A CLOSER LOOK AT OUR NAMES AND WHY SOMETIMES OUR NAMES MAY CHANGE.

The aim of this basic study loosely based around Eph 5:21-32 is first and foremost to really encourage us to think more deeply about our relationship with Jesus.

Then secondly, to show how this same understanding of how we relate to Jesus should also directly affect our relationship with our spouse if we have one, or if we are thinking of marriage.

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I want to start by taking a brief look at three words that apply to all of us as unique individuals – name, identity and personality.

So firstly, let’s look at the idea behind a person’s name. A name is simply a word or term used for identification.

If then a name is a word used for our identification, what then is our identity? An identity is what we give ourself to, for example what we stand for and are known to stand for. For example, in days gone by names had a descriptive meaning ie Mr Mason was a stone worker, Mr Smith was a blacksmith, Mr Painter was a painter and if your surname is Doolittle or Gotobed your ancestors were probably very lazy!!
Sometimes in the Bible we see God changing peoples names.
When God changed a person’s name and gave him a new name, it was usually to establish a new identity. God changed Abram’s name, meaning “high father,” to “Abraham,” meaning “father of a multitude”.
Why did God choose new names for some people? The Bible doesn’t give us His reasons, but perhaps it was to let them know they were destined for a new mission in life.
For example, God also changed Jacobs name, which means ‘supplanter’, to Israel which means ‘wrestled with God’.
So, just to repeat, our identity is what we give ourselves to or are known for.

Thirdly, personality. Personality is our individual and unique way in which we live and shape our identity.

It’s so important we understand these distinctions before we now move on and look at these three words applied firstly to Jesus and then to ourselves.

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The name Jesus in original language literally means to deliver, or to rescue.

Now let’s look at Jesus’ identity, let’s look at what He gave Himself to do or to be – and we see Him as redeemer, Saviour, healer, as bringer of wholeness, peace, joy, love etc.

And, being fully human, Jesus also had a personality too and although that’s something we don’t know too much about I guess it must have been perfect!

Now let’s take my name, William. Nowadays, in England certainly, our names are little more than mere words and my name for example doesn’t describe my identity. But the fact my birth name doesn’t reveal anything about me nowadays isn’t too important for this exercise.

What is important is what follows now regarding my relationship with Jesus and my identity. When we get baptised that symbolises the death of our old identity and the beginning of a new one as we give ourselves for a different cause and we become named as Christians. I am a Christian (although strictly speaking I no longer like or use that word to describe myself to non Christians as it has too broad a meaning nowadays and can all too easily convey a very wrong impression). That name identifies me. What is my new identity? Well, it is what I’ve given myself to, which in this case is a life of serving Christ, obedience to and becoming more like Him.

My personality though remains the same ‘me’, the unique individual I am, and it’s the characteristics of this ‘me’ that shape my identity, my Christian life, in the way it is. It’s still my choice as to ‘who I am’ and what I choose to do.

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Moving on but still very much staying in the flow…

LOOKING NOW AT MARRIAGE OF MAN/WOMAN AS A PICTURE/SHADOW OF JESUS AND HIS BRIDE Eph 5 21-32

So, with regards to my salvation and my new identity, I still like to think that my personality forms the unique “me” even though my identity totally changed the instant I stopped serving self and gave myself to being a servant of Jesus (see note 3 at the end). At that point I effectively gave everything I owned over to Jesus’ ownership (that’s the theory anyway!) as I stop serving self and start to serve Him and let His will dictate my life. I can of course still freely use all these things which I gave to Him (my money, my possessions, my time etc), but they are to use now for His purposes, not mine, as I go about working out my salvation. As I said, that’s the theory!!

Basically, I have become joined or “married” to Christ, who John called the Bridegroom.

