You tip-toe through the humid jungle. Your socks are wet, your shirt is damp, and so are your spirits. A night in the middle of a rain-forest wasn’t exactly your idea of a good night out, but here you are. There’s no moonlight, nobody else around and you have no idea how you’re going to hack your way out of this leafy prison.
The forest floor cracks and crumbles under your boots, and centipedes and giant spiders scatter around them. All in all, your arachnophobia would be kicking in big-time by now if it wasn’t for another fear that hogged your attention. Yes, because out here, among hanging vines and thick-stemmed trees, something far larger is lurking. Something you thought couldn’t possibly be alive, but which is. Something with teeth that would shame crocodiles and an appetite that not even Mac Donald’s wants to compete with.
Just as you brush a large leaf of an exotic plant to the side, you catch a movement out of the corner of your eye. Your spine tingles and the hair on the back of your head begins to rise. Tension ceases your every nerve. Is your mind playing tricks on you? Is there really something there? Your head begins inching its way to the right from which you saw something. And there it is. A Tyrannosaurus. The large beast towers over you, watching your closely with brutish eyes. Saliva drips from its half-open jaw.
You stand dead-still or you’ll be dead-meat.
You don’t know whether to run. You don’t know where you’d hide. You even forget to breathe. So this is it. You’re done for. Dead. Finito. Sheesh Kebab. You’re going to be the feast of the Beast. You’re going to die at the jaws of a monster from the past.
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I believe that we all, at some point in our lives, have had a Jurassic Park experience. The Jurassic Park experience consists of you finding yourself surrounded by monsters that you thought were long dead and gone. History gets nasty.
Anyone who tries to change, tries to move on, tries to live and new and bettered life will encounter their blast from the past. And guess what? It’s hungry. As Christians this phenomenon is one of the many battles we face. We think we outran that memory, we think we conquered that enemy, we think we shook that habit and are on to a brand new start. But there it is; the past rears its ugly head. We are so brutally reminded of that person we used to be, that life we used to lead, that reality we used to call home.
I have had many a good Christian soul tell me, with stars in their eyes, “Don’t you worry! Jesus gave you a new life! The past is gone, your sins are washed clean, the battle is over. You are a Victor! Your are a Conqueror!”
I nod and admit that it sounds great. A new beginning and a chance to leave the filth behind sounds like just the thing I want. But I know deep down that my experience has often been less than as A-4 as all that. I have often seen my nightmares washed down the sink, only to see the sink back up and the filth return. I have seen bad habits running back to their owners with open arms and past patterns repainting their way back into sincere Christian’s lives. Addictions, fears, depressions, weaknesses, doubts… oh yes. The Tyrannosaurus is back in town and he wants to know what’s on the menu.
You should know right now that if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you will slay many dragons. And there’s another thing you should know too. Many of these dragons will rise again to block your path once more.
“What??” you say. “Rise again? How could they? I don’t believe it! They only rise when we lack faith! No way!”
Yes, we all lack faith, but that is not always the cause of slain dragons returning to us. Not at all. They return because they received our invitation. You don’t remember sending it out? Oh you don’t have to worry about writing one. Your sinful nature did that all for you. And guess what? It’s throwing you a great reunion party. All your past sins and defeated enemies. They will all try their luck and knock at your door, and they’ll even bring presents. Why? Because you asked them back. Why? Because your heart used to be their home.
So what then? Will we fall into the same traps? Are there no real new beginnings?
Ok, let’s side-step for a moment…
Do you think you’re special? It’s an honest question. Do you think you’re special? Is there anything that makes you different from everyone else – something that defines YOU?
In our society you may believe that you are encouraged to be as special and unique as snowflake. And indeed a lot of us sometimes act like we truly are the center of the universe; the hub of the happening. But guess what? In reality, among the masses, your identity is too often narrowed down to numbers.
2 Kids, 1 mortage, 2 cars, 6 hundred in debt, 5 pounds to heavy, 7 cigarettes a day.
“Could prisoner 212657 please step forward!”
