Calling on the Name of the Lord

“Your Big Why” has been something that has been used for the last few years to help people set goals and stick to their goals. It is something that we come up with that will emotionally drive us to accomplish the hard things we’ve set out to do. Many people who set out to train for a long race will dig deep and create a Big Why statement that will fuel them as they train and run. So on mile 10 when they want to quit, they can rehearse their Big Why and it will emotionally surge them past the brick wall moment and on to victory.

Our faith journey has often been compared to a race. Paul refers to our faith as a race two times and the writer of Hebrews penned the verses that most of us are most familiar with, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

As with any race, we will have great moments of victory as well as great moments of feeling defeated. We will be forced to face our own weaknesses and decide whether or not our race is worth running. We also have to decide why we choose to run this race. Jesus Himself told us that our faith journey would not always be easy, in fact He knew that at times it would be more of a battle than a race. And we all have to come up with our Big Why if we want to endure to the end.

The difference between a physical race and a spiritual race is who we are depending on to get us to the finish line. This is often revealed by who we are calling out to when our race gets difficult. Some will dig deep and rely completely on themselves. But, if we’ve walked with Jesus for any length of time, we will learn through trial and error how defeating it is to rely only on ourselves. It is during those dark times in our lives when we learn to call on the name of the Lord to help put one foot in front of the other.

We each have an individual race to run, but as the people of God we can look to those who have gone before us and learn from their victories and their mistakes. We can understand the blessings that come when we call on the name of the Lord, and we can learn from the consequences that come when we don’t.

In the beginning Adam and Eve freely conversed with God. But the first time we see prayer show up in scripture is in Genesis 4:25-26, “Adam made love to his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, “God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.” 26 Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of the LORD.”

It was Adam and Eve’s grandchildren who began to call on the name of the Lord. There doesn’t seem to be anything too significant about why at that time they began praying, but it makes me wonder about the stories that had been passed down to them from Seth and Adam and Eve. Stories about a garden, about how animals lived in perfect peace, about a God who walked among His creation and breathed life into them. I wonder if that generation began to long for what had been lost, and in the midst of grieving over what had been lost they clung to the promise that God had made to Adam and Eve in the garden.

Genesis 3:15, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” In this verse we see the first glimmer of the gospel. God is telling Adam and Eve what will happen to Satan. It is from this point on that humans will be looking for someone who will come to crush Satan’s head and right all that had gone horribly wrong.

1. Prayer is about remembering God’s promises.

Calling on the name of the Lord was simply asking God to come through on what He had already promised. This sets the stage for the entire Biblical narrative on prayer. God wants to redeem people, in order to be in relationship with them, and establish His Kingdom on earth. Throughout scripture God makes promises to people about how He is going to do accomplish His will.

To Abraham God says, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. 2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” Genesis 12:1-3. God made a promise to accomplish His will through Abraham’s descendants. Shortly after that in chapter 13 it says that Abram called on the name of the Lord, asking Him to come through on what He had promised him.

Time passed and God does come through on His promise to Abraham and establishes the nation of Israel through his offspring. Several generations later, the Israelites find themselves enslaved in Egypt. And what do you suppose their response is to this very trying time? They called on the name of the Lord. They still believed that He would be faithful to His promises. That’s when God raised up a deliverer. As Moses was standing next to the burning bush, God said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 9 And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” Exodus 3:7-10

The reason people felt like they could cry out to God is because they trusted His promises. Throughout the Old Testament they believed that God would establish His Kingdom and raise up a Savior who would reign over His Kingdom. God remained faithful to hear the prayers of His people and when they prayed in accordance with His will, He was faithful to rescue, restore and redeem them.

There are two examples of praying kings in the Old Testament. First we have King Saul, he was the man that God placed as king over His nation. The people had cried out for a king and God gave them what they had asked for. In every way, Saul seemed to be the right choice. But a close examination of his prayer life proves that he desired Israel to be established as his kingdom, not God’s. The only place in scripture that we find King Saul praying is in 1 Samuel 14. “Then Saul prayed to the LORD, the God of Israel, “Why have you not answered your servant today?” Saul was so eager to be the king that he only sought God for favor. He desired his crown so much that he was about to put his own son Jonathan to death in order to gain the throne. It didn’t take long before Saul’s crown was taken from him and given to one who was known as a man after God’s own heart. How can someone come to be known by such an intimate title?