Paul tells us in Ephesians 5 that Adam and Eve, being a ‘married’ couple, are a type of Jesus and His bride (see my note on typology at the end) and here comes the more controversial stuff in this modern era. Keeping in mind the pattern we’ve just looked at, just as we as the bride of Christ give ourselves totally to Jesus, so a wife is called to give herself totally to her husband. And this is why she changes her name to his name. It’s because her identity has changed and she now ceases to serve self and gives herself to serving her husband and what he stands for. She gives over all ownership of her possessions and her old way of life and uses both to serve him.
But of course the wife retains her freewill and her individual personality to be able to do this how she deems fit and personalise her new and unique identity in her husband, just as I have that same freedom of choice in how I decide to live for and the extent to which I serve Christ, my ‘husband’.
And just as Jesus ultimately gave His life for us, so a loving God fearing husband will give himself for the best interest of his bride. He will love her and treat her as he would his own body. Andrew Murray says this of Jesus, here likened to a vine and we being the branches, “All His fullness and all His riches are for thee, O believer; for the vine does not live for itself, keeps nothing for itself, but exists only for the branches. All that Jesus is in heaven, He is for us: He has no interest there separate from ours; as our representative He stands before the Father. The vine supplies all the branch needs”. And, when someone pointed this next part out to me, I just found this such a powerful illumination of a truth I’d never before realised – ‘Remember, the fruit grows on the end of the branches. That’s all the vine exists for, to produce fruit’.
1 Cor 11:7 immediately made total sense, “….man is the glory of God but woman is the glory of man”. 
It is worth parking up there and meditating on that. After all the church indoctrination I’d received as a youth that was an awesome illumination for me….

Jesus is the perfect husband so the strength of our marriage relationship with Him, the joy we receive and the fruit we grow from it directly depends on how well we attach ourselves to the vine, in how far we CHOOSE to devote our time and personalities to serve our husband….

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REAL LIFE APPLICATION OF THIS FOR OUR MARRIAGES

So, now for some real life application. I recognise we are all imperfect human beings and all that we’ve just looked at is theoretical, it’s the ideal that we are to aspire to! John Wesley always argued we could be perfect this side of heaven – he might be right but I for one am not there yet so I can’t be that perfect husband! Pre marriage courses are great ideas to prepare us but I’m not sure I agree with some of their modern ideas. Is a marriage really an equal partnership as the HTB course suggests? Am I really in equal partnership with Jesus? Does He compromise with me or ever submit to me and do things my way? Ummmm….
Something to think about!

Personally, I love looking at Abraham and Sarah as our example on how our shortcomings all work out on a practical and realistic level, like for example how God protected Sarah when she remained the obedient wife to Abraham even when he was quite obviously wrong with some of his decisions and then got into big trouble, although I don’t need to mention too much of that in detail here, we can study that in our own time. I just wanted to mention a few basic observations and practicalities here.

It is quite clear to me now that failure of Christians to fully submit in all areas to Christ is why most of us see very little of the Kingdom of Heaven manifesting in our lives – we are simply not attached to and drawing from the Vine how we could be (and that’s why I see so many Christians walking round looking more miserable than many people in the secular world). And in a similar way a wife should devote herself to her husband if she expects her marriage to be truly happy and fruitful and to receive all the marriage has for her. True joy in marriage comes from true submission. Paul tells us Gods order – the wife submits to the husband, the husband submits to Jesus and Jesus submits to God the Father. There is no equality in authority and as destructive forces continue to pervade our land, and even our bible colleges, we must be always on guard against the constant attack and bombardment of our minds from all around us, even sometimes from our pulpits. We must keep studying our Bibles and make that a top priority every day.

The question of male dominance always comes up now and how sometimes women think men expect them to be slaves. Well, many men do abuse their role that’s true, even in church, but a true born again Christian who knows Jesus Christ as their saviour will never view this as male chauvinism, they will see just how wonderful the God ordained order in relationship that Paul talks about really is. The wife will gladly submit and the husband will realise just how precious a treasure his dear wife really is and guard and protect that treasure with all his heart and everything that he has.

