What Does "Hallowed Be Your Name" Mean?

Most people can recite the line without ever stopping on it. Hallowed be thy name. It’s the second phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, and it may be the most skipped-over four words in it. I mean, when’s the last time you heard anybody say “hallowed”? So what is the actual meaning of “hallowed be thy name,” and why did Jesus put it first, before He let us ask for anything?

Two words, defined

Hallowed means treated as holy, set apart, regarded as uniquely precious and pure and worthy of awe.

Name, in the Bible, means much more than what you’d write on a form. A person’s name stood for who they were, their character and reputation. So God’s name stands for everything He is, His goodness and His power and His love and His justice.

Put together, the line means something like: May You be honored, treasured, and made much of, above everything else.

(Modern translations like the ESV say “hallowed be your name.” Older ones say “thy.” It means the same thing.)

A statement and a request

This line runs in two directions at once.

First, it’s a declaration. God, You are holy. You are glorious whether anyone notices or not.

And it’s a plea. Father, let the whole world see You as You really are. And let my own heart treasure You more than anything else.

That second part is where it gets personal. You can’t honestly ask God to be treasured everywhere while you treasure something else more, and so the prayer that starts out sounding like a hymn turns into a mirror.

Everybody hallows something

We make a claim in our book that I’ll stand behind. Nobody is a non-worshiper. The word worship doesn’t first mean singing in a building. It means ascribing worth, building your life around what you treasure most.

By that definition, everybody hallows something. Some people hallow a career and sacrifice their evenings and their health to it. Some hallow a relationship and ask another flawed human being to be their everything. Others hallow comfort, or money, or their kids’ success, or their reputation.

None of those things are evil, and most are good gifts. What goes wrong is the weight we put on them. They were never built to carry a human soul, so they keep promising satisfaction and keep failing to deliver. Have you felt that strange emptiness that shows up right after you finally get the thing you wanted?

One of the men in our church described his old treasures (comfort, people’s approval, tech toys) this way: “It felt good when you got those things. But it all wore off after a while.” Willpower isn’t what changed him. He discovered that God satisfies longer.

So when we pray “hallowed be your name,” we’re praising God, and we’re also asking Him to take back the throne from whatever has been sitting on it.

John Piper has spent his life on this idea, and he puts it in one sentence. God isn’t competing with our joy. He is honored most when we find our joy in him.

What happens when you pray it for years

In Living the Lord’s Prayer we describe four movements this line works in a person over time. I’ve found them useful as a kind of map.

1. See our unholiness. Admit we are not the center of the universe, and that apart from Jesus we’re running on substitutes.
2. Dethrone the unholy things. Pull lesser treasures off the throne of the heart, one at a time, as God exposes them.
3. See God’s holiness. Most clearly at the cross, where His justice and His love went on public display together.
4. Enthrone Him over everything: home, work, money, worry.

Don’t skip that third step. Working up religious feelings won’t hallow God. Looking at who He actually is does that, and the clearest look we get is Jesus dying for people who had put everything else first. The holiness of God isn’t just His distance from evil. It’s His willingness to pay for ours.

Reverence is something you build

There’s an old definition that has helped me: reverence is knowledge plus submission. Believe that God is. Know what He’s like. Stay aware of Him. Obey Him.

So hallowing God isn’t a mood you wait for. You build it, one ordinary decision at a time. Where does your first free thought go in the morning? What do you do with the money that’s left after the bills? What do you reach for when you’re anxious? Those are all hallowing questions.

Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Your calendar, your bank statement, and your daydreams are pretty honest witnesses about what you currently hallow.

So why did Jesus put this line first? Why not start with something more practical, like bread or forgiveness?

Because order matters. If you skip treasuring God and jump straight to behaving for God, you get religion at its worst, duty without delight, the kind of rule-keeping that turns into pride or collapses into exhaustion. Everything else in the Christian life runs on the fuel of this line. We love because He first loved us. Take away the treasure, and all you have left is a to-do list.

And there’s a promise in it. “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). Treasure God, and you finally get what you were looking for in all the substitutes, because He’s the only treasure that doesn’t wear off.

Try this for a week

Here’s a small practice. Each morning this week, before you check your phone, pray the short prayer we put in chapter two of Living the Lord’s Prayer: “God, be big in my thoughts today. Be precious in my decisions. Be honored in how I treat my family, my work, and my struggles.”

Then at the end of the week, ask yourself one question: what, if anything, shifted?

If you’re working through this with a small group, our free leader’s guide has discussion questions for this chapter. It’s a good conversation to have out loud.