New Name

 

The New Name

First Series – Sermon Five

Original by George MacDonald

Paraphrase by Dale R. Howie

 

The First Series has been quietly leading us toward this moment. Child in the Mist invited us to enter the Father's kingdom as children. The Higher Faith taught us to trust the Father's heart above everything else. It Shall Not Be Forgiven revealed forgiveness as the Father's relentless work of removing everything that stands between His heart and ours.

Now George asks the next question: What is the Father restoring us to?

Hidden within every child of God is a unique life that the Father alone knows completely. He sees the oak in the acorn and the butterfly in the caterpillar. Long before we recognize our true selves, He is already bringing that hidden life to its glorious fulfillment. Long before we recognize our true selves, He already knows the person we are becoming and patiently works toward that glorious end.

At the heart of every human being is the longing to be truly seen, known, received, and loved. We often satisfy that longing by placing people into categories, reducing them to labels and judging them by outward appearances. But in the Father's kingdom there are no anonymous crowds, no sameness as in “ist’s” and “ism’s,” only beloved sons and daughters. No herds of cattle or flocks of birds. Each life is uniquely imagined, uniquely created, and uniquely loved.

The white stone and the new name are not rewards for becoming someone else. They are the Father's joyful declaration that His dream has been fulfilled. The name written upon the stone is the expression of the person He has always known us to be. It is His affirmation that the child He conceived in love has finally blossomed into the fullness of life He intended from the beginning.

Oh Father, teach us to see one another as You do. Help us delight in the beauty, uniqueness, and calling of every person we meet, and give us grace to become the sons and daughters whose names have always been written upon Your heart.

 

Outline

Sermon Question: What is the “New Name”?

P1 - Mysticism – Truth is best revealed through life.

      P2 - A Name Expressed – Our true name is God's gift.

             T - Individuality Blessed – Every child is known by name.

       R2 - Aspiration – Our calling is not to be greater than others, but to become ourselves.

 R1 - Face-to-Face – The Father is bringing every child to the fulness of life.

 

Revelation 2:17 NASB

 

"… To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it."

 

Mysticism

Question: Why does George begin by talking about mysticism?

Before turning to our passage from Revelation, I want to begin with a few thoughts about mysticism. I use the word to describe a particular way of revealing truth, one that is common, in varying degrees, to all the writers of the New Testament. Mysticism is a vast subject, and I can offer only a single observation here. A mystical mind sees the highest expressions that truth reveals. It finds those truths reflected in nature, in human customs, and in the ordinary experiences of life, allowing visible images to awaken invisible realities. It is one of the highest ways of expressing profound truth, and our Lord Himself often taught in this manner. Consider His words in Matthew 6:22–23: "...if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep is that darkness."

John's mysticism is among the simplest and, therefore, the most compelling in all of Scripture. He remembered and recorded the words of our Lord with remarkable faithfulness, yet his Gospel bears a distinctly different character from the other Gospel writers. Its simplicity carries a deeply personal and poetic vision. The book of Revelation, however, speaks with a different voice. Its imagery is richer, more complex, and often more subjective. That difference is exactly what we should expect. In his Gospel, John writes primarily as a witness, remembering the words and works of his Master through the lens of his own heart. In Revelation, those same experiences have matured into personal vision. The words no longer flow directly from the lips of Jesus, but through John's own heart, soul, and mind as the Spirit reveals their deeper meaning.

Truth is truth, whether it comes from the lips of Jesus or Balaam. Yet truth, in its deepest sense, is not merely the correct arrangement of words or the expression of a right opinion. Truth is first a condition of heart, soul, mind, and strength toward God and toward our brothers and sisters. Therefore, Truth, when spoken, is in a very real sense the person speaking it.  Many of the images in Revelation are more than symbolic language. They are the fruit of truths John himself came to see, to experience, and finally to know.

In the passage before us, the gift of the white stone centers upon the new name, and it is this gift of the name that concerns us. What the white stone represents in itself is of little importance for our discussion. It seems to belong more to the symbolic form than to the central meaning. Perhaps John chose white because it speaks of purity, and stone because it suggests permanence. Whatever the imagery may imply, the stone is only the vehicle by which the gift is given. My concern is not with the stone itself, but with the name written upon it. For if we understand what the name represents, the symbolism of the stone has already fulfilled its purpose.

