Awe: Hallowed Be Thy Name - Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Awe: Hallowed Be Thy Name" Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life
Release Date: February 3, 2025

Introduction

In the episode titled "Awe: Hallowed Be Thy Name," Tim Keller delves deep into the transformative power of authentic prayer and its role in reshaping our passions and loves. Drawing from Psalm 63 and exploring the Lord's Prayer, Keller provides a comprehensive framework for understanding and practicing genuine praise and adoration of God.

Exploring "Hallowed Be Thy Name"

Keller begins by unpacking the phrase "Hallowed be Thy Name," emphasizing its call to treat God as utterly sacred and holy. Referencing historical theologians like St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, he explains that this phrase urges believers to "praise and adore" God with a heart captivated by His magnificence.

"Hallowed be thy name means to praise and adore. It means to be captivated, astonished to be melded with grateful joy for who he is and what he's done."
— Tim Keller [03:45]

Five Aspects of Praise and Adoration

Keller outlines five essential aspects necessary for genuine praise:

Thinking:
Engaging the mind to enumerate and analyze God's attributes. Drawing parallels with romantic love, he likens this to listing the qualities one loves in a partner, fostering a deeper appreciation.

"First of all, praise means thinking and thinking it out and analyzing it and enumerating the glories of God."
— Tim Keller [05:10]
Expressing:
Translating thoughts into articulate expressions of praise. Keller underscores the importance of vocalizing praise, whether through music or spoken words, to fully engage with God.

"He's not just simply thinking about God's glory. He's expressing it."
— Tim Keller [10:00]
Appraising:
Assessing God's worth by comparing His attributes to other aspects of life. This appraisal leads to a reordering of priorities, placing God's greatness above worldly concerns.

"If God is this strong, why am I afraid?"
— Tim Keller [15:20]
Beholding:
Experiencing God's presence viscerally. Using sensory language, Keller describes how true praise involves sensing God's power and love, moving beyond mere intellectual acknowledgment.

"He is saying, because I know that your power and glory and love, but I actually experienced your power and glory and love."
— Tim Keller [12:45]
Experiencing Grace:
Embracing the undeserved grace of God transforms our perception of Him from a mere provider to one worthy of adoration. Keller illustrates this with the story of David and connects it to the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus.

"Your salvation is by grace. It's undeserved. And that is what turns God into someone not just who's useful, but who's beautiful to you."
— Tim Keller [16:10]

Insights and Discussions

Keller integrates insights from notable thinkers to enrich his teachings:

C.S. Lewis on Praise:
Referencing Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms, Keller explains that praise completes enjoyment, turning personal joy into a collective adoration of God.

"We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise does not merely express but completes the enjoyment."
— Tim Keller [09:30]
Jonathan Edwards on Sensory Experience:
Highlighting Edwards's distinction between rational knowledge and sensory experience, Keller emphasizes that true praise involves feeling God's attributes deeply, beyond intellectual understanding.

"You can't actually sense the sweetness of honey without not also rationally knowing that it's sweet."
— Tim Keller [13:50]
Simone Weil and Meditative Praise:
Keller shares the story of Simone Weil, illustrating how meditating on God's grace leads to a profound transformation of the heart, aligning one's loves with divine beauty.

"She experienced what David experienced and what you can experience if you see him bearing the blame for you dying on the cross for you."
— Tim Keller [16:45]

Conclusion

Tim Keller concludes by reaffirming that genuine adoration of God reshapes our hearts, freeing us from fears and addictions by anchoring our loves in His unwavering grace and beauty. He encourages believers to engage deeply in each of the five aspects of praise—thinking, expressing, appraising, beholding, and experiencing grace—to cultivate a prayer life that truly honors God’s sanctity.

"Praise him with a heart. You can go to Psalm 33 and other places. It says, praise him skillfully because the joy comes out."
— Tim Keller [14:30]

Through this structured approach, Keller offers listeners a roadmap to transform their prayer practices, fostering a deeper, more meaningful connection with God that transcends superficial religious routines.

