Step 3: “Hallowed Be Thy Name” - Honoring God’s Nature
The Meaning of “Hallowed”
The third step of the Lord’s Prayer introduces the concept of hallowing or honoring God’s nature. The word “hallowed” has powerful meanings that go beyond simple reverence. The word hallowed has the same meaning as holy or whole or wholesome or heel or healed. It really means I am all, there is, I’m the whole thing.
The word “hallowed” comes from Old English and means “to recognize as being whole.” This reveals that God is saying “I am all of it. Everything that there is, I am. Everything that has ever been expressed has come from me, it is an expression of me.”
The Name of God
In the Bible, a “name” doesn’t simply refer to what someone is called, but to their essential nature or character. In the Bible as elsewhere the word name means the essential nature or character of that thing. And therefore, the name of God is not God. It’s not God’s name, not in the Bible.
The ancient Hebrews understood that God’s true nature couldn’t be captured in a pronounceable name. The word Jehovah that has been used for that in the Scriptures did not really exist in ancient times. It was never a word at all that was used by the Hebrews. Jehovah is a medieval mistaken translation. The ancients used the divine name of God which was a tetragrammaton or a word of four consonants, Y-H-W-H. These four letters (YHWH) couldn’t be pronounced, representing that God’s nature is beyond human ability to fully comprehend or express.
That God’s nature is beyond human comprehension—is deeply rooted in Jewish theology, where God’s name represents His infinite and unknowable essence.
What It Means to Hallow God’s Name
To hallow God’s name means to recognize, honor, and celebrate God’s true nature.
To hallow is to recognize His nature, it means to rejoice in His nature, it means to observe it, it means to become aware of it, it means to identify with it, it means to begin to believe in it, it means to call it forth, it means to express it, it means to draw it out, it means to stop seeing the problems and start beholding the creative cause.
This involves a fundamental shift in perception:
- We recognize God as the source of all good
- We see beyond problems to the perfect spiritual reality
- We rejoice in God’s nature even when circumstances seem challenging
- We begin to identify with God’s nature as our own true identity
Seeing Beyond Appearances
A key aspect of hallowing God’s name is developing the ability to see beyond appearances to spiritual reality. It’s to come to believe that as a rose bush cannot produce lilies, so God cannot cause or send anything but perfect good to God’s beloved children. God can only act in accordance with His divine goodness.
When we truly hallow God’s name, we refuse to accept that evil, limitation, or suffering is part of God’s plan or nature. In other words: “I will believe in you when all else seems to have failed. I will believe in you; I will never believe in the appearances.”
The Practical Application
Hallowing God’s name isn’t just a theological concept but a practical approach to life. Hallow be your name means that I realize that your true nature is my real identity and that my very life and the love that I am feeling and the intelligence with which I perceive the world around me and the power that is mine to move my finger, the strength to accomplish the things that I need to accomplish, all these things are about an expression of you.
In our daily lives, this means:
- Acknowledging God as the source of all our capacities
- Recognizing divine qualities in ourselves and others
- Expecting good even when circumstances suggest otherwise
- Rejoicing in God’s nature rather than focusing on problems
By hallowing God’s name, we shift our consciousness from seeing problems to recognizing divine possibilities, setting the stage for the transformation that continues in the subsequent steps of the prayer.