SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/7/2020 8:31 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “God’s
Priority”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 6:9c
Message of the
verse: “hallowed be Thy name.”
In our last SD we have been talking about the names of
God and what the names of God mean. As
we begin today we want to look at what Jesus Himself gives as God’s name as He
gives the clearest teaching about what God’s name means, and the reason that He
can do this is because Jesus Christ is God’s greatest name. Let us look at John 17:6 “"I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world;
they were Yours and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.” Everything that Jesus Christ, the Son of God
did on earth manifested God’s name.
Jesus Christ was the perfect manifestation of God’s nature and His glory
as seen in John 1:14 (“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we
saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and
truth.”) Jesus was the perfect manifestation
of God’s name.
John MacArthur writes “Hallowed’ is
an archaic English word used to translate a form of hagiazo, which means to make holy.
Words from the same root are translated ‘holy, saint, sanctify,
sanctification,’ etc. God’s people are
commanded to be holy (1 Pet. 1:16), but God is acknowledged as ‘being’
holy. That is the meaning of praying ‘hallowed
be Thy name’: to attribute to God the
holiness that already is, and always has been supremely and uniquely His. To hallow God’s name is to revere, honor,
glorify, and obey Him as singularly perfect.
As John Calvin observed, that God’s name should be hallowed was nothing
other than to say that God should have His own honor, of which He was so worthy,
that men should never think or speak of Him without the greatest reverence.
Hallowing God’s name, like every
other manifestation of righteousness, begins in the heart, ‘Sanctify Christ as
Lord in your hearts’ Peter tells us (1 Pet. 3:15), using a form of the word
that ‘hallowed’ translates.”
When we do as Peter speaks of in
sanctifying Christ as Lord in our hearts, then we will also sanctify Him in our
lives too. It all begins in our hearts,
and I think that perhaps it would be wise to give the definition of the word
heart as found in my Online Bible Dictionary:
“1) the heart
1a) that organ in the animal body which
is the centre of the circulation of the blood, and hence was regarded as the seat of physical life
1b) denotes the centre of all physical and spiritual life
2a) the vigour and sense of physical
life
2b) the centre and seat of spiritual life
2b1) the soul or mind, as it is the fountain and seat of the
thoughts, passions, desires, appetites, affections, purposes, endeavours
2b2) of the understanding, the faculty
and seat of the intelligence
2b3) of the will and character
2b4) of the soul so far as it is affected and stirred in a bad
way or good, or of the soul as the seat of the sensibilities, affections,
emotions, desires, appetites, passions
1c) of the middle or central or
inmost part of anything, even though inanimate”
I hope that this will help us better
understand what the heart is, both the physical, but mostly the spiritual
meaning of the heart, and so we can understand what Peter wrote “Sanctify
Christ as Lord in your hearts.” We can
also understand why if we do this that in our lives we will sanctify Christ
too.
When we acknowledge that Jesus
Christ exists then we hallow His name. “He
who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those
who seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6) which comes from the great faith chapter. If a person is honest and has an open mind,
then God is self-evident. MacArthur writes
“Immanuel Kant had many strange ideas about God, but he was absolutely right
when he said, ‘The law within us and the starry heavens above us drive us to
God.’” This quote from Kant comes from
William Barclay’s commentary on the Gospel of Matthew.
I want to quote from Psalm 36:1 to
show what happens to mankind when they don’t find that God is self-evident, and
suppress the wonderful truth about God.
I also want to mention that Paul quotes this verse in Romans 3:18. “An oracle within my heart concerning the
transgression of the wicked: There is no fear of God before his eyes”
(Ps. 36:1). “Warren Wiersbe states “In
Scripture, an oracle is usually an authoritative pronouncement from the Lord; but here it is sin that is
speaking an oracle deep in the heart of the sinner.” I write this to demonstrate how far our world has come in a downward spiral
from what was observed by Immanuel Kant in the quote above.
Lord willing we will continue
looking at what it means to hallow God’s name in our next SD.
11/7/2020 8:59
AM
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