Think of the generations who have gone to the grave saying this prayer.  What a prophecy of the heaven, where all shall be gathered and each feel his sense of Fatherhood increased by his brethren!

And this is the only possible basis for true fraternity among men.

Opinion?  Men are not thinking machines.

Interest?  Men are not ruled by calculations, and such union is the destruction of true unity.

Common aims?—­shallow.

Nation or race?—­artificial and not capable of universality.

There is no brotherhood but that which rests on God’s Fatherhood, Christ’s Sonship.  For the world Christ has come, therefore we are no more ‘strangers and foreigners.’

Therefore, listening to His voice, and trusting in Him who has made us heirs together with Him, let us lift up our voices, ‘Our Father,’ and therein proclaim that God who loves every soul of man, who knows each man’s wants, who bends over him in pitying tenderness, who can neither die nor change, and who will gather into His eternal home all His prodigal children and keep them blessed by His side for evermore.

‘HALLOWED BE THY NAME’

     ’Hallowed be Thy name.’—­Matt. vi. 9.

Name is character so far as revealed.

I. What is meaning of Petition?

Hallowed means to make holy; or to show as holy; or to regard as holy. 
The second of these is God’s hallowing of His Name.  The third is men’s.

The prayer asks that God would so act as to show the holiness of His character, and that men, one and all, may see the holiness of His character.

i.e.  Hallowed by divine self-revelation.

Hallowed by human recognition.

Hallowed by human adoration and appropriate sentiments.

Hallowed by human action.

II.  On what it rests: 

On the Fatherhood of God.

On the confidence that God wills that His Name should be known.  In other words, the petition rests on the assurance of God’s fatherly love, which cannot but will that His children should know their Father as He is.

On the fact that men need the knowledge of the Name.

On the conviction that men cannot attain it for themselves.

That Christ is the great means of His hallowing His Name.

His finished work does not render this prayer unnecessary.

‘I have declared Thy name, and will declare it.’

That this is to be issue of all.  A grand prophecy.

III.  Why put first.

Singular, that so remote a petition should stand at beginning.  We should begin not with ourselves, but with God; not with temporal wants, not even with our own spiritual ones.

We begin not with men, but with God.

It is God’s glory even more than men’s knowledge of Him that the petition contemplates.  And though the two things coincide, which of them is foremost in our minds makes an infinite difference.