Identity Series - Changing Your Name

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Introduction -

Who remembers when the music artist Prince changed his name? If you are too young to remember, he changed his name to a symbol. The problem with that was the symbol had no name, so they literally called him “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.”

This got me thinking about name changes and I came across this funny story that I wanted to share with you: A man in London, named Sam Smith, decided his name was too common. There were too many other Sam Smith’s running around and he wanted to differentiate himself from all the other Sam Smiths by changing his name to Bacon Double Cheeseburger in 2016. Though Smith told the Evening Standard the idea was “a culmination of probably too many drinks in the pub,” he didn’t regret it at all. His friends, colleagues, and father found it funny, too, but the same couldn’t be said for his mother or fiancée. “My fiancée is fairly reluctant about marrying a Cheeseburger,” Cheeseburger said. “No girl ever dreams of spending her big day marrying a man called Bacon.”

Today we are continuing our sermon series on the topic of Identity. And what we are doing is like a jeweler who might hold up a precious jewel and look at it from various different angles looking at the value of it.

So we are going to look at identity today from a slightly different angle. Today we are going to be looking one of the most famous name changes in the Bible and what that could mean in regards to identity.

Genesis 17:1–8 ESV

When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.”

God Changes Abram’s Name

To me this is such an interesting passage. There’s a lot going on here. This is the fifth time that God meets with Abram. A lot has happened in Abram’s life. He’s been called by God and left his homeland. He has rescued his nephew Lot. He’s been blessed by the priest Melchizedek. Then there is the whole Hagar and Ishmael ordeal. A lot has happened. Most importantly God has promised Abram something and in today’s passage, he is going to reiterate that promise. In Chapter 12, he tells Abram that he is going to make him extremely fruitful and he is going to multiply his offspring so they will number the sand of the seas or the stars of the sky.

Abram, though has lived a long life. He is now 99 years old and the only child he has came from the slave woman and not his wife. Abram, I imagine feels like a failure. Now God comes to Abram at this point in his life. When Abram can offer God nothing really. Abram can’t conjure up a child. He can’t make Sarai fertile. He has nothing to offer God at all.

And God says, now is the time. This is where I wanted to get you to. Now is the time for me to use you. Now is the time when you are useful to me. Now that all your pride is gone, now is the time. God still does that with us. We walk through hard things in our lives and I believe a lot of times, for many of us, the point is to get something out of us that doesn’t belong. He’s breaking us and remolding us in his likeness. But in order to do that, he does have to break us. And you get the idea that Abram is a broken man.

Abram is broken and he needs to be reformed into the man that God wants him to be. So God does something drastic. He changes his name. Now think about this, for 99 years, he was known as Abram, but now God has changed his name and talk about a name change, we all call him Father Abraham now. It stuck. This wasn’t just a nickname, this was a full identity change. this was a big deal and it wasn’t just something that was neat for a while, this was a lasting change.

Names are a huge thing when it comes to identity. A 1948 Harvard study, along with some subsequent studies, found that names affected everything from your profession, to where we live, to whom we marry to whether we graduate or not. People with strange names were more likely to drop out of school than finish their education. We are more likely to buy things from people with our name. And the list goes on. So whether we realize it or not, our name is a huge part of our identity.

Today, some cultures identify more with first names, while others the last name. Hence you hear things like don’t dishonor the family name. Meaning, don’t do anything to disgrace your last name.

God comes to Abram and says, you will no longer be called Abram, but you shall be called Abraham. Abram’s name was his identity. It represented who he was. But in this case, he never even lived up to who he was supposed to be. His name in the Hebrew means exalted father. Abraham means Father of Nations. So Abram, wasn’t living up to his name. He wasn’t an exalted father, he had one child with another woman. Nothing exalted about that.

And that’s just like us. We do not live up to who we are supposed to be. When we are born, we are given a name and most of our parents have hopes and dreams for us in those moments. They wander, what we will she be like. What type of man will he be? Or if you parents didn’t care that much, you grew up with your own hopes and aspirations and sometimes life has a way of beating that out of you. You are beat down and your name doesn’t represent something you are proud of, perhaps feeling a lot like Abram must have felt.

A Father of Nations

The beauty of this is that God calls Abram a Father of Nations. He hasn’t been truly faithful in his own family. He’s not done what he’s supposed to and yet God doesn’t look at him and base anything on his past, but on his future. God renames him based on who He saw him to be, not who he was. This name change reinforced the Promise that God made to Abram many years earlier. Abraham would be a father of nations, God would see to it himself.

Listen, you may be looking at your life and think, I’m old. I’ve gone too far. I’ve messed up too much, but let me remind you, Abram was 99 years old. Older than anyone in this room and God gave him a new name and promised destiny. He can do the same for you!

So he changes Abraham’s identity in an instant. No more will he be looked at as a failure for not living up to his name. Look at who is responsible for this to happen. It’s not Abraham. He’s tried to get his life together several times and its clear he can’t do it. It’s not Sarai. In fact, she’s going to get her name changed later in this passage as well. She’s just as messed up as Abraham is. It’s God. God is going to be the one to bring about this change.

The Hebrew Language

Now, there is something going on here that’s deeper than what we can see in English. There’s something else going on here in the Hebrew. Let’s look at that and see if there is any significance here. So first, we need to understand something about the Hebrew language - there are no vowels. We add the vowels in so we can transliterate their language to English. For instance. The name of God is...

