The First Thing He Taught Them to Ask For Was Not Anything

A man kept a list of the things he prayed for, and he kept it faithfully for six years.

It was a good list and he worked it honestly. His wife's back. His brother. A neighbor's son. Work, a decision, a friend's diagnosis. He crossed things off and he added things and he never once skipped a day, and if you had asked him whether he loved God he would have said yes without hesitating, and he would have been telling the truth.

One evening he read the prayer Jesus taught, the one everybody knows, and he noticed something he had been reading past his whole life. He counted where the asking starts.

It does not start at the beginning. There is a whole clause before anything is requested, and that clause is not about him, and it is not about anybody's back or brother or diagnosis. It is a request that God's name be treated as holy.

He sat with that for a while. Then he wrote at the top of his list, above everything else, a line that was not a request for anything at all, and he told me later that he did not know what to do with it for about a month.

Where the pattern actually begins

Read the opening again, slowly, and notice how much happens before a single need is mentioned.

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. (Matthew 6:9, King James Version)

Two things, and both of them are about God rather than about the one praying.

Our Father which art in heaven. Before anything is asked for, the one praying is told who they are talking to and what the relationship is. Not a distant power to be negotiated with. A Father, and in heaven, which means near enough to be called Father and high enough that nothing you are about to mention is beyond Him.

You have been given a relationship before you were given a request line, and the order is His rather than a convention of ours, and Matthew 6 puts the address first in the text itself, and it is the Spirit of adoption who makes the word Father something a person can say rather than something they can define.

Hallowed be thy name. Then, still before any request, a petition that His name be set apart, treated as holy, held as weighty.

Notice that this is a request. It is not a compliment paid to God on the way past. Jesus puts it in the imperative, the same grammatical shape as give us this day, which means He expects His followers to actually want it and to ask for it.

You are permitted to ask for something that is not for you, and the first line of the pattern is exactly that, which Matthew 6:9 establishes before a single need appears, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person an appetite for a request they get nothing out of.

What a name means in Scripture

A name in Scripture is not a label. It is the thing itself, made speakable.

When Moses asks who is sending him, God's answer is not a title.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. (Exodus 3:14)

That is not information about God. It is God handing a frightened man something to carry into Egypt.

And Solomon writes about the name as a place rather than a word.

The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe. (Proverbs 18:10)

Runneth into it. A person can be inside a name. That is what Scripture thinks a name is: not a label fixed to a thing, but a place where somebody stands.

You have somewhere to stand that does not depend on how the name has been feeling in your mouth lately, and Proverbs 18 describes it as a tower rather than as a mood, and the Spirit is the one who walks a person back inside it when their own words have gone thin.

The wearing-out that nobody notices

Nobody sets out to wear a name smooth.

It goes the way a stone step goes: worn in the middle by ordinary use, and nothing was decided and nothing was disrespected. It simply thinned. The man with the six year list had not gone cold. He had said the name several thousand times, mostly on behalf of other people, which is not the behavior of somebody who does not care.

But there is a difference between a name that carries weight and a name that has become the punctuation between two requests, and a praying person can slide from the first to the second across a decade without a single day on which it happened.

And when they notice, they almost always reach for the wrong verdict. They decide they have been insincere, or that the whole thing was habit, or that God has moved further off.

You have not worn Him out, and a name can go thin in your mouth without anything at all changing on His end, which is what Proverbs 18:10 says about a tower that does not move, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than your intensity who has been keeping the name weighty this whole time.

Malachi describes what the repair looks like, and it is almost startlingly ordinary.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name. (Malachi 3:16)

Thought upon his name. Not studied it. Thought upon it, and spoke about it to each other, and God wrote it down.

You are already the kind of person that verse is describing, because you noticed the thinness at all, and Malachi 3 has the book written for people who thought upon the name rather than for people who never let it thin, and the Spirit is the one who gave you the noticing in the first place.