Of Working Out Your Salvation: The Name Gate

The world we are living in today demands that those that confess and follow Christ actually do the hard work of following Christ to match their confession. Many who identify as Christians do not understand that salvation is a process and a journey towards becoming the body of Christ. Even less people understand the weight of this journey in which a name is only a small and yet weighty matter.

Before I get into names and their place in working out your salvation. Let’s look at a moment in time that captures a little bit of our days today. So Jesus is talking to his disciples preparing them for the days ahead. He is telling them of the suffering he will go through before he dies in Jerusalem. Peter… the ever over enthusiastic disciple pulls Jesus aside and I paraphrase, ‘How dare you speak like that about yourself! No such thing can ever happen! Do you hear me?’

I can imagine that Peter was livid because in that day, they must have understood the correlation between how we speak about ourselves and how life turns out. Something I fear is desperately diluted in our days. I also imagine Peter thinking that Jesus was running a little mad so he needed to save Jesus from himself.

How many times as Christians do we feel like we are responsible for protecting God, presenting him in a certain way and framing how he should be experienced by others? Consider this for a moment and perhaps repent and ask God to break the boxes you have made to contain all that He is.

So how does Jesus respond to this fellow, one of his closest fellows? You would think he should be gentle with Peter because really, what does Peter know of the ways of God? Peter is not yet mature to understand the difficulty of the work of the messiah. SO perhaps Jesus should be gentle with him and bring him slowly to a place of understanding… so what did Jesus do? (All pun intended IYKYK)

‘Get behind me Satan! You are a stumbling block to me! You do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men.’ I believe Jesus was oozing either hot fire or cold fire… whatever it was it was definitely some kind of fire that did not in any way land gently or in an ‘understanding manner. Let’s unpack this moment.

Peter does what is expected of a loyal friend in his best wisdom. Removes Jesus from the crowd and rebukes him for speaking such terrible things of himself! I bet peter did not want this great teacher to lose face in front of the others. He was wise in the ways of men.

Peter was a close associate and I dare say friend of Jesus, yet Jesus calls him Satan in this moment and a stumbling block. This might be a good moment to note that the term or name Satan, does not apply to a personification of any one particular entity but rather is a title that means, ‘the adversary’. How many times have you made god your adversary?

In this moment, Peter has made himself an adversary of God and as such… a stumbling block. The term stumbling block has been used in scripture many times before this moment to describe iniquity that leads to sin. I like to believe that in this moment the sum total of all iniquity that could be found in Peter, met The Messiah (also a title meaning saviour) in this moment and met with a certain stream of fire. Peter came to a moment where the nature of man in him, had met the nature of God in Jesus.

How many times in our lives does God ask us to choose between the ways and nature of men and the ways and nature of God? This may have been one of those moments in Peters life. Like Peter, we meet many such moments when our human wisdom meets Gods ways and we find ourselves having to choose God over man… over and over…

Jesus turns back to his disciples and says, ‘If anyone must come after me, you must deny himself (the human nature led by iniquity and fulfilled by sin) and take up his cross and follow me (the nature and ways of God)…’

In other words, if you want to follow in the footsteps of Jesus (be of a nature like Jesus), you must deny that which is in you that is led by iniquity (the inherent sinful nature of man secured by Adams fall from Eden and passed on to all living men by the generations) and fulfilled by sin (actually doing things that go against the heart, the will and the word of God)

Therefore, a journey begins at the Calvary cross where we meet salvation, but it doesn’t end there. Today, many that identify as Christians have built houses and institutions at the foot of the cross and have never moved from the place of identifying, confessing and repenting of sin. Many have not, in effect, picked up their cross and followed Christ. If we had, we would have already fulfilled many times over what Jesus said we will do… ‘Greater works than these will you do…’ When was the last time you raised a man from the dead? Too big a feat? Okay, let me come down and ask, when have you healed the land and brought peace upon generations? When last did you cast demons out and stand up to the principality known as the gatekeeper of hades? What have you done that can be considered greater than what Jesus did?

What we do is cower and pray with head knowledge that Jesus finished it at the cross. What Jesus finished at the cross was your outcome not your journey. You have to walk the journey of salvation, Jesus finished the journey securing you a victorious outcome.

On this journey you shall encounter different levels of the iniquity that plagues your person and the sin that ties rocks to your feet. The work of salvation is overcoming these things and as you overcome that which is within you, you gain more power and authority over the powers that be in the world within which you live.

There’s a Swahili saying that expresses this sublimely, kikulacho, kinguoni mwako (that which eats you, is in your clothes). The journey of working out your salvation is inherently, inside work that manifests in outside power. Paul also speaks to this when he exhorted the Philippians to continue to work out their salvation in fear and trembling. The biggest adversary to your redeemed nature is within you.

The Name Gate

What’s in a name? It’s been a few years since I wrote this article, I would like to think that I have since grown a little in understanding. A name carries in it our functions, our purpose on this earth, the history of our people and even a function to return some of what has been lost to time and space into the present. A name is a container that carries who & where our people have been (generational identity), who we are now, who and what we can be in the future as well as tools encoded in the deeper meaning of our name for us to function optimally in this realm. A name is a very important thing. When a people is taken into captivity, their names are changed… to disconnect them from their identity, their generations and the tools to their prosperity and to connect them to their captors. Changing a name is not a light matter and is indeed a tool of spiritual capture and enslavement.

