What is your name?

NAMES ARE IMPORTANT TO GOD.

What if I told you there was a name you could claim for yourself that would let you live forever? Just think about this for a bit. Hold onto that thought.

All over the world it is universal to communicate by exchanging names of people, places, and things. Names are powerful because they mean powerful things. They tell you if something is dangerous. They tell you if something can help you. They tell you if a person wants to hurt you or they tell you if a person loves you.

Names are everywhere. A person cannot avoid having a name or interacting with something else that has a name. Sometimes you will have many names. It depends on the person who is calling you that name. If it is your mother, she might call you by your first, middle, and last name. And each one of those names has a meaning.

Do people become the name that is given to them? Maybe. Do those names affect how people grow up? Definitely.

People in your community might call you different names. Your boss might call you a hard worker. Your teacher might call you a procrastinator. Your friends might call you funny. Your spouse might call you kind. Your children might call you strict. Now you might be thinking these are descriptions of names.... And you would be right. Because they describe WHO I AM.

I serve a God who describes himself by saying his name is YHWH—pronounced Yahweh. It means "I AM". I AM what? This is a natural question a person might ask. The Bible gets into that. Every time we see the word LORD in all caps in the Bible, it is used in place of Yahweh. He is the God of power and might and He is compassionate and seeks justice. He is merciful and holy and He is always present in our lives. Yahweh is our God and his name means He is our deliverer who gives us guidance and grants us forgiveness when we call upon his name.

God does not sin against himself. God is jealous when worldly things lure us away from him. This is our God and I serve him willingly with a joyful heart.

In the Bible, names are important. From the very beginning, in Genesis 2:19-20 it says, "Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field but for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him."

The meanings of the names Adam assigned to the livestock and to the beasts and to the birds BECAME THEIR IDENTITY. It became who they were. Names have meanings and they give us our identity.

In the garden, Adam originally called his wife "woman" because she was taken and formed from Adam himself. But as the story progressed he eventually named her Eve, "[...] because she was the mother of all living." (Genesis 3:20)

So immediately, we have an example that NAMES CAN CHANGE. A name can reflect where you came from and a new name can indicate what your future will be.

If we skip forward a little bit to Genesis Chapter 5, we meet a character named Noah, whose name means "rest" because, "out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands." (Genesis 5:29) Relief can also mean rest.

This is in DIRECT REFERENCE to the curse God gave to Adam in Genesis 3:17,
"And to Adam he said,
'Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
'You shall not eat of it',
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life."

Noah's name meant REST—and he was given this name before he ever gave mankind rest from God's curse on the land. To prove this point, one of the first things Noah did after landing his big boat was plant a vineyard.

In Genesis 11—the Tower of Babel story—the people built a tower "with its top in the heavens," then said, "let us make a name for ourselves." (Genesis 11:4) It describes people who are looking to make a name for themselves, but the story goes on to tell us how God put a stop to that.

Why would these people—who stood together in unity to reach the heavens—be opposed by God? Because they were doing so according to their own will, and not serving the will of God. When God put a stop to the Tower of Babel, it was to teach us how to be selfless and how to glorify God—that way we can learn to make God's name great, instead of our own.

Today, the Church is almost like a new tower—but one blessed by God and not conceived by man—that has "its top in the heavens," and its members working in unity to glorify God's name.

The Church exists so that brothers and sisters can stand together in unity serving the will of God. The Church does not exist to make a name for its members—rather, it exists to make God's name great. Remember, Jesus is God incarnate—meaning, in the flesh.

If we skip to the New Testament and see how the name Jesus became the name above all names in Philippians 2:9-11, "Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him THE NAME THAT IS ABOVE EVERY NAME, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the sun, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

What does the name Jesus mean? It means 'God saves'. Jesus also has the title of Christ. Sometimes the name we use can be a title instead of the name given to us at birth. When we see that title, we associate it with all that Jesus stood for. Christ is a title that means God's chosen One or anointed One. So basically, when we put his name and his title together, Jesus Christ means the One who God chose to save us.

Save us from what? Save us from sin. Romans 6:23 says, "for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is ETERNAL LIFE in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Remember when I told you there was a name you could claim for yourself that would let you live forever? That name is Jesus.

SO WHAT NAME DO I WANT PEOPLE TO CALL ME?

I want people to call me Christian. I want them to know me as a Christian. I want them to describe me as a Christian. Because that is the title used for Jesus by his devout followers, and I don't want my name to be made great. I want the name of Jesus to be made GREAT. I want Jesus to use me to glorify him. Without him, there is no me.

Jesus died in our place for all the sins of the world. What most of us need to understand is that Jesus died for us while we were still sinners. He loved us and he pursued us while we sinned against him. He forgave us for our sins and he rose from the grave after defeating death to give us the GOOD NEWS that we, too, can defeat death—by simply declaring him to be our Lord and our Savior and repenting—which means we have now turned our lives away from doing evil and seek to do what is righteous in God's eyes.

A Christian calls Jesus their Master and King, Savior and Redeemer, the Son of Man, The Great I Am, the God of all Creation. Call me Christian because I serve Jesus the Christ who is God's chosen Savior for all who believe in his name. John 1:12 says, "But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God."

Receive the name of Jesus today and believe in his name and let us all live forever by the grace of God!