Your value boils down to things defined by value systems such as money, workdays, taxes, bank account number, age, earnings, products, divorces, hours and minutes. When disasters across the world happen, we define our loss by the number of deaths, as if one wasn’t enough.
But I believe in a God who treats us quite differently. He doesn’t find it necessary to march in crowd demonstrations, wearing all the rainbow’s colors, and demand freedom of expression and individualism and wave strange art in the air. He knows how important identity is to us. Individualism, in its truest form, was his idea. He made us that way. Special, unique, irreplacable.
And so when he gives an individual person the chance to start again, to get a clean slate, he begins by changing the most basic thing about our identity. It is the first thing we use in order to present ourselves to others. Our Name.
Flip through the Bible, old testament and new, and you fill find it peppered with stories of people meeting God, and in the same process, getting their name changed. It may seem a little strange to us, but then again it kind of makes sense. If I wanted to move away, disappear, alter my identity, I would have to change my name.
Well, God changed people’s names as a sign of a new beginning, a new identity.
Abram to Abraham
Sarai to Sarah
Jacob to Israel
Simon to Peter
Saul to Paul
Graceless to Christian
Sinner to Saved
Thief to Valuable
Drunkard to Warrior
Depressed to Beautiful
He’s played the Name Game with a lot of people. He starts at the beginning (a very good place to start). He says; here’s a new name, let’s start a new life together. And so it begins.
But if I was to change my name to ‘Angelina’ over-night, not everyone would have heard about the change. And even if they heard about it, they wouldn’t easily be able to remember my old name. My friends would keep slipping up, calling me ‘Natalie’ in an absent-minded moment, or downright refusing to use my new name. Seems natural. To them I am Natalie. To them, that is my ID.
The same things happen when we try and change our life. We try and adopt new habits, new patterns, new lifestyles, new thinking, new worldviews, and some familiar chum steps up to, with all the care in the world, and calls you by your old name. Hate, Despair, Anger, Lazy. Yep, there are a whole bunch of worse names out there than Olga. (I’m sorry to anyone named that. You may sue me later.) You will meet people in your life who call you by your old self. We will be reminded, even at times by dear and close friends, of what we were. For a second it can seem as if nothing has changed. We begin to doubt the work of grace in lives. We begin thinking that perhaps we were just imagining freedom and we never really had it at all.
Wrong again.
People in this world will continue to call you by your old name, and so will your Enemy. Beasts of the past will seem to rise from their ashes to tempt you anew, attack you anew, knock on your door anew, as if nothing has changed, as if nothing has been replaced.
You hearing the knock? Don’t know what to do?
Let Jesus answer the door.
Fact is, as long as we are one this Earth things we thought we had defeated once and for all may come back to haunt us. But just because they come crawling back, doesn’t mean you have lost anything. The fact that you believe that Jesus is making you a new creation, means that he’s in the house, and He doesn’t like to share the remote. Temptation is not sin. And failure is not permanent. Even when we do fall or give in to dragons of the past, the Grace if God is renewed every morning. It isn’t a one-time opportunity.
Jesus is in it for the long-haul. That’s why he wants to move in; so you can move on. Don’t be discouraged when you see an old enemy returning like last night’s bad curry. When we say that “the Lord will give you victory” we are mistaken if we think this is limited to “keeping the Devil away”. Jesus is powerful enough to keep defeating sin and our dark past every time is returns.
Stuck in a jungle, facing your Dino? Or bothered by an identity you can’t seem to shake?
Don’t worry. Jesus has the power to take down your past not only once but thousands of time. And he knows WAY better moves than Jackie Chan.
And you will meet good people out there who look at you and call you by your new name. Make these people your closest friends because they don’t only see you, but they see who Jesus is making you. These people know Jesus and therefore know the way it works. He won’t let you go back there unless you want to…
The Tyrannosaurus will have to survive on veggies for now. Too bad, Barney.
