Set Apart: Holy Words

[Featured Art by Jen Norton, “Jesus Prays the Psalms“]

As Jesus and His band of followers minister together for three years, Jesus shares many words. He preaches. He prays. He teaches with parables. Every word Jesus speaks is holy because He is holy. And because He carries within Himself a holy desire to awaken as many people as possible to the Kingdom of God He is ushering into the world. 

In this way, His words are no less holy than the signs and wonders He performs. In fact, the words of Jesus as documented in Scripture just might have longer-lasting effects than their supernatural counterparts – if for no other reason than they remain before us longer.

And I’m reminded of the time Jesus met with the Samaritan woman at the well – and the way the non-Jewish people of her town believed Jesus without witnessing a single miracle. All they needed were the words He preached to believe for themselves that He “really is the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).

We never want to deny the power of words. The words of others shape us just as our words impact them – for good or bad. But the power of holy words redeems them all. So as we continue to move through Luke’s Gospel, we will unpack the holy words of Jesus’ most famous prayer as well as a few of His parables – for understanding, yes. But, even more so, to allow these holy words to break-in and transform us.

By giving Jesus’ words space to work in us, we will learn and experience what it is to live set apart as holy to God.

Holy Words: Prayer

Luke demonstrates with great intentionality the reality of Jesus’ prayer rhythm – that of getting alone to pray with His Father. In fact, Luke comes right out and says it early on, “As often as possible Jesus withdrew to out-of-the-way places for prayer” (5:16 MSG). And His disciples noticed!

There’s a scene in The Chosen where Jesus returns to His group of restless disciples after one such evening of prayer – to find them anxious. After some conversation, one of the disciples speaks up, saying that when he had followed John the Baptist, John had taught his followers a special prayer. Then he asks Jesus to do the same.

It turns out, the writers of The Chosen picked up on a tidbit of historical truth. Jewish rabbis, especially those of the first century, were known for teaching unique prayers to be memorized and recited by their disciples.¹ So when Jesus’ disciples ask Him in Luke eleven, “Lord, teach us to pray” (v.1), they’re asking Him to give them the ‘Rabbi Jesus Prayer.’¹ We have come to call it the “Lord’s Prayer.” 

Of course, Jesus complies! And what flows forth is a poetic prayer that not only gives all of Jesus’ followers in every generation words to pray but also teaches us how to pray:¹ 

Jesus said, “This is how you should pray:

‘Father, may your name be kept holy.
    May your Kingdom come soon.
Give us each day the food we need,
and forgive us our sins,
    as we forgive those who sin against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation.’” 

Luke 11:2-4 NLT

For context, Jesus did not give prayer-less people something like training wheels to learn how to pray. Rather, He gave a deep, meditative, holy set of lines to a group of men who would have prayed at least three times a day for their entire lives. He offers His prayer as one to add to their daily prayer rhythm – as a liturgical kind of ritual that’s packed with God’s story as well as words that speak to identity and purpose.¹ 

But the craziest, coolest thing I discovered in researching for this post is that there’s a prayer from ancient Judaism called the Kaddish. It’s a prayer for “making holy;” it’s a prayer “by which one sets one’s own life and heart aside as holy to Yahweh in the process of praying it.”¹ And here’s where it gets really wild – this is the conclusion to the Kaddish:

“May God’s great name be exalted, and hallowed, or recognized as holy in the world, which he created according to his will. May he establish his Kingdom in your lifetime, and in your days, and in the lifetime of the House of Israel, speedily and soon, and we say, ‘Amen.’”¹ 

This prayer pre-dates Jesus. And as a faithful, praying Jewish man of the first century, Jesus incorporated this well-known Kaddish into the prayer He taught His disciples. By doing so, He not only passes on His own understanding of Hebrew Scriptures but demonstrates that He, Himself, was part of this tradition – that He was formed by it.¹  

Now He passes all of this on to us – as “a formative prayer that’s meant to shape us through repetition, over a long period of time.”¹ As we pray these words and meditate on them over the course of our lifetimes, we will discover more of who our holy God is, who we are in Him, and why we are here on earth. 

The ‘Prayer of Rabbi Jesus’ is one we’re meant to employ as a way to shape our understanding of God as holy. We also pray it as the means of setting apart our lives and hearts as holy to God! We pray to ‘make holy’.

