A Sinner or a Saint?
A Sinner or a Saint?
on being given a new name
My name is Jamie. Jamie doesn’t have its own meaning. You have to trace it back to James. When you look up James, it says Jacob. Jacob in the Bible means “deceiver” or “supplanter.”
As a relatively young Christian, I was unfamiliar with all of this. I grew up in a church and a Christian home, but it wasn’t until I went to college that I began to take responsibility for my own knowledge of the Christian faith.
At some point, either in high school or early college, I went on a retreat held at Shocco Springs, a retreat center here in Alabama. The little gift shop had a kiosk that held cards with names on them. I found my name and its meaning.
I don’t know if I still have the card, but I have the cardboard placard I made and hung it on my dorm room wall with my name, its meaning, and the Bible verse. It’s faded because college was almost 30 years ago (yikes!). Here’s a pic.
For a little while, during those early college years, I lived into what I thought my name meant. I believed that I was chosen and could be used by God.
Somewhere along the way, the Bible dictionary became my best friend, and I learned that my name did not, in fact, mean “chosen.”
When I graduated college, I spent years of my life in a dark night of the soul wrestling with God. I felt abandoned and sometimes hopeless during those years and was a little deceived. I didn’t yet know what a gift it was to wrestle with God. I didn’t yet know that to wrestle with God was to be chosen by God. I began to live into my name - deceiver, supplanter. I was not too fond of being a deceiver or a supplanter, and I never intended to become my name.
But that’s what names do. They tell us who we are.
And while I’ve never been what I felt was intentionally deceptive, I was deceived into thinking that I didn’t matter too much to God. Sometimes, I felt and believed that God wasn’t good during those dark days. Most people in my life didn’t a) either know God well enough to say He was good or b) understand the depths of despair I felt I was in, and if even someone did try to speak the truth to me, I rarely listened. I’d grown up with the “try harder gospel,” and that’s all anyone seemed to offer me. That or it was the only way I knew how to frame anything anyone said.
To be clear, I was absolutely wrong. God is the best person, being, or thing that you could ever conceive or imagine. If you have a view of God that makes Him not the best, most fantastic thing you’ve ever heard of, then you’ve misconstrued Him somewhere, and that’s my take, although I validate that you may have complicated emotions toward God, and that’s okay.
Fast forward to today and my story of what happened to me recently. For some context, I am in a spiritual formation program at Friends University.
In my last class, we talked about how God sounds when He confronts us and how He is constantly confronting us.1 Let me preface this by saying much of spiritual formation looks at narratives. Narrative theology helps us see the story we tell ourselves and what we believe. Often we think false narratives under the guise of truth like I did when I felt God must not be good because He seemed to leave me alone and was silent.
Listen to what Jan Johnson writes about the tone of God in confrontation,
While most humans confront each other in harshness and even judgment, God is not like humans. God can be firm while being compassionate and kind. God really is patient, kind, not pushy or rude, not easily irritated. God always protects us when speaking to us (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). Even in confrontation, God embodies the “wisdom from above,” which is “pure...peace loving, gentle at all times,...willing to yield to others...full of mercy and the fruit of good deeds [and] shows no favoritism and is always sincere” (James 3:17 NLT).2
In class one night, one of my classmates asked, “What if God is not confronting me?”, and I asked a similar question. I’d been experiencing a sweet peace with the Lord, but I worried, as my classmate had, that maybe something was wrong if God was not confronting me. My small group and I practiced group direction and prayed to ask God if He would show me anything I needed to be confronted about. I heard nothing to challenge me, and neither did my classmates. If anything, a praise song ran through my mind.
This quiet, inner peace and stillness had become a new way of being for me. I felt like a child being held in love. My classmates began to speak that it was such a gift that the Lord had given me time to know my belovedness. Internally, I began to contrast and compare this time to the darkness I’d had many years earlier.
Later that night, I fell asleep and dreamed. I don’t remember the whole of the dream, only that in it, the Lord renamed me BELOVED. When I awoke, I felt drenched in love.
In The Good and Beautiful God, James Bryan Smith writes a chapter on narratives of being a sinner or a saint. The first time I read this chapter, it felt heretical at first. But as I read it and thought about identity in Christ, I knew that every word was accurate. You are no longer a sinner when you become a child of God. You are a saint. Many times in evangelicalism, we’re taught to think of ourselves as sinners rather than saints. This is an immature view that keeps us from growing into who we are.
As God’s child, you are not called by your sin. To be called by your sin is to sound like the enemy - condemning, fearmongering, and hate-filled. I’m not sure I see Jesus call anyone by their sin, even pre-Christians.
Sure, Jesus confronts. Jesus calls us up and out of sin, but he never calls us by the name of our sins. To be given a name is to tell you who you are. Never once does Jesus change a name from something good into something bad. He always, always, always gives a better name. Jesus is and will always be better.
Jesus never uses guilt or shame to motivate you to something else. Sometimes, we think He would because we use fear, guilt, and shame to encourage people to be better and do better. Fear, guilt, and shame are poor motivators and tend to make people stay the same or devolve rather than change and grow. Perfect love casts out all fear.3 There is no condemnation in Christ.4
Don’t believe the lie that you are your sin, that you are the voice the enemy snarls at you to tell you that you aren’t good enough. He’s good enough, and He’s given you His name. By providing us new names, He’s telling us who we are, so we can become who He wants us to be. Like Him. Beloved. Whole. Healed. and on and on.
God is not like a human parent. He gives you a better name. A new name. A name that gives you the freedom to love Him even more. A name that allows you to rethink everything you’ve ever wrongly believed. A name that enables you to really obey and be changed. Your name is hope-filled and lovely.
No longer will they call you Deserted or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the Lord will take delight in you, and your land will be married.5
Anyone who says anything less is still learning the sound and tone of Jesus’s voice. Read the Gospels, learn to know who He is, and listen to the sound of His voice, and if it’s not the best sound you’ve ever heard, pause and pay attention a little deeper. You might be listening to a false narrative or belief that doesn’t sound like Jesus.
In Christ, you are beloved. Now be loved. That’ll lead to rethinking and re-believing, which is what repentance is.
This piece was written in response to a recent sermon by a well-renowned radio talk show host and member of the church I attend. I didn’t see the need to write him personally, but as I ruminated on the sermon (which was very well received, and I am sure the Lord used it), this felt like a good way to speak the truth in love and share my form of gentle correction.
When the Soul Listens by Jan Johnson.
When the Soul Listens, 2017 edition, p. 161.
1 John 4:18
Romans 8:1
Isaiah 62:4