Answer: Because God often reveals eternal truth through earthly images.

 

A Name Expresses

Question: What does our new name express?

Briefly, the giving of the white stone with the new name is God's expression of what He thinks about a person, spoken to that person alone. It is His divine conclusion—the Father's own "Come, you that are blessed," addressed personally to His child.

To understand the greatness of that gift, we must first consider what a name truly is and why it matters. The name God gives does not describe our accidents, achievements, or imitations. It expresses our very essence, revealing who we truly are because it is God Himself who writes it.

The names by which we know one another carry little significance in themselves. They distinguish one person from another and gather a little history around them. Occasionally a name becomes widely known because someone has done something unusually noble—or terribly evil—but such distinctions remain outward things. They tell us what a person has done more than who the person truly is.

The true name expresses the character, nature, being, and significance of the one who bears it. It is the soul's image in a single word, the sign that belongs to that person and to no other. Who can give such a name? God alone. No one else truly knows a person as God knows him. No one else could gather the whole harmony of a life into a single expression.

To whom, then, is this name given? To the one who overcomes. And when is it given? When the person has overcome. Does God not already know what a person will become? Surely He does, just as He sees the oak within the acorn. Why then does He wait? In truth, He does not wait. He has known the name from the beginning. Our waiting is much like repentance. God forgives first, yet we only become aware of His forgiveness as we repent. So also, we only come to understand our new name as we grow into the person it has always described.

The blossom does not create the tree; it reveals what the tree has been from the beginning. So it is with us. The perfection and completion of our lives express the name God has always known. We cannot see the tree of our own souls before its blossom appears. Neither can we understand beforehand the flower we are to bear or the name that belongs to us. Only in its fullness does life reveal its own meaning.

God's name for each of His children is a mystical word, understood only by the one who receives it. It is the expression of God's own understanding of that person—the thought of God concerning that child, the dream He faithfully carried through every moment of that child's becoming. To speak that name is to declare its victory, to say, "In you also, I am well pleased."

Yet we are still moving within the language of symbols. At the center of those symbols stands the personal relationship between every child and the Father. Each of us has our own encounters with Him. Those encounters shape our understanding, our affections, and our fellowship with the One who is both our Maker and our Father. Were we merely creatures of passing days, destined only to worship and die, then death would speak the final truth about our existence. God might be our Maker, but He could never truly be our Father.

But God is not the God of the dead. He is the God of the living. Because our life has its source in Him, worship becomes the thanksgiving of living sons and daughters rather than the resignation of dying creatures. We come to Him, not merely as those He has made, but as those who have come from Him.

The white stone, then, belongs to the one who worships the God of the living. To the one who knows himself to be God's child; who offers himself in love because he has first been loved; who climbs, by every God-given effort and every God-given victory, toward the fullness of his being. Looking at last upon his true self reflected in the Father's heart, face to face, he receives from the Father's hand the new name written.

Answer: The true person the Father has always known.

 

Individuality Blessed

Question: Why is every child different?

Understanding more clearly what the new name signifies, we can now go a step further. The name given upon the white stone belongs to the one "which no one knows but he who receives it." Not only does every child have a personal relationship with the Father, but each relationship is unlike any other. Each of us has been created after our Father's own design, and when His work in us is complete, we shall receive a name that no one else can fully understand, because no one else has lived our life or shared our fellowship with Him.

Each son and daughter, therefore, worships the Father as no one else can. Some may possess greater knowledge, but none possesses a greater relationship. Every child is beautifully distinct in the eyes of the Father. Let none of us presume to stand before Him as the judge of our brother or sister, dragging another into His presence for condemnation. Rather, let us first receive His grace ourselves, and then rejoice in every glimpse of the Father that He has chosen to reveal through those around us.

As the fir tree differs from the palm, so every one of us lifts a distinct humanity toward our common Father, and He answers each according to the particular beauty with which He created us. With every child He shares an intimacy that belongs to no one else. In every heart there is a secret place where the Father communes personally with His beloved.

