Living In Our New Name

My last blog post, titled “I Love, Even If…” is one I describe as “putting something in the present-affirmative to help make it so in practice.” 

By that I mean, I wrote that post with the intent and purpose of doing what it says, of encouraging my ability to do it, of actually living it because it is what Christ requires (similar to when, in grade school, the teacher made us write “I will not be late for school” one hundred times on the blackboard in order to drive the point home).

The writing of it is just the beginning. It’s a way of imputing the truth of Christ, that, once on paper, helps clarify and cement the direction in which to go. 

I am not entirely there yet. But I’m further than I ever have been, all credit to God alone. 

And that is the Christian life: being further down Christ’s straight path than we were yesterday, and the day before that. 

Do I wish that God had brought everything that I know now to my knowledge sooner? I used to.

But now I see that the obtaining of Christ’s wisdom is, for each of us, a process; the sheer act of starting life over as a Christian (while at the same time having a past and a present to make peace with) that each of us has to enter and continue through via an immutable God. 

The developmental stages of head-to-heart and heart-to-head knowledge are similar to a 5-year-old starting off in kindergarten and proceeding on to each successive grade thereafter. 

Sure, some kids skip a grade, just as some Christians grow at a faster pace than others. But still, we grow—and growth takes time.

We mature through study and experience—imperfectly and gingerly at first, then imperfectly boldly—finally getting to a place of realistic and humble confidence in simply staying the course.

In time—times of desperation at the slow pace, at the seeming as if nothing is changing in us, at the sense of flatlining—and also times of beautiful incredulity, of perceiving unmistakable instances of God, of protection, of definite calm when we ought to be freaking out—during all of these times, we metamorphose, bit by bit. We are changed. 

We come to understand why, in the Bible, Jesus gives people new names.

We, too, are given a new name: His name, Jesus Christ. That is why we call ourselves Christians. He is our Lord. Our identity rests in Him. And so that is how we live—how we must live, and will certainly desire to live, increasingly so. 

copyright Barb Harwood

“For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” 

2 Corinthians 4:6-11