Matthew 6:9-13 — After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

I seem to be going through “classes” of Bible passages this week! Passages that hide from me, passages that I hide from, and now passages I revisit and keep getting (new) value from! One such is Psalm 23. Then there are some whole books — Jonah and Job, for instance. And then there’s this one. “The Lord’s Prayer”, “The Model Prayer” … it has been called both. It’s Jesus answering the disciples question about how to pray very directly, by giving them a prayer guide. That was pretty unusual, I think. Most of Jesus teaching of the disciples (that we know about) was either indirect or by example. This question was so important that He gave them a straightforward — but very deep — answer. 
Here are just a few things I’ve discovered about the Lord’s prayer.
It’s structure might be important. It’s a bit like the Ten Commandments — the first half of the petitions relate to God, and the second half relate to us.
Inside the first group, the direction is from God to man, from above downwards. The second group starts with our most basic physical need and works to our deepest spiritual need — complete deliverance from evil.
The individual petitions might have more to them than meets the eye. To illustrate that, I want to talk about “Hallowed be thy Name”… four words only, but how much they say.
Matthew Henry says, beautifully, “The Lord’s prayer (as indeed every prayer) is a letter sent from earth to heaven.” and then says about “Hallowed”, “It is the same word that in other places is translated sanctified. But here the old word hallowed is retained, only because people were used to it in the Lord’s prayer. Sanctified, of course, is “made holy, not used commonly”. God hallows His name when He shows His character by His actions. We hallow his name when we treat it with the reverence due to it.
God’s name is more than just the label. It is His whole identity, His character. His name is the one we should hold more carefully than any other. We pray “hallowed be thy name” and so we should!
“Hallowed be thy name” — four short words in a prayer that is short itself, only sixty-six words. How much weight they carry. I will, no doubt, return to the prayer often and find new riches every time!