Note: This summary excludes advertisement, introductory, and concluding segments unrelated to the core sermon content to maintain focus on the substantive teachings presented by Tim Keller.

Transcript

A (0:03)

Welcome to gospel and life. What we love shapes who we are. So if we want to change, we have to start by changing what we love, what we're passionate about, what delights us. One of the primary ways we can rearrange the things we love most comes through consistent and faithful prayer. Join us today as Dr. Keller looks at how authentic prayer connects us with God and reshapes what we love.

B (0:35)

Tonight's scripture comes From Psalm chapter 63, verses 1 through 11. You, God, are my God. Earnestly I seek you, I thirst for you. My whole being longs for you. In a dry and parched land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory because your love is better than life. My lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live. And in your name I will lift up my hands. I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods, with singing lips, my mouth will praise you. On my bed I remember you. I think of you through the watches of the night because you are my help. I sing in the shadow of your wings, I cling to you. Your right hand upholds me. Those who want to kill me will be destroyed. They will go down to the depths of the earth. They will be given over to the sword and become food for jackals. But the king will rejoice in God. All who swear by God will glory in him, while the mouths of liars will be silenced. This is the word of the Lord.

C (1:54)

Now, as you know, this fall, we're looking at the subject of prayer. And we're taking the Lord's Prayer, which is Jesus own instruction to the human race on how to pray. And each week we're taking one of the phrases and looking at what in the Bible, at the teaching in the Bible that helps us understand what that phrase means and therefore how we can actually make good on it in prayer. Tonight we're going to look at hallowed be thy name. Hallowed is an old English word, but it means to treat something as sacred, to treat something as holy. And everyone who's ever expounded, if you go back to St. Augustine or Martin Luther, John Calvin, or anybody who's ever tried to explain what this means, they say that it means to treat God as being as glorious, as holy, as infinitely, majestically beautiful as he really is, to treat him as glorious and as great as he actually is. John Calvin in his commentary on the Lord's Prayer, when he gets to hallowed be named, he says it is to have your Entire heart captivated with wonderment for Him. To have your entire heart captivated with wonderment for him. So hallowed be thy name means to praise and adore. It means to be captivated, astonished to be melded with grateful joy for who he is and what he's done. So we're here to talk about tonight. How do you do that? How do you praise and adore God? And we're looking at Psalm 63, a very famous psalm about praise. You see verse four, it says, I will praise you as long as I live. It's all about praise, but it tells you quite a lot that is very specific about prayers. Actually, for many years I always felt I didn't really know how to do it because nobody ever gave me specifics. Well, here's five aspects, not steps, though I'll show you that I'm trying to give them to you in a logical order in some ways, five aspects to praise and adoration. They are thinking, expressing, appraising, beholding and resting. Got to do all five if you're going to praise him, if you're going to hallow his name. First of all, thinking. The first thing you see here is that David. That's a psalm of David. We'll get to. We'll explain a little bit more about when this happened. And this is a psalm of David. David doesn't just say you're great. He breaks it down. He analyzes it. He enumerates the glories. He does this analysis. It's called the old word for this is called recollecting. He doesn't just say you're great. He says, I see your power, I see your glory, I see your love. He's breaking it down. And the reason all praise starts like this, you break it down into specifics. You enumerate and list the glories of God. You go on and on about how all the different ways in which he's glorious, you don't just say, you're great. You know why? Because praise is very linked to love. When you fall in love with somebody, your mind goes into overdrive about what's great about the person. And you're specific. You know, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43, very famous, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. That is the language of love. Not, oh, you're great, it's let me count the ways. You get specific. You go into detail. You know that great classic, wonderful, well done comedy movie Groundhog Day. And you know, the character played by Bill Murray is someone who has to have the Same day repeated over and over and over and over again. And of course, during this time, he falls in love with the character played by Andie MacDowell. He, of course, has actually spent years with her, years of days in which he's seen everything that he loves about her. Whereas, on the other hand, she doesn't realize that's happened. And at one point, he tries