And we kept going over and over it without having a clue what it means. Those who have been to Catholic school, as I have been, the first thing we ever learned in Catholic school was the Lord’s Prayer. Whatever does this mean? It is so easy to pray the Lord’s Prayer. In Chinese, “ 願祢的名被尊為聖 yuan ni de ming bei zun wei sheng”. Today we come then to these words, “Hallowed be thy name”. “Draw near to God He will draw near to you.” Thus, here in Scripture, the emphasis, not as my emphasis, it is the Scriptural emphasis, always lays the responsibility on us because God has done everything there is to do. We do not have to know what is God’s part. The question only is we have to know what is our part. “Ask” - that is our responsibility - “then you shall receive.” “Seek” - that is our responsibility - “then you shall find.” And James says, “Draw near to God He will draw near to you.” You do your part He will do His. Therefore, Scripture itself emphasizes our responsibility and it never leaves us in doubt that God is ever ready to respond to our prayer. The only question is whether we are ready to do ours. You keep emphasizing what we have to do.” But that is what Scripture says, not what I say. It is funny how some people often say to me, “You seem to always put the responsibility on us. And James tells us, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” It depends on you. He is always near.Īnd so, how do we draw near to God? It is quite simply by drawing near to Him, by repenting of our sins. But never is He far away from you in terms of distance. If He is far away, it is because you are far from Him. And then it comes and dawns upon you as to what it really means, that God is as near as your own breath, as near as your own spirit. But in due time, the meaning of it will gradually, I hope, percolate like coffee right down from your mind into your heart. You virtually have to be a theologian to understand the depth of what we are talking about. Now, I know that many of you may not appreciate the importance of this. God is Spirit and He is not near or far in some way that we can measure in terms of geographical distance. And you find that you have entered in a new and different state of existence, which is where God is.
And we saw what difference it makes to our whole spiritual outlook, what difference it makes to our prayer life, when we accurately understand the Word of God, that God is not far away that we have to reach Him by some kind of rocket-propelled prayers, but that God is always near, that right across the border of the material and the spiritual, the spiritual is, as it were, right beside, just switching, you might say, the spiritual or even the material frequency.
We have already studied the richness of God’s Word in the meaning, when we studied what it means, of “Our Father.” What does it mean when the week before we saw “which art in heaven” ? We saw that heaven is not some kind of a geographical location but a spiritual state of being. Today we need to come to these important words: “Hallowed be thy name”. Sermon by Pastor Eric Chang, November 21, 1976
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