A recent edition of the
Daily Sentinel newspaper shows a photo of a young man on his knees at an
Interstate off ramp holding a sign that says, “Please Help Hungry”. When the reporter asked why he was on his
knees, the young man said that he was begging and praying. The kneeling man
didn’t have any trouble telling the reporter his first name, ‘Lu’, but then
made reference that he had changed his last name to ‘Cifer’. You can’t help but
wonder who the young Mr. Lucifer is praying to and kneeling before. No doubt
some unaware Christian travelers do support his begging, but personally I think
the young man’s solicitations are misdirected. “Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will
never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”
(John 6:35 NIV)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----I had a neighbor who changed his name to Rolene. He had to win a court battle to do it, which I’m sure made him doubly proud of his new name. At the time, his thing in life was the invalidity of the word “should”, and stuff like that. That’s what was in the new name for him; everyone else should have a first and last name, so he memorialized his "no should" viewpoint with the simple name, Rolene.
-----It is interesting that Mr. Lu Cifer made specific note about having changed his name to. We probably should suppose (sorry, Rolene) this specific mention was made from pride, but it could just as well have surfaced from confessionary feelings, possibly regarding the why for his circumstances of now begging along the roadside. Either way, we don’t know for certain why he would change his name to such. Maybe just for the joke of it. Maybe he meant to poke society in the eye, like Rolene did.
-----Names still mean things. In Biblical times they meant even more. To the Greeks and the Hebrews alike, their respective words for “name” went beyond a linguistic tag for merely distinguishing you in a crowd to a term which stood for your particular character. So it is that when we pray in the name of Jesus we more than pray by the authority He availed for us, but we also pray in attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge of truths about man and God He held.
----And that concept is doubly meaningful when taken to Matthew 10:32, “So every one who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven;” and Revelation 3:5, “He who conquers shall be clad thus in white garments, and I will not blot his name out of the book of life; I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.” Christ’s character is elementally truth and love. It takes more than an acknowledgement of a word by which one is called to acknowledge what and who one is. So when we acknowledge the truth and love of Christ before men we are attempting our best to participate in that same elemental substance. Heaven is the place for it to be. So it gets acknowledged there by our Father.
-----Meanwhile, for us there’s a fire to go through and some burning up to be done. Surely His Spirit dwells in us with ours. At death it is whisked off to join Christ in short order. But what we’ve done, what we’ve built upon the foundation of Christ, who we we've made ourselves at that time must pass through the fire. The gold and precious stones and silver of us survives, but the flammable rest of us burns away (I Cor 3:11-15)
-----It would be rewarding to enter heaven with much of your character intact. But greater yet, once there, we get a character as deeply personal, unique, and private as the one we have here. “To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it.” (Rev 2:17)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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