to say something about he loves her. And she says, you don't love me. You don't even know me. And then suddenly, he looks at her and says, you like boats, but not the ocean. You like a lake in summers, in the mountains. You're a sucker for French poetry and rhinestones. You're very generous. You're kind to strangers and children. And when you stand in the snow, you look like an angel. And it's riveting because he doesn't just say, I love you. He says, here's what I love about you. And he's listening. He's analyzing it. And as you go through the list, your heart expands, and the loved one's heart expands, and that's praise. The first thing you have to do is you have to break it down. You have to have 10 things, 100 things. You don't just say, I praise you, God, for being a God of love. You say, I praise you, God, for being a God of costly love. Because it costs you so much to give me your love. Undeserved love, wise love, tough love, unconditional love. Every one of those things is like a different aspect, a different wonder. And you never learn how to praise unless you think it out, unless you do recollection, unless you analyze it. So, first it takes thinking, but secondly, it takes expression. It's not enough just to see God's glories. You have to articulate them. You have to declare them. You have to express them. You see, he says, my lips will glorify you. He says, my singing lips. With singing lips, my mouth will praise you in your name. I will lift up my hands. He's not just simply thinking about God's glory. He's expressing it. And you notice he's expressing it musically. He's expressing it publicly, overtly. He's also expressing it corporately, because he's talking about praising God in the congregation. Now, one of the things that's maybe not what you might think is that the Book of Psalms does not say, it's enough just simply to praise God in your heart. Though of course, that's praising God. Of course it is. You've thought it out. You've thought it out. You see his glories, and now you tell him directly about his glories. And that is praise. You can do that in your heart. But it's striking how the Bible talks about how important it is to do this skillfully. Do you know how many places the Bible talks about praising God with the harp and with the timbrel, praising him in the congregation with music. And then it says, but play skillfully. Do it well. It's got to be great music, not bad music. Okay, you can praise them with your list, but it's got to be eloquent. Why now? We don't. There's no way to understand praise. I don't think, especially what the Bible says about praise, unless you read an essay by C.S. lewis. It's a chapter in his book Reflections on the Psalms. And one of the chapters is called A Word About Praising. I often cite it. If you've done any research in this area, you'll run into people. Other people cite it all the time because it's just so seminal. In it, he tells about how when he first became a Christian, C.S. lewis, as he first became a Christian, he really was put off by the fact that God's always asking people to praise him. He's inviting people, praise me, glorify me. And, you know, you say, gee, that's pretty conceited. I mean, if you're talking to a woman, for example, and you're talking a little while, and after, suddenly she says, enough about you. Don't you think my dress is beautiful? Don't you think I look great in it? And you might say, yeah, but then you want to get away because, you know, she's conceited. And so why should we treat God any differently? And Lewis actually ended up saying that when he went through that phase where he thought God was conceited. To be asking us to praise him is because I didn't. He said, I didn't understand how praise works. And this is what he says in there. I'll paraphrase and then read you a quote. He says what he didn't understand is that when you enjoy something, that joy always spontaneously overflows into praise. When you enjoy something, that joy overflows into praise. So if you listen to some music that you enjoy, you grab someone and say, listen to this. Or if you find some beautiful landscape, you grab somebody, say, look at this, and you praise it. And you want them to praise it, too. You want them to say, wow, that is great. Why? Lewis says, this is what's interesting. He never realized until at a certain point he did that if you enjoy something, you have to praise it to others. It's almost a visceral desire, need to praise it to others. Because he says, expression of praise completes the joy. And here's this quote. We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise does not merely express but completes the enjoyment. It is its appointed consummation. So God, in commanding us to glorify him, is simply inviting us to enjoy Him. You can't get at the joy until you get out the joy. Now you see what he's saying. He says, it's not like I enjoy something, then I praise it. You enjoy it by praising it. In fact, your joy is completed as you praise it. And the better you praise, the better the joy. Have you not noticed that you feel joy or you feel, you know, admiration for God? And one of the ways you get that you actually, in a sense, experience that joy is when you sing a great