Holy Words: Parables

More than any other Gospel, Luke shows Jesus as sharing holy words most often through the telling of parables, which are short stories packed with layers of purposes and meaning. In Greek, the word for ‘parable’ means “to set alongside,” and for Jesus, He set His parables alongside the reality of the Kingdom of God.² These holy words work to reveal kingdom truths as much as they seek to conceal them from those who refuse to believe Jesus. Even from those who want to harm Jesus. 

For a lot of years, I have wondered about Jesus’ continual request of the people He healed to keep the miracle under wraps – such as when He raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead then ordered her parents to tell no one (Luke 8:56). I didn’t understand the why behind such secrecy – until recently. The light bulb finally turned on as I have been re-watching The Chosen and rereading Luke for Lent. Jesus always knew He had come to earth to teach and train disciples, to spread God’s holiness to those who hurt the most, and to die as our final sacrifice. He also understood that as His teachings and healings gained more attention, the sooner He would be killed. Hence, His requests to keep things quiet! Jesus was buying time.

And that’s one of the beautiful things about the parables He used in His teachings. Those in the crowd whose hearts and minds were open to Jesus could hear the truth and understand His messages tucked into the hidden layers of each parable. But those who hated Jesus, whose hearts and minds were closed to Him, could hear nothing but the vague stories He continually told. This strategy kept Jesus’ enemies from fully understanding His identity and purposes until He was ready for them to. Total brilliance!

Jesus also taught with parables in order to express His “shocking announcement that God’s Kingdom was arriving on earth as in heaven” (N.T. Wright).² Most of us were taught that parables are merely stories with a moral when, actually, “Jesus taught with parables to provoke the imagination to see what God is doing from a new perspective.”⁴ So much of what Jesus taught worked to realign hearts and minds back to God, which required listeners to think differently, to be willing to see differently.

For instance, nearly every person Jesus came upon in first century Israel expected Messiah to arrive as a warrior king who would defeat the Romans and set Israel up as their own nation. Over and over, Jesus taught stories to help people gain a different view of the kingdom that God was building on earth: 

• A kingdom that is humble and quiet, nearly unnoticeable at first but eventually spreads – like yeast (Luke 13:20-21). 
• A kingdom that values people of all socio-economic, ethnic, religious, and moral backgrounds – as seen in the ‘Good Samaritan’ (10:30-37). 
• A kingdom that extends love and forgiveness – as illustrated in the Prodigal Son’s story (15:11-32). 
• A kingdom whose values are quite upside-down to the world’s; one where wealth and status have no value – like the story of the rich man and the beggar, Lazarus (16:19-31). 

Because He knew the mindsets and long-standing biases of the people He came to save, Jesus taught with great intention. Very often He even employed different kinds of stories in order to evoke varying responses from those who were listening. 

Some parables, by design, forced a ‘crisis of decision’.² In these stories either a reckoning or a choice had to be faced. For instance, in the “Parable of the Tenants,” a landowner had planted a vineyard then left his vines to be tended by tenants. The tenants were faced with a choice when the landowner sent servants, and eventually his son and heir, to collect his share of the profits. And the evil tenants chose to kill or beat every single person he sent their way. So, eventually, the landowner returned to kill those tenants and to give the vineyard to others (Luke 10:9-18).

This parable tells a shocking story on the surface, but underneath lies a deep truth about God’s kingdom. And for the Jews who had ‘ears to hear’, they would have seen themselves as the tenants and God’s kingdom as the vineyard. Jesus was asking them to face this crisis of decision. He was asking them to make a choice about Him – the Son and Heir!²

Another type of parable is known as the “subversive critique” because of the way these stories subtly seek to dismantle people’s views of God’s Kingdom.² And for a culture soaked in thousands of years of assumptions and predispositions, these parables often evoked the strongest responses.

One such ‘subversive critique’ parable is “The Great Banquet” where a man of wealth planned a grand party, inviting many guests. Except when the banquet was ready, all those who had been invited declined to attend, which angered the master of the house. So he sent word out to invite “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” (Luke 14:21). Even with all of these people, there was room for more, so the master sent his servant out to “the country lanes and behind the hedges” to invite total strangers (v.23). Those originally invited were no longer welcome to the table (v.24).

Anyone with ‘ears to hear’ would have known that the original invitees were the Jews. But as they decline to join Jesus at that great feast in heaven (v.15), the door opens to all people – even the Gentiles, the non-Jews. Jesus, through parables such as this one, seeks to tear down preconceived ideas of the Kingdom of God, to point people to the plan God always had of making a way for all nations to join God at the Great Banquet.² 

Of course, we know the response of the Temple leaders to such parables. They did, indeed, kill the Son. 

