How Do You Use the Name of God?

What could be more grotesque than taking that which is sacred and reducing it to vulgarity? That is what we’re doing when we take the name of God in vain. Today, R.C. Sproul calls us to consider the way we treat the Lord in our speech.

Who will forget—if they were alive and old enough to remember it—the assassination of John F. Kennedy, one of the most traumatic days in human history? According to all of the reports, when the president was hit by the first bullet, his head flew backwards, his hands went to his head, and he exclaimed the last words he would ever say in his life. He cried out, “Oh, my God.”

Now, I wasn’t there, and I don’t know in what way he uttered those words. One of the last words that Jesus ever spoke before He died were the same words: “My God, why hath Thou forsaken Me?” There is nothing wrong with a genuine prayer of expression to say, “Oh, my God,” to address God, particularly in times of anguish and in times of crisis, but what frightens me in our culture is that that expression, or just the abbreviated form, “My God,” is part of the normal speech patterns of millions of people in our culture. It’s become an exclamation of triviality, which reduces the serious invocation of the name of God to the commonplace, to the vulgar.

And so I ask you to examine your own speech habits. Ask yourself, “How do I use the name of God in my routine daily speech?”