It is from that hidden fellowship that each of us brings life to others. The revelations we receive, the strengths we develop, and the gifts we offer all flow from that unique relationship. This is why we are who we are. We were created to share life with our Father and, through that life, to bless one another.

By His creation each of us stands individually before God. Each of us may truly say, "My God." Each may come to the Father alone and speak with Him face-to-face, as one friend speaks with another. Our individuality is never swallowed up by the multitude. When God looks upon humanity, He does not see a faceless crowd, but a living body whose smallest member is distinct, precious, and indispensable to the whole.

Consider, then, the beauty of the image before us. Every one of us is a distinct flower or tree in the garden of God, precious for our own sake in the eyes of the great Gardener. He gives to each the water, the sunshine, and the life needed to bring forth the blossom of our being. Within every child He has planted something of His own life, and every time we yield ourselves to that true self, another ray of His light shines through us. Slowly, faithfully, He brings each life to its own fullness.

What a glorious hope lies before us—to discover ourselves as God has always known us. Surely such a vision makes all our petty self-consciousness, selfish pride, and self-admiration fade away. To know what our Father thinks of us is to think far less about ourselves. The false self loosens its grip and frees us from our selfish-selves. Like Paul, who began with the cry, "Who will deliver me from this body of death?" we also discover that our life is no longer found in ourselves, but in Christ.

Is there danger in such thinking? Certainly there is, if we imagine that our growth has been our own achievement. But pride grows only where grace is forgotten. In the Father's kingdom there is no room for boasting, for every step has been sustained by His love from beginning to end.

Answer: Because every child reflects the Father in a unique and personal way.

  

Aspiration

Question: What is the difference between ambition and aspiration?

In this life there is no room for ambition. Ambition longs to be greater than others. Aspiration longs only to become all that the Father created us to be. Comparison has no place in the kingdom, for no one else can receive your new name. It belongs to you alone. Here there is endless room for aspiration, but none for boasting. Ambition desires to rise above another; aspiration simply reaches higher toward the Father's purpose. Relative worth is not merely unknown among the children of God—it is unknowable. Each esteems the other better than himself.

The overcomer says, "God made me for Himself. I am most truly myself when I become the person He created me to be." What matters whether I am grass, an eagle, a building stone, or the Son of Thunder, so long as I am truly His? I am His thought made visible, His idea brought to life. Therefore I am complete in my own kind and precious in His sight. Let my loving Father call me by whatever name He chooses. That name will be enough for me, and I shall seek no other.

Such aspiration leaves us wonderfully free. It is enough that our Father knows us and delights in us. To be loved by Him, to be worthy of His care, is life enough. We no longer strive to establish our own importance because our identity rests securely in His love.

Neither does this individuality separate us from others. Quite the opposite. What we say of one we must say of all. We begin to recognize the sacredness of every person's relationship with the Father. We learn to look upon one another as prophets, priests, and fellow pilgrims, each bringing some fresh revelation from the presence of God. Every son and daughter becomes a new unveiling of the Father's heart, and in Him we are drawn nearer to one another rather than farther apart.

Is there danger in such freedom? Certainly. Yet where danger increases, grace abounds still more. Should one who has climbed many steps stumble and fall, the Father's work has not ended. There is still the fire of God—the consuming fire that burns away all that is false without destroying the child Himself. His purpose remains unchanged until every son and daughter has become what He first intended.

Answer: Ambition compares. Aspiration becomes.

 

Face-to-Face

Question: When will we finally know our true name?

All these things must seem foolish to those who have never desired fellowship with God, or who have never longed to know Him as Father. So be it. The realities of the kingdom are not proved by argument alone, but by lives awakened to His presence.

Lord, help us all. Encourage us as Your children and let Your image within us grow ever clearer, until we are transformed into Your likeness. If through long years of struggle, discipline, and growth we must continue climbing toward that day, then let us climb with hope, knowing that every step brings us nearer to Yourself.

Grant that we may one day stand before You face to face and receive from Your hand the white stone with the new name written upon it. Until that day, feed us continually with the hidden manna, the Bread of Life that comes from Your own presence. Fill us with Your Word. Teach us to lay up treasures that neither moth nor rust can corrupt, and to become faithful stewards of the life You have entrusted to us.

