What are you living for?  What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Other than your bladder.

Before your feet hit the ground each day, what kind of thoughts pass through your head?

I can tell you I have spent a lot of years waking up to the reality of how many places in my life I have felt stuck, unanswered, even under attack.  I have even woken up thinking about those unanswered realities in my children.  I have battled anxiety for as long as I can remember.  I have children that wrestle with anxiety, I guess they come by it honestly.  The day our son was born, I feel like you could see his angst over the reality that he had been born on this planet.  There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t have several conversations about what to do with his concern for life, for death, and everything in between.  Most recently my son has been battling with the question of whether or not “God is real?”  I will be honest, the moment I had children I felt like the enemy wanted to start me worrying over their salvation and over the realities of all that this world pulls them into, and out of.  I didn’t expect that we would be grappling with “God being real” as early as 10 years old, but here we go.

Lately our family has been on a journey to discover the names that God calls us by.  We are discovering our true identities, not just our gifts (although those get killer involved too) but our names given by God.   We took a road trip over the summer and listened to a sermon series on identity by a guy named Jamie Winship.  Little did I know the tsunami-type impact this would have on my family when I cued up the podcast to start our trip.  We listened intently about this incredible thought that God has called each of us, individually, by a name.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you [and approved of you as My chosen instrument]” Jeremiah 1:5 AMP

“Do not be afraid, for I have ransomed you.  I have called you by name; you are mine.” Isaiah 43:1 NLT

I think I’ve always been comfortable with the idea that my identity is IN Christ.  Christ created me to bring glory to His name.  That is the foundational truth my faith is built on – but truth be told, it has always seemed sort of ambiguous and confusing.  The idea that my identity in Christ results in an actual name was not something I had considered.  Quite frankly, it’s blowing my mind.  The reality is, how are you supposed to know how to bring Him glory if you don’t know the identity He’s give you?  Not what you’ve become good at over the course of your life, not what you do for a living, but His purpose for creating you.  This was