Can your name reveal who you are, in Christ?
My firstborn's full name is Josiah Van Garland, meaning, “healed and supported by the fire of a gracious God to the victorious end.” My daughter—my Sunshine and Honey—is Cassia Sinclair Garland, meaning, “broken and crushed to perfection by God, through prayer to the victorious end.” My full name, Catherine Christen Garland, means “pure one, chosen of God, victorious to the end.” My husband's full name, Michael Eugene Garland, means "nobleman who challenges heaven and earth with the question, 'Who is like God?' until the victorious end."
As you can see I’m very much into the meanings of names. I love how our names often reveal what we bring to our stories and what God wants to reveal through our destinies. In many cases, I find it very interesting that our life-stories can be influenced by the things that God deposits in us as revealed to us by the names our parents gave us. It’s not always the case, of course, but I do find it very interesting.
We find this in the heroes and heroines of the Bible over and over, as their stories reveal how God moves on their behalf. When I read the Bible, I see God hiding for a time, then revealing Himself in just the right way, at just the right time.
Since all of our stories are unique, there are limitless ways to display new facets of God’s character as He hides and reveals Himself, then imparting Himself, to meet our needs.
He hides Himself just as I hide from my toddlers when we play hide-and-seek—not too well (so they don’t freak out). But not too easy to find either, so they’ll have the fun of finding me, squealing with laughter as they try to climb in with me wherever I was hiding!
I believe God often hides Himself from us so we can experience the thrill of finding him—discovering Him through revelationship. He hides Himself in the folds of our stories and bends of the paths in our life, taking different roles in our stories—sometimes hidden, suddenly appearing as the Rescuer, disappearing again only to reveal Himself as the Beloved who knows us better than we know ourselves. Our stories and the revelations of Him in them prove to us and the world that the God who created us is the God who wants to be found by us, for the joy we’ll share in the finding.
The purpose of our matchless story is to display God’s glory in a way that has never been displayed before and will never be displayed again. This glorifies God, which is our purpose. But the point of our life—our story—is to find God, and once having found him, to remain in him to receive our commission for whatever adventure is coming.
The first time God reveals Himself to us is the beginning of our relationship and every step we take getting to know God more deeply is preceded by a revelation of who God is, in particular, in our story. Think of Hagar who says “I have seen the God who sees me.” She learned that God saw her, cared about her in particular, cared about the injustice done to her, and promised her he would make a great nation of her son. This revelation transformed her and her future.
This search for the God Who Reveals Himself in our stories came to me during my teens as I read the Chronicles of Narnia for the umpteenth time. As I read them over and over again I started to imbibe an overarching theme for the books: we need to find Aslan...Christ. If you've read them, you'd know every misadventure the heroes and heroines have and many of the mistakes they make—even the lives that are lost—are because they don’t look for Aslan first. Every time they find Aslan they get involved in what he’s doing and then everything goes right.
From those books and my own experiences, I learned to look for God to reveal Himself in the people's stories of the Bible, but then later in my own life, in friendships, family, music, traditions, caring for others, serving the community, examining the details of the backs of leaves, through written language, logic, science, history, and so much more.
As we respond to each revelation, our revelationship, if you will, deepens.
I have aggregated what this life of revelationship looks like, into a formula, so it's easy to remember:
To know him is to love him, to love him is to trust him, to trust him is to obey him, to obey him is to follow him, to follow him is to die to our self/absolute surrender, and rise to walk in the abundant life.
I use this "formula" in my counseling and discipling but it can also be used on yourself to know where you are right now, this minute, in your walk with God. For example, if someone says to me, “I really am feeling that God is asking me to do this thing and I just don’t know if I can do it.” Then I know they have a trust issue which stems from a love issue or a love deficit, which stems from a lack of knowledge or revelation of who Christ is to them.
I’ll break each step down in consecutive blog posts but the beginning is this question: Where are you with your walk with God?
To know him is to love him, to love him is to trust him, to trust him is to obey him, to obey him is to follow him, to follow him is to die to your self or absolute surrender, then to walk in the abundant life that Christ has ordained for us.
Grace reveals Himself so we can know Him.