In the Garden of Eden, Gods first assignment to the one he formed from soil and breathed life into to look like and function like Himself… was to name the animals. To imprint, identity, purpose and function on creation. Adam, a name derived from Adamah that means the ground or earth it also means red… like soil and is the root word for blood… (see how man was formed from earth and was given dominion over earth and through the elements of the earth can he live in his perfect purpose), was created in the image (look like) and likeness of (function like) God.

Many generations, a flood and a tower unto heaven later God changes the name of a man from Abram to Abraham. He also changes his wife’s name from Sarai to Sarah. The common factor in these changes is the sound ha. Which denotes breathe. Wind air… which is reminiscent of God breathing life into Adam. God once again breathed life into the seed of a people he marked out to be his own in a determinedly fallen world. He sealed his promise to Abram to sow a nation as vast as the stars in the sky, with a name change… or more accurately, a name upgrade.

When Israel was captured and taken into captivity, Daniel was given a new name by his captors: Belteshazzar.

Daniel means: Judge of God

Belteshazzar means: baal-protect-the-king

In these days, the people clearly knew the power of a name and must have understood something of the meaning of Daniel to rename him or give him the function of protecting their king in the name of the God they worshipped. Remember that Daniel was assigned to the kings court as an advisor to the kings of Babylon. This is important to remember.

It’s interesting to me that Daniel kept his name despite being renamed by his captors… I suspect it is because he did not agree to this name change and therefore it remained a surface level situation that did not impact his roots, identity and function. He still functioned as Gods Judge and this is seen when he reminds God that the time set for the captivity of Israel has passed. Daniel did not agree to this new name.

When slaves were transported to the new world from Africa, they received new names from their ‘owners’. Most of them carried their owner’s last name…. effectively bonding their lives, strength, purpose and productivity to their enslavers. They were enslaved both physically and spiritually and through time, even those that may have refused to accept the new names died and the old names were lost to time and space – effectively forgotten. This could be an explanation as to why the descendants of the enslaved although free today are still bound to systems that exploit them. They are spiritually still enslaved.

In Kenya, like in many former colonies, many of us were given Christian names because the African name was considered crude and unacceptable in formal situations (school, work, military, and government office). Our grandparents were forced to wear Christian/European names in exchange of something like dignity and social acceptance among the privileged.

When someone changes religion, they are often presented with a new name denoting the change in their foundational identity. I don’t want to get too deep into this at the moment but you can start to see for yourselves the weight of a name and its implication on how you live… and possibly how you die.

Somehow over the years and about 2 or 3 generations, we have confused European naming for Christian naming and so we continue to shun our indigenous names for European names thinking that we are cutting away from evil meanings and attaching ourselves to holier meanings.

I witnessed a conversation among believers where as they started learning about the importance in a name they were becoming horrified at the meaning of their indigenous names and so shifted towards their European names because they were cleaner. All I saw were colonized minds embedding themselves deeper in the whitewashing of themselves. I saw self-hate manifesting in the name of a white washed jesus… whom me, I do not know. If you have read this far, you might have picked up a nuance from the identity and likeness of God that was Adam. Sadly that budding conversation and the learnings therein has fizzled out to the fear regarding the nature of the power we carry because our human nature is bound to fear and many haven’t yet chosen the nature of God when we meet scary things in this journey of working out our salvation.

A name change, beyond going back to your roots, is a God affair. For instance, I have chosen to identify by my African name – at first, I just liked it better, but as I have grown, I have understood, who I am, what I am, a little bit about why I am and how I am to carry myself… through my African name. All these things revealed to me by God himself. If it were up to me I would have changed my English name to another African name years ago, but I have understood that there’s something of God there too, I do not know it yet, so I wait. I have also understood that there’s an order, a way and a protocol to the changing of ones name spiritually and physically. Its not as easy as we make it seem. At this point, I must impress on you, that no human being outside of yourself and/or your parents with your permission and agreement has the right to change your name. If you allow someone else to change your name, you give yourself unto another… A name is an important and precious thing and as such must be treated with care, honour and all due diligence.

Jabez saw that his name carried connotation of pain and struggle, he realized that he did not want a life marked by pain and struggle, so he prayed that God changes the meaning of his name.

Remember a name is like a container, a precious container that carries in it everything you need to live a powerful and meaningful life. When we give God access to our names, he can wash the container so that the dirt comes off it and it is clean and purified (Jabez), He can add some things to the container that were not there previously (Abraham), He can switch it out completely (from Simon to Peter (Cephas – meaning ‘rock’) to give it a whole new function.

Consider your name with care. Take time to understand not just its today meaning, but also try and dig to see where it came from… the folktales concerning the name and if you can trace it lingo-historically… please do! There is so much treasure hidden in your name. Along that journey, God himself will reveal his will for you regarding your name. Some of you may need it changed out completely, some of you will have the meanings changed, and others will have god add to the name.

Go about this carefully, slowly and with the fear and trembling that denotes your working out of salvation.

And lastly, I urge you to pick up your cross from that place at Calvary where your sins were forgiven, and start to follow the footsteps of Jesus to overcome that which is within you that demands for sin and gain authority over the powers and principalities that rule this world that the glory of God be seen on earth as it is in heaven.