Do I as a man feel like an unhappy dominated slave in my ‘wife’ relationship to Jesus Christ? No, no, no – of course not! If any of you do then you need to ask someone to lead you to the full gospel message and a proper understanding of what it means to be free from the slavery of sin and found in Him! My death to self and my new ‘slavery’ to Christ is pure joy, I praise the name of Jesus Christ as I draw and feed more and more on what He has already provided for me! The closer I get to Him and the more I ditch my ways and devote myself to walk in His ways the more joy and peace I have in my life (not to mention authority, and power to demonstrate the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, where Jesus my husband rules as King, entrusting ME, a previous nobody, as His representative and to use His authority..). And similarly, the wife should also be and feel equally blessed in her relationship with her husband IF both spouses operate in their God ordained calling and divine order of authority.
This might be hard for some to take on board, but let’s go back to our model, our relationship with Christ, and ask ourselves “what would happen if we started to live how we wanted according to our own plans and carnal desires”? Do you know? I do, I’ve already done that and learned the consequences the hard way.

Practically then, just as it is vital for us to make the right decisions with our lives as to which god we will serve, so it is also with a wife – she must choose very very, and I say again, very carefully the man she chooses to marry and serve.
Just like if we had chosen to worship a wrong god (like self, money, Mother Earth, the Sun etc etc) and give our whole devotion to that then that would be absolutely disastrous, similarly if a godly inclined lady chooses to marry the wrong man, that too can be absolutely disastrous.
But if we choose the right husband, there is nothing more we could wish for.
As Christians we are totally safe because we know our husband Jesus is perfect. But in human relationships, what a tremendous responsibility that puts on the Christian husband to imitate Christ…
And how a Christian lady needs to choose her husband so very carefully….

In practice, we all fall short and this is where we need to learn grace and the unconditional love God has for us and then reflect that to our spouses, as well as to all others of course.

Hopefully now we can understand this paragraph below that I copied when I was looking online to see what others think about this issue of name changing when a lady comes to be married. Beata, now my dear wife, asked me before we married if she should change her name and that sparked 3 months of amazing study for me! It also led to an amazing new discovery and incredible illumination of scripture, specifically the story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well, and I’ve written another article on that as although it’s not very long, it is a very deep study.
So, back to the thread and the issue of if/why a lady should change her name when she gets married.

“This change in women’s identity, by taking a husband’s name, has emerged from patriarchal history where wives had no surname except “wife of X”. The wife was the husband’s possession and right up to the late 19th-century, women in England ceded all property and parental rights to husbands on marriage”.
(theconversation.com -why so many women still take their husbands last name).
There is more on this in my notes at the end.

Hopefully we will see that this is not some male chauvinistic culture that used to exist in days gone by, as feminism teaches, but we should see it as simply God ordained order/authority and I am personally so sad that the once far more God fearing nation we used to be now sadly belongs to a bygone era. For me, “education“ is the culprit and now parents are no longer the primary educators of their children this leaves them wide open to state indoctrination. And as disciples of Christ we should know who this world system belongs to, shouldn’t we.

Writing this has really challenged me once again to remember that I need to stop serving self still in so many areas of my life. It is only when we devote our whole existence to Christ that we will see the things some of us are desperately praying for yet wondering why we don’t see them…

As we get ever closer to Christ the path gets ever narrower so let’s keep on loving and encouraging each other.
Please feel free to get in touch with ANY comments, for the giving of or request for any help, and for any general encouragement or need of any.

Be blessed

I don’t write many articles because other people can write and teach so much better than I can but there are times that I feel I need to, and that’s when I see a subject being unknown, ignored, or largely ignored by modern church. And once again the root of this lack of teaching on this subject covered here is the typological teaching here that is largely ignored by modern dispensational preachers – deliberately too in my opinion because typology exposes their erroneous dispensational teaching (a very necessary teaching for the great and final world deception to come about – big big topic that one…). If you’re not sure what dispensational means, that’s quite okay, you’re not likely to have been taught that word, but today can be the day of the start of your awaking to the mass deception that has deliberately been introduced and allowed to totally compromise our church system this last couple of centuries. Please do get in touch if you are the inquisitive type or crave more from your Christian walk. Every single Christian will remain stunted in their spiritual growth until they understand the deception behind dispensational teaching, and without a correct understanding one can only go so far….
As the Holy Spirit reveals then guides us through more and more of our strongholds our spiritual walks become ever more amazing and evermore exciting. That’s not theory, that’s my testimony but we MUST read our Bibles for ourselves and we MUST desire God above all else.