But here’s what we need to take away from all of this. Jesus’ parables, like His prayers, are meant to be pondered. Meditated. Returned-to again and again. The lessons Jesus intended for His original audience still have power and purpose for us today. We, too, carry assumptions about the ways of God. We, too, haul around deeply set prejudices and preconceived ideas. We, too, have values that reflect more of the world than the Kingdom of God. And these stories can help flush them out.

Holy words. They require our time, our attention, our willingness to invite Holy Spirit into our minds and hearts so that the prayers and parables of Jesus can shape us and re-form us. To live set apart as holy for God, we must confront our own ways of thinking and believing. We must give space for Jesus’ words to do a work in us.* 

Today we’re praying the lyrics to Selah’s song, “The Lord’s Prayer:”⁵ 

Our Father in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done
On earth as it is in Heaven

For Thine is the kingdom
Thine is the power
And the glory forever, forever, amen

Give us, Lord, give us
This day our daily bread
And forgive us, forgive us, Lord
Forgive us of our debt

For Thine is the kingdom
Thine is the power
And the glory forever, forever, amen, amen

Lead us from temptation
Lead us from temptation
But deliver us, deliver us
From evil to Thy salvation

For Thine is the kingdom
Thine is the power
And the glory forever, amen

Thine is the kingdom
Thine is the power
And the glory forever, forever amen 

Resources: I love sharing with you the books, podcasts, articles, and anything else that has inspired, encouraged, or taught me. These are humble offerings with no expectations.

• 1 – The Bible Project podcast transcript about Lord’s Prayer (episode 20 of The Sermon on the Mount series)
• 2 – The Bible Project podcast series on how to read Jesus’ parables
• 3 – There doesn’t seem to be an exact, agreed upon number of parables in Luke. But twenty-four seems like the most frequently listed number, and it gives us an idea of just how many parables Luke incorporates into his Gospel – eighteen of which are unique to Luke. 
• 4 – The Bible Project video on why Jesus taught with parables
• 5 – Selah’s rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer” pulls from Matthew’s versions of ‘Rabbi Jesus’ Prayer’, which is the more familiar version. I do love how they incorporate the later-added conclusion as the chorus. Hearing and singing along with the Lord’s Prayer is one way to meditate on its words, to give those familiar words space to do a work in us. Of course, this song is on our series’ Spotify playlist, Set Apart As Holy.
• *I open each of my “Teacup Videos” with this phrase, “Let’s hear some words and give them space to do a work in us.” I did not expect this piece of writing to lead me to this often-used phrase – a phrase that I now see as holy. Because the words we seek belong to our holy God. Each Wednesday I upload a “Teacup” teaching video that carries on the topic here. You can find all the videos on my Facebook Author Page, Instagram, and YouTube.
• Many of you have found me on Substack. Thank you so much! And, if you’d like to listen to (rather than read) these weekly posts, you can do so on Substack. It’s easy to see and use the audio bar across the top of each post. While you’re on Substack, check out the ministry I’m blessed to be part of, the Devoted Collective.
• My monthly newsletter, The Abiding Life, goes to email inboxes the first week of each month to those who have subscribed on my website. I also post them on Substack. My most recent edition can be found there, and you can subscribe for future newsletters on Substack, here.

Rhythms: As my newsletter’s title infers, we seek to develop an abiding life in this space — a place where we can get informed but also be transformed as we learn to abide in God’s presence throughout our days. I like to think that developing rhythms is one way to aid us in our desire to become more Christlike.

• It’s Lent, so it makes sense that we’d pick up the spiritual rhythms of fasting and praying. I offer to you a resource that will aid your rhythm of praying the Lord’s Prayer. Every Monday in this season, I’ve been listening to Annie F. Downs’ That Sounds Fun weekly podcast episode in her series “Spiritual Stronger.” This particular Monday took me by surprise! Not only did I not know these two men but I have never heard anyone talk about the Lord’s Prayer the way they do. I think it will challenge and encourage you — as it has me. Here’s to making God’s name holy!

• We’re all called to share the truth about who Jesus is. One way you can do that is by sharing this site and telling others your own stories of faith experiences. May we use our whole selves to tell others about our holy God!!

Featured Featured art by Jen Horton, “Jesus Prays the Psalms“

“All the Bits and Pieces” Photo by Aleksandra Sapozhnikova on Unsplash.