June 5, 2007

Naming God

Read Matthew 6:5-14 and Psalm 99

"hallowed (holy) be your name..." vs. 9

It has been nearly a week since my last blog and to those who read faithfully, I apologize. The reason for my delinquency is two-fold. First, last week was extremely busy. Two, and probably more of the reason than the first, the second verse of the Lord's prayer has completely intimidated me. I have spent the last few days stressing over writing a devotional that some how does justice to the second line of Jesus' prayer. I have been meditating on it, praying on it, and in some respects avoiding it.

Starting off, I guess I would like to say that naming God is a matter of utmost seriousness. Our language for God is merely analogy. None of our language can properly contain God nor define Him perfectly. Therefore, as we speak of God we are doing the best we can with the language we have. For some of us this might seem a foreign thought. The Bible defines God as love, holy, and sovereign. Obviously then, God is these things. Yes, but the degree to which He is these things and the ways by which he transcends these categories reveals to us the limits of our language. God is love. However, God is love to the degree that supercedes our ability to fully define what it means to say that God is love. What does this mean? Shall we stop talking of God because of the limits of our language. Never! We have been given an appropriate language through our Scriptures, a language that seeks to faithfully identify the One to which our worship is directed. We engage in the humbling task of speaking about God in ways that honor Him and at the same time stay exceedingly dependent upon His Spirit for our conversation about Him.

Groovy, now what on earth has this to do with prayer? Ok, the second line of Jesus' prayer names God as holy. Our last devotional spoke of God as a Father, an extremely analogous term that helps us recognize God within earthly categories. Now we have named Him Holy. To speak of God's holiness is to be whisked away from the categories or our earthly existence and be placed within the realm of God's "otherness." In theological lingo, "otherness" is another way of saying that God is not like us. God is not bound by the same limitations that we are. We are finite...He is infinite. We are bound by time...He is eternal. We mess up...He is perfect. We are bent toward sinfulness...He is purely good. We are limited in persepective...He grasps all things. In so many ways, God stands far beyond us in His being.

When we pray, we pray to a God who isn't limited. We name a God whose "otherness" pushes us to have faith in the One who calls things to be that once were not. We pray to a God whose holiness exceeds our understanding, our expectation, and our definitions. We pray to a God who is perfectly good and faithful. We pray to a God who is free to act as He would when He would knowing that he properly grasps all things. To name God holy is to speak of a God that is so completely free from evil and sin that we needn't doubt His intentions for our lives, the motive for His actions in our lives, nor the responses to the prayers of our lives. Holy is his name!

Let me finally conclude, praying to a God that is completely holy should offer to us a great assurance about whom we pray to. Also, allow me to say this, and we will deal with this to a further degree later, holiness leads us to God's otherness. But God's otherness has broken into our world in the person of Jesus Christ. Although God is beyond us, he became like us so that we might become like Him. Through Christ we are drawn into the otherness of God. In fact, one might say that through Christ we are moving beyond our limitations. In Christ, we break free from our bondage to time and live eternally. Likewise, our bent toward sinfulness and self-worship is being redefined. We are in the process of becoming holy as He is Holy (1 Peter 1). Therefore, as we pray the holiness we have as we participate in Christ calls us to evaluate our intentions for prayer and our acceptance of God's perfect will in His answer to our prayers.