May we learn to delight, not in becoming greater than one another, but in becoming the sons and daughters You have always known us to be. Then, when at last You speak that name which has rested in Your heart from the beginning, we shall discover that it has always been the truest thing about us.

Answer: When we stand before the Father and see ourselves as He has always seen us.

Sermon Answer: It is God's expression of who He created you to become.

 

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Continue your Quest . . .

Next Sermon - Heart of the Treasure

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CLIFF NOTES WITH MACDONALD’S ORIGINAL QUOTES

 

Mysticism

 

“Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam. But, in its deepest sense, the truth is a condition of heart, soul, mind, and strength towards God and towards our fellow—not an utterance, not even a right form of words; and therefore such truth coming forth in words is, in a sense, the person that speaks.”

“But I care chiefly to regard the stone as the vehicle of the name,—as the form whereby the name is represented as passing from God to the man,”

 

A Name Expressed

 

“I say, in brief, the giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the "Come, thou blessed," spoken to the individual.”

 “The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own symbol,—his soul's picture, in a word,—the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is, or even, seeing what he is, could express in a name-word the sum and harmony of what he sees.”

 “Does God then not know what a man is going to become? As surely as he sees the oak which he put there lying in the heart of the acorn.”

 “It is the blossom, the perfection, the completion, that determines the name; and God foresees that from the first, because he made it so;”

 “God's name for a man must then be the expression in a mystical word—a word of that language which all who have overcome understand—of his own idea of the man, that being whom he had in his thought when he began to make the child, and whom he kept in his thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea.”

 “We shall not look long before we find that the mystic symbol has for its centre of significance the fact of the personal individual relation of every man to his God. That every man has affairs, and those his first affairs, with God, stands to the reason of every man who associates any meaning or feeling with the words, Maker, Father, God.”

 “Who knows that he is one of God's children, this one of the Father's making, he giveth the white stone. To him who climbs on the stair of all his God-born efforts and God-given victories up to the height of his being—that of looking face to face upon his ideal self in the bosom of the Father—God's him, realized in him through the Father's love in the Elder Brother's devotion—to him God gives the new name written.”

 

Individuality Blessed

 

“Because that which follows embraces and intensifies this individuality of relation in a fuller development of the truth. For the name is one "which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else; for when he is perfected he shall receive the new name which no one else can understand.”

 “From this it follows that there is a chamber also—(O God, humble and accept my speech)—a chamber in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man,—out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made—to reveal the secret things of the Father.”

 “By his creation, then, each man is isolated with God; each, in respect of his peculiar making, can say, "my God;" each can come to him alone, and speak with him face to face, as a man speaketh with his friend. There is no massing of men with God. When he speaks of gathered men, it is as a spiritual body, not a mass. For in a body every smallest portion is individual, and therefore capable of forming a part of the body.”

 “See, now, what a significance the symbolism of our text assumes. Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in the spiritual garden of God,— precious, each for his own sake, in the eyes of him who is even now making us.”

 “To have a consciousness of our own ideal being flashed into us from the thought of God! Surely for this may well give way all our paltry self-consciousnesses, our self-admirations and self-worships! Surely to know what he thinks about us will pale out of our souls all our thoughts about ourselves!”

 

Aspiration

 

“Here is room for endless aspiration towards the unseen ideal; none for ambition. Ambition would only be higher than others; aspiration would be high. Relative worth is not only unknown—to the children of the kingdom it is unknowable. Each esteems the other better than himself.”

 “Neither will he thus be isolated from his fellows. For that we say of one, we say of all. It is as one that the man has claims amongst his fellows. Each will feel the sacredness and awe of his neighbour's dark and silent speech with his God. Each will regard the other as a prophet, and look to him for what the Lord hath spoken. Each, as a high priest returning from his Holy of Holies, will bring from his communion some glad tidings, some gospel of truth, which, when spoken, his neighbours shall receive and understand. Each will behold in the other a marvel of revelation, a present son or daughter of the Most High, come forth from him to reveal him afresh. In God each will draw nigh to each.”

 

Face-to-Face

 

“Lord, help them and us, and make our being grow into thy likeness.”