were commissioned to make it known and honored — live in a way that obscures it, distorts it, or drags it through the mud?

That is exactly what Jesus is addressing when He teaches His disciples to pray:

Matthew 6:9 NASB95

9 “Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.

I want to provide a few other translations for perspective here, because that word hallowed is a bit archaic. Later, you will hear the word hallowing, and I don’t think I’m talking about that day reserved for dressing up our kids and sending them out like bandits to collect as much candy as possible and then extracting a fee from them for ourselves because “that’s just too much candy. That’s not good for you to have all that sugar.”

Matthew 6:9 NTFE

9 “So this is how you should pray: Our father in heaven, may your name be honored.

Matthew 6:9 TLV

9 “Therefore, pray in this way: ‘Our Father in heaven, sanctified be Your name.

Matthew 6:9 NLT

9 Pray like this: Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy.

This is not a polite opener to get the prayer started. Jesus is reaching back into a long and painful story — a story of a name that was supposed to shine and had been covered in shadow — and He is calling His followers to pray and live their way into its restoration.

So let’s walk into that story together.

Announce text again: Matthew 6:5-15

Scripture Reading

Matthew 6:5–15 NASB95

5 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6 “But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. 7 “And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. 8 “So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. 9 “Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. 10 ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. 11 ‘Give us this day our daily bread. 12 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’ 14 “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 “But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.

Prayer for added blessing to the reading of the Word

Message

Hallowing His Name: Living Up to the Calling

In Matthew 6:9, Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, starting with a reverence for God's holy name, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the sanctity and glory of YHWH.

Big Idea: As ABBA’s children, our mission is to honor and restore the holy name of YHWH by living lives that reflect His character and glory in every area of our lives.

The Problem Jesus is Addressing

To understand what Jesus means when He says “Hallowed be Your name,” we need to understand something about first-century Jewish prayer. We’ve talked about this before, so this will be a good reminder. Jesus was not inventing a new form of address when He opened with “Our Father in heaven.” Jewish prayers of the period — the Kaddish and the Eighteen Benedictions — already addressed God as Father and already prayed for the sanctification of His name and the coming of His kingdom.

Jesus was speaking a language that His listeners already knew, but He was doing something remarkable with it.

Notice: He gave His disciples this prayer in Aramaic — the everyday language of ordinary people — not in the formal Hebrew of the synagogue. This was a prayer not for the religious specialists, but for fishermen and tax collectors and ordinary households. And He said, "Pray like this" — not "recite this," but "pray in this manner." It was a framework, a set of priorities to animate their lives.

And the very first priority — before daily bread, before forgiveness, before protection from temptation — is this: hallowed be Your name.

Now, to understand the weight of that phrase, we need to go deeper into what God's name actually meant.

In the ancient world, a person's name was not incidental. Names carried character, identity, and presence. And no name carried more weight than the personal name God revealed to Israel at the burning bush: YHWH. This name appears roughly 6,800 times in the Old Testament. It is not just a divine label — it is a concentrated expression of Who God is. Scholars believe it connects to the Hebrew causative stem: "He causes to be what exists" — depicting Yahweh as the Creator and Ruler of all history.

When God revealed His name to Moses, and then to Israel through the Exodus, He was doing something extraordinary: He was binding His reputation to this people. His name would live or die — in the perception of the surrounding nations — based on how Israel lived. If Israel was faithful, obedient, just, and merciful, the nations would look and say, "Their God is holy. Their God is real. Their God is worthy." If Israel was unfaithful, corrupt, and finally defeated and exiled — the nations would draw exactly the opposite conclusion.

And that is precisely what happened.

Listen to the grief in Psalm 74. The psalmist is weeping over the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by Babylon. He describes the enemy coming in, smashing the sanctuary with axes, burning it to the ground. And then he cries out:

Psalm 74:10 LEB

10 How long, O God, will the adversary taunt? Will the enemy treat your name with contempt forever?

Israel's defeat was experienced not just as national tragedy — it was experienced as a desecration of Yahweh's name before the watching world.

Isaiah 52 makes the connection explicit. God speaks into the context of Babylonian exile and says:

Isaiah 52:5 NASB95

5 “Now therefore, what do I have here,” declares the Lord, “seeing that My people have been taken away without cause?” Again the Lord declares, “Those who rule over them howl, and My name is continually blasphemed all day long.

Israel's slavery, Israel's shame, is directly tied to the dishonoring of God's name among the nations.

But the most direct and devastating word comes from Ezekiel 36. God rehearses the entire story of Israel — chosen, called, commissioned — and then says this:

Ezekiel 36:20 LEB

20 And they came into the nations to which they went, and they profaned my holy name when they said to them, ‘These are the people of Yahweh, and from his land they went out.’