YHWH

Now when we pronounce this we say, Yah-Weh. We are adding the vowels, a and e to pronounce it, but they are not found in the original language. It’s the Hebrew letters - Yod, Hei, Waw, Hei. The letter H is the letter I want to zoom in on, because in both Abram’s and Sarai’s name change, that’s what is added - The Letter H. The letter H in the Hebrew language is essentially the letter for breath. It is pronounced to sound like a breath or the wind. We pronounce that letter in much the same way.

Now, let’s think about this for a moment. Here’s what I believe is going on, God is inserting a part of his name into Abram’s name and changing it to Abraham. And I don’t think it was coincidence that he chose the H. We see throughout Scripture that breath and spirit are used somewhat interchangeable. From the beginning, God breathes his breath into Adam and then again at Pentecost the Holy Spirit shows up in the wind and enters all of the disciples in the upper room. But perhaps one of the best examples of this is in the upper room with Jesus prior to his death.

John 20:22 ESV

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.

Jesus here breathes on his disciples and essentially puts his Holy Spirit on them. Now what am I getting at? Here’s where I’m going. God changes Abram’s name by adding the letter H which is a breath. In other words, here is what I think God is saying here. Abram, you’ve tried to do this on your own. You’ve tried to do this without me. But I know what you need. You need me. You need my spirit, my breath to empower you. You will not be an exalted father, or a father of nations on your own. You need me to do it for you. So I’m putting me into you. I’m putting my name into your identity. If you are going to accomplish this, it will be through my power, my spirit, my very breath that will bring this to pass.

And this is exactly what he says to us. We try so hard to make something of ourselves and we fail a lot. When we try to do it in the flesh or on our own, we get nowhere. If we have any hope of accomplishing anything for God, it comes from Him inserting his Spirit into us.

Ezekiel 36:27 ESV

And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

Now this is what happens to Abraham, God changes his name. He changes his identity to better match how He created him. Remember, Abraham was made in God’s image. He was supposed to reflect God. Just like us. We reflect him most when the Spirit of God is in us and working through us. We aren’t perfect reflections even then, just look at the church and you will see that, but we better reflect Him when His Spirit is in us working through us to accomplish his will and his ways.

So this leads me to my main point for today - embrace change.

Embrace Change

Here’s what we don’t see in this passage. We don’t see Abraham fight against what God wants to do in his life. He doesn’t say, “well I’ve been Abram for so long, I can’t really change. Besides everyone knows me as Abram anyway. They will never accept that I’ve really changed.” He didn’t make excuses. He embraced what God was doing in his life.

And that’s exactly what God expects of us. He expects us to embrace change. God comes to us and he is going to change everything about us. That is why Jesus tells Nicodemus that you must be born again. The old you is dead and now there is a completely different you. Now, I believe this is a process, so if you still feel like the old you in some ways, even though you’ve been a Christian for many years, don’t fret. God is still working. He is working in your to put the old man to death and allow the new you to flourish.

Listen to what he says to the prophet Isaiah:

Isaiah 56:5 ESV

I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

So embrace that change. God has a better name for you! It’s even better than son or daughter! What a promise! It’s an everlasting name, meaning it will never be cutoff from the world, it will live for ever. God has not forgotten you! Embrace the change.

Recently I read that one of the signs of an emotionally mature Christian is that they embrace change. I thought that was interesting. Here’s why I think this is so important, especially when it comes to identity. As a teenager, I was really into drugs. I built my identity around that. I was a hippie lost in time, living in the 90s as a skateboarding kid who smoked a lot of dope. That’s who I was. That was my identity. Now. I could have stayed there. I could still be that person. But when God spoke to me, when he came to me and opened up my heart to hear his grace, I changed. My identity changed.

I lost friends, why? Because I wasn’t the same person anymore. I had to reintroduce myself to my own family? Why? Because I had a new identity. I embraced the change God was doing in my life.

If your theology doesn’t change your behavior, it will never change your destiny.

Charles Spurgeon

In other words, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you will keep getting what you’ve always got. The Redneck version of that same quote.

Spurgeon is saying that what you think about God matters - that’s all theology really is, how man sees God and understands Him. Our theology is imperfect. It’s imperfect, because its incomplete. When can’t fully know him until we are with Him fully. But your theology, how you understand God today matters. He has revealed certain things about himself and one of those things is that he is a God full of grace. If you don’t understand grace, you won’t get this message today.

Grace is the payment God made for you to be able to change. He desires for you to be in a constant state of change. You are being changed to be more like Him. Jesus died in order to give you and new life. The question I have for you is this, are you going to embrace that new life or kick against it?

Many of us fight change. We don’t like change. I think our normal state, our normal MO is to fight against change in our lives. We don’t like the process. And trust me, it’s a process. It takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Some big changes may occur immediately when you first meet Jesus, but the deep stuff takes time. It takes him working in you for many years to exact a lasting change.

My charge to you today, is to embrace it. Embrace what God wants to do in your life. He’s got you in this season, at this specific moment in time for a purpose. He is working something new in you and it will affect your destiny. Allow Him to do that work.

Takeaways

God Changes Your Name and Gives You a New Identity.

Your New Identity is Better Than Your Old One.

Embrace The Change In Your Life

Closing