hymn. Why? Because usually the words say it better than you can say it. And because the words say it better than you can say it. You, through those better words, because you're praising God, well, you're enjoying him better. Why do you think I, so often, when I'm preaching, will suddenly break into and quote a stanza out of a hymn? Notice how I do that. In fact, I'm going to do it later today. Now you can thank God. I don't actually try to sing it to you, but the reason I quote it, the reason I cite it, is because it says it praises God better than I can. And so the more excellent our praise, the more eloquent the words, the more incredible the music, the more, the better we express praise, the more we actually enjoy God, the more our hearts are engaged and the more he's honored. This is the reason, by the way, why asking for excellence in worship is not just a New York snob factor. It's not like, well, of course we want excellent music. We're New Yorkers. The food's great, the music's great. Everything's great here. You know. You know, it's a snob factor. It's not a snob factor. The Bible actually says, praise him with a timbrel. Praise him with a heart. You can go to Psalm 33 and other places. It says, praise him skillfully because the joy comes out. And the better it comes out, the more eloquent, the more fitting the expression of the praise is. The more God has honored and the more your heart's engaged, the more joy you have. That's the reason why God says, glorify me because I want you to have the joy that you won't have otherwise. So, first of all, praise means thinking and thinking it out and analyzing it and enumerating his glory. Secondly, expressing it. Thirdly, appraising. By the way, the word appraise has the word praise in it. Did you notice? What does it mean to appraise? It means to add up its value and compare it to other things. If you're going to appraise a painting or appraise a piece of land, you're going to compare it to other lands, you're going to appraise a home, you're going to compare it to other homes. And this is what's happening. Where does it say that? Well, look, Verse three. Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. Now, let's talk about this. I'll mention it now, but I'll come back to it in a second. David, as we're going to see. You know, these psalms have headings. They actually don't. Whenever. Whenever you get the psalm out of the software program to put into the bulletin, for whatever reason, generally the headings of the psalms don't come with it. But if you read them in the. In the Bible, you see psalms have headings that describe sometimes who wrote it and the situation. And in this case, it says, when David was in the desert of Judah, he was on. He was running for his life, he was being hunted down. His life was on the line. And he comes in and has an experience of God's power and glory and sees his love and says, it's more important that I have God's love than it is for me to stay alive physically. Your love is better than life. You know what that means? What he's doing is he's thinking out the implications of what he sees. It's not just like, oh, you're a God of great eternity and power and love. What he's saying is, if you are that, then why am I afraid? So what? Doesn't matter if I die here. In other words, he's getting courage. You know, Paul says in Acts 20, verse 24, neither do I count my own life dear to me that I may finish my course with joy. What he's actually saying is, if, you know it's necessary for me to have the love of God, it's not necessary for me to live. It's perfectly okay to lose my life as long as I've got this. And he's actually thinking out the implications of the greatness he sees he's aligning his whole life. See, to praise God means to treat him as if he's as glorious as he is. You see his glory, you express it and then you bring everything in your mind, not only your mind, not only your emotions, but your life in line with that. And you say, if he's really that great. See, look at the place where it says the Lord. This is in the Psalms. The Lord is the stronghold of my life. And then it says, of whom shall I be afraid? You see the he's appraising. If God is this strong, why am I afraid? See, don't just praise him for being a God of love. Say if you really are this loving, why am I afraid? Don't just praise him for being a wise God. Say if you really are that wise, why am I so upset with how my life is going? You know best. Or if you praise God for being merciful, don't just praise God for being merciful. Say if you're really that merciful, why am I still feeling guilty for this thing that I did in the past? See, that's what David's doing. He's praise means not just with your mind enumerating everything that God is all his greatness, and then with your heart and with your mouth expressing it, but then appraising and saying, well, if he's really this, and if he's really this, he's got the ultimate wealth, he's got the ultimate health, he's got the ultimate love. Then all these other things that I'm looking for to give me, that only God can give me, they're not so important, are they? I'm not as upset now about my career. I'm not as upset now about my relationships. I'm not as upset about those things.