Through idolatry, injustice, and ultimately exile, Israel had done the very thing they were called to prevent. They had made the holy name of Yahweh something the nations sneered at.

Here is the Problem in the Text: God's people were called to be name-bearers — to be the human community through whom the character and holiness of Yahweh would be visible among the nations. But Israel failed. The name that was supposed to shine was profaned. And the very prayer Jesus teaches — "hallowed be Your name" — presumes this. It is not a description of how things are. It is a petition for how things must become. To pray "hallowed be Your name" is to admit that right now, in the present world, that name is not being fully honored.

The Problem for Us Today

Now. Here is where we need to take an honest look in the proverbial mirror because the problem in the text is not a problem that stayed in the ancient world.

We have received the same calling Israel received. Through Jesus Christ, we have been adopted into God's family. We bear His name. We have been commissioned — Paul says it clearly in 2 Corinthians 5 — as ambassadors of God in a world that does not yet know Him. We are the ones through whom God's character is supposed to be visible.

And the question that text asks us is simply this: How is that going?

When the world looks at those who carry God's name — at the church, at Christians, at us — what do they see? Do they see the holiness, the justice, the compassion, the self-giving love of YHWH? Or do they see something else?

We have to be honest here. Because when Christians use God's name to justify cruelty, when the church covers up abuse instead of protecting the vulnerable, when those who claim to follow Jesus live in ways indistinguishable from — or sometimes worse than — the surrounding culture, God's name is not being hallowed. It is being profaned.

Just as Israel's conduct caused Yahweh's name to be profaned among the nations, our conduct — individually and corporately — causes people to either draw closer to God or push further away.

The world is watching, and they see better than they hear. The tragedy of this is not merely that we are failing to meet a moral standard. The tragedy is that every time we bear God's name carelessly, we are misrepresenting who He is to people who desperately need to know Him.

This is the Problem for us: We were called to be a people who make the holiness of God visible — and we are not doing it well enough.

The Grace Jesus Offers His Disciples

But here is where the Gospel breaks open.

Go back to Ezekiel 36. After God rehearses the indictment — Israel has profaned My name — He doesn't stop there. He says:

Ezekiel 36:21–23 NASB95

21 “But I had concern for My holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations where they went. 22 “Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for My holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you went. 23 “I will vindicate the holiness of My great name which has been profaned among the nations, which you have profaned in their midst. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord,” declares the Lord God, “when I prove Myself holy among you in their sight.

And then He makes a promise that sounds almost impossible:

Ezekiel 36:26–27 NASB95

26 “Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.

The restoration of God's name would happen not through Israel's effort to clean up their act, but through God's transforming work within His people. He would do what they could not do for themselves.

And this is precisely the story Jesus steps into. When He teaches His disciples to pray "hallowed be Your name," He is announcing — in the language of the prophets — that the moment of restoration has arrived. Jesus Himself is the one Who perfectly hallows the Father's name. He is the image of the invisible God, the One in Whom the character of YHWH is fully and finally visible. Everything that Israel was called to be and failed to be, Jesus is — completely, perfectly, without deviation.

He heals the sick for the sake of the Father's name. He welcomes the outcast for the sake of the Father's name. He speaks truth to power, He weeps with the grieving, He lays down His life — all as the perfect revelation of Who God is. On the cross, the One Who bears the name of God absorbs the full consequence of our failure to honor it, and in the resurrection, that name is vindicated before the whole creation.

And now — through the Spirit — we are drawn into that same mission. The Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in us. The One Who promised Ezekiel "I will cause you to walk in My statutes" has kept that promise through Pentecost. We are not left to manage the reputation of our Father on our own.

The Grace Jesus extends in the Text is this: The Father does not simply call His people to hallow His name — He acts to make it possible. He transforms us from the inside so that we can be what we were always called to be.

Jesus Extends that Same Grace to Us

So what does that look like now — in our world, in our day, in our ordinary lives?

Here is what the biblical pattern suggests. Living in a way that hallows (keeps holy) the Father's name is not about religious performance. It is not about which rules you follow or how publicly pious you appear. Jesus addresses exactly that in the Sermon on the Mount — the people who make a great show of their righteousness are not the ones hallowing the Father's name. The ones who hallow it are the ones whose inner life and outer life are aligned with the character of God.

And that character, as Scripture presents it, is deeply practical. It shows up in how you conduct business. In how you treat people who can't do anything for you. In how you speak about people when they're not in the room. In how you treat the vulnerable — the stranger, the widow, the person on the margins. In how you handle money. In how you fight for justice in a world that constantly exploits the weak.