We can read one of the most dynamic prayers found in the Bible in 1 Samuel 7:18-29, “Then King David went in and sat before the LORD, and he said: “Who am I, Sovereign LORD, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far? 19 And as if this were not enough in your sight, Sovereign LORD, you have also spoken about the future of the house of your servant—and this decree, Sovereign LORD, is for a mere human! 20 “What more can David say to you? For you know your servant, Sovereign LORD. 21 For the sake of your word and according to your will, you have done this great thing and made it known to your servant. 22 “How great you are, Sovereign LORD! There is no one like you, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears. 23 And who is like your people Israel—the one nation on earth that God went out to redeem as a people for himself, and to make a name for himself, and to perform great and awesome wonders by driving out nations and their gods from before your people, whom you redeemed from Egypt? 24 You have established your people Israel as your very own forever, and you, LORD, have become their God. 25 “And now, LORD God, keep forever the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house. Do as you promised, 26 so that your name will be great forever. Then people will say, ‘The LORD Almighty is God over Israel!’ And the house of your servant David will be established in your sight. 27 “LORD Almighty, God of Israel, you have revealed this to your servant, saying, ‘I will build a house for you.’ So your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to you. 28 Sovereign LORD, you are God! Your covenant is trustworthy, and you have promised these good things to your servant. 29 Now be pleased to bless the house of your servant, that it may continue forever in your sight; for you, Sovereign LORD, have spoken, and with your blessing the house of your servant will be blessed forever.”

Do you hear the promises of God being uttered in David’s prayer? Do you hear covenant language? David was more concerned with God accomplishing His will and fulfilling His promises to the nation than he was with his keeping the kingdom for himself. He understood the depth and the breadth of the Kingdom, he longed for God to make Himself known among the nations and bring redemption through his line.

2. Prayer is calling forth the forward movement of God’s Kingdom.

And that is EXACTLY what God did! He remained faithful to His promises even when His people were consistently unfaithful. He established Israel as His nation for generations and generations. Then about 2000 years ago His promise of redemption and salvation came in the form of a man named Jesus. He came from the line of David, He was the Son of God, and He fulfilled the promise that God’s Kingdom would continue to expand throughout the whole world.

The birth of Christ was ushered in on the prayers of the faithful men and women who called on the name of the Lord, people who continually asked God to come through on what He had promised. Men like Zechariah and Simeon, and women like Anna. And when Jesus came, He shifted the focus of prayer from calling on the name of the Lord to establish the nation of Israel, to crying out to our Father to spread His Kingdom throughout all nations.

The Bible mentions Jesus praying 25 different times. Many instances we aren’t given specifics on what He said, what we do know is He prayed before, during and after major moments in His ministry. He prayed after He was baptized, after He fed the 5,000 (which just so happens to be before He walked on water), before He called the 12 disciples, after casting out demons, before preaching in the synagogues, and before accomplishing His purpose on the cross. Not all of His prayers are written out for us, oh how I wish I could have heard Him pour out his heart to His Father on the mountainside, but what we do have we can see how His prayers aligned with the whole biblical theology of prayer.

His most famous prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, is directly correlated with covenant language and Kingdom focus.

Matthew 6:9-13, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, 10 your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”

The three things that Jesus is teaching us to pray for all revolve around the ultimate fulfillment of all God’s promises, the inbreaking of God’s eschatological rule!

For thousands of years, people had approached God formally, calling on His different names, Yahweh, Elohim....Jesus begins His prayer by referring to God as Our Father then He begins to tell His followers to pray in His name. This dynamic shift shows us that “praying in the name of Jesus is the NT is equivalent to calling on the name of the Lord in the OT. In both cases prayer is construed as asking God to do what he has promised-in the OT to send the Messiah and establish His Kingdom; in the NT to continue to build the church of the Lord Jesus Christ until He returns.” (Calling on the Name of the Lord, A Biblical Theology of Prayer, pg.179)

Soon after Jesus ascended to heaven we find the disciples gathered for prayer in Acts 1. And from that point forward all major gospel movements are accompanied by prayer. Prayer has been what God has used to cause people to remember His promises and call into being the forward movement of His Kingdom.

Now, in 2021, we are the people of God who are calling on the name of Jesus to do what He has promised to do. We are part of this eternal race that is constantly moving forward. In His Kingdom, our Big Why must be to do the will of the One who has saved us and redeemed us. Our voices rise up along with the saints who have gone before us to call on the name of the Lord until He comes. From Eden to the End Times we cry out, Amen, Come Lord Jesus.

Let’s Pray

The New International Version. (2011). (Mt 6:9–13). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

People had always passionately cried out to God, Jesus intimately transformed it

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The New International Version. (2011). (2 Sa 7:18–26). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The New International Version. (2011). (1 Sa 14:41). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The New International Version. (2011). (Ex 3:7–10). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The New International Version. (2011). (Ge 12:1–3). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The New International Version. (2011). (Ge 22:16–18). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The New International Version. (2011). (Ge 3:15). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The New International Version. (2011). (Ge 4:25–26). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The New International Version. (2011). (Heb 12:1). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.