NOTE 1
Regarding our identity.
We all actually have multiple identities, for instance, I’m a log man, I am a father, I am a cyclist to name but just three of many. There are lots of other identities I have ditched since finding Jesus but some we need to keep, for example if you are a Sunday school teacher and a Production Manager you may not want to lose those identities! In this little note here I am solely talking about our main identity, the one that overrides all others, the one that really identifies us and shapes us as believers and defines who we are and what other identities we take.

NOTE 2 (This is relevant to the main text but I felt it disrupted the flow of my reasoning so I’ve included this as a note).

CHILDREN IN A MARRIAGE, WHOSE ARE THEY? MUMS, DADS, OR BOTH EQUALLY?
This whole controversial issue is like one or two other biblical studies, you won’t really find many, or maybe any core verses that talk about this specifically. As in so many other areas of biblical truths though, to get a clear picture we mustn’t look at single verses and take them out of context as so many people do, we need to look at the bigger picture. That bigger picture is ALWAYS Jesus Christ.   
Right throughout the Old Testament from Genesis to the birth of Jesus we see it’s all about the Seed (ie Jesus, Galatians 3:16), it’s never about the egg!! It’s the mans Seed that is important, the carrier not so much so. Jesus is called the son of David, not Mary. And that is where Rome gets it all so very wrong, it’s all about Jesus Christ, not Mary. Everything is about Jesus Christ, not Israel, not the church, not the Jews, not Mary, and only when we read the bible through the lens of Jesus Christ will we begin to get a clear and accurate interpretation.

Now please look at another ‘bigger picture’ view.
In the OT a Jewish girl was considered the property of her father. When she was to be married she was bought with a price. She then became the property of her husband, along with everything she owned (and that was the case in this country too until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870 ended that).
So, the children she bore therefore also belonged to the man. The woman had no possession of or legal right over the children, just like when a man buys a log splitter, sells a few logs then gets paid, the log splitter has no right to the logs or the money, does it…!!
To most people today that sounds preposterous, but it is actually the way society has been conditioned that makes it sound thus.
Consider this – looking through the lens of Jesus Christ again is where things become so clear. As unregenerate sinners we were the property of the devil. Jesus came along and purchased us, the purchase price being His blood at Calvary. Paul says we have been given the Holy Spirit as the promise and the downpayment until the full redemption of the ‘purchased possession’. If we belong to Christ then every single thing that we have also belongs to Jesus Christ, all our possessions become His. All the money we earn is His, we are merely stewards.
Paul indicates in Ephesians chapter 5 that husband and wife is a shadow of Jesus and His bride. So, after we have actually got our bibles out and thought about things biblically, who do you now think the married couples children belong to?

Incidentally, there are scores and scores of examples of biblical strongholds like this where our mindsets have been twisted and deliberately turned away from Gods truth. There are so many Bible doctrines that we are taught that are twisted in a similar way and until we really study the Bible for ourselves we will continue to let our Bible colleges churn out indoctrinated preachers and pastors who then preach to congregations who just lap up everything as gospel that the pastor puts to them. Most people today have more faith in the pastor than they have in Jesus Christ….

“Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true”.
Acts 17:11

NOTE 3
Having come across many Christians who admit they sometimes question their salvation (ie their identity in Christ) I think I should mention that our identities change the instant we get saved. Salvation is absolutely secured at that point! Of course we are not perfect, we continue to get many things wrong and we will all be judged according to how we use our personalities as we work out our Christian lives and all that is definitely worth keeping in mind every day – but, the area of personality will not affect our salvation, just our rewards. Salvation is based on our legal “position” and not our physical “condition”. That is so important to remember because the devil will play mind games with us if we don’t stand firm and rest in what Christ did for us, NOT what we do for Him (just to clarify too, I am most certainly NOT preaching Calvinism here). And it is the same with marriage, we are married at the point of the ceremony, the marriage status cannot be questioned afterwards no matter what our or our spouses performances are within the marriage. Poor performances lead to a lot of marital issues but a good performance will lead to many rewards and blessings!!

Praise the NAME of Jesus!