The call to holiness encounters us in the field, at home, in business, with friends, with foreigners, in worship, and in family. There is no compartment of life where the hallowing of the Father's name (again, keeping His name holy) is not relevant. Holiness is not attained by withdrawing from the world. It is attained by the living in and according to Holy Spirit as we encounter and engage the Father — He transforms and enables or empowers us to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

And perhaps most importantly: we demonstrate His Love. Jesus identifies the greatest commandment as loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (quoting Deuteronomy 6:4-5 — the Shema). The second, which is like it, is loving your neighbor as yourself (quoting Leviticus 19:18).These two commandments form the foundation for the entire Law and the Prophets. And love is not simply a feeling we wait for. It is a practice we engage in. We practice generosity, and generosity becomes our nature. We practice justice, and justice becomes our instinct. We practice kindness toward those who are difficult, and our character is formed into something that increasingly looks like the God who is kind to the ungrateful.

This is how God's name gets hallowed in the world — through ordinary people, in ordinary moments, living in an extraordinary alignment with the character of YHWH.

So, pj … What’s the point?

Conclusion

Jesus taught His disciples to pray this prayer — and to live this prayer. "Hallowed be Your name." Not as a wish. Not as a piece of liturgy to recite and forget. But as a commitment. As a life orientation. As a statement of what we are for.

The big idea I want to leave with you today is simply this: As ABBA's children, our mission is to honor and restore the holy name of YHWH by living lives that reflect His character and glory in every area of our lives.

Not just on Sunday. Not just in our public, religious moments. In every area.

I believe this passage is calling us toward something. Because what I have been describing — this deep alignment between our inner character and the character of our Father, this life that genuinely hallows His name in the world — is not something we achieve by trying harder. Israel tried. They failed. We try. We fail.

What we need is what Ezekiel promised. We need a new heart. We need not just to be forgiven of our sins — as glorious as that is — we need the transforming work of the Holy Spirit to actually change what we love. To change what we want. To cleanse us so thoroughly that our natural inclination begins to bend toward holiness rather than away from it.

The Father's invitation to us today is not simply to manage our sin better. It is to let Him do the deep work. He wants to fill us so completely with His Spirit that the deep root of self-centeredness is cleansed and replaced with genuine love for the Father and genuine love for others. He wants to go all the way — all the way in, all the way through. And the question I want to ask you before you walk out of here today is this: Have you let Him?

[Pause. Let that land.]

Are there rooms in your heart that you have kept locked? A habit, an attitude, a wound, a way of seeing the world that you know is not aligned with His character? Because today, the Father is not standing at the door waiting for you to clean that room up first. He is asking you to let Him in.

Imagine what this congregation could look like if every person here were genuinely committed to hallowing the Father's name— keeping His name holy by how we live — not as a performance, but as an overflow of a transformed heart.

Imagine the neighbor who has written off Christians because of what they've seen — and then they encounter someone from this church. And something is different. There is a kindness here that isn't strategic. There is a generosity here that doesn't make sense by the world's logic. There is a peace here that the world cannot manufacture. And they begin to wonder: what does this person know about God that I don't?

Imagine the businesses represented in this room conducting themselves with such integrity that their employees and their clients begin to associate that integrity with the God they serve.

Imagine the families in this congregation becoming places where healing happens — where the watching world sees something of the self-giving, forgiving, redemptive love of our Father lived out in ordinary households.

That is what it looks like when God the Father's name is hallowed. That is what it looks like when ABBA's children take seriously what it means to bear His name.

So here is My invitation to you today. Before you leave this place, I want you to ask yourself — and I want you to ask God — two things.

First: Is there an area of my life where I have been careless with God's name? Where my conduct has misrepresented who He is — to my family, to my community, to the people who are watching? If there is, bring it to Him. He is a God who restores. He is the God of Ezekiel 36, the God who acts for the sake of His holy name — and that includes acting in you.

And second: Have I truly surrendered every room of my heart to Him? Not just the presentable rooms, but the rooms I keep hidden? Because God's invitation today is not just to forgive you — it is to transform you. To give you a new heart. To put His Spirit within you and cause you to walk in His ways.

The name of YHWH is at stake in how you and I live this week. But here is the good news — we do not carry it alone. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, and He lives in me. The same God who promised to vindicate His own name has promised to transform you and me from the inside out.

As ABBA's children, this is who we are. This is what we're for.

Let's live up to it.

Let’s pray together right now:

First, The Shema.

Hear, O Libby! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Next, The Lord’s Prayer.

Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.

Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]’

Closing prayer & benediction

Numbers 6:24–26 NASB95

The Lord bless you, and keep you; The Lord make His face shine on you, And be gracious to you; The Lord lift up His countenance on you, And give you peace.’

Scripture records the following words in v.27:

Numbers 6:27 GW

“So whenever they use my name to bless the Israelites, I will bless them.” 

So, receive and go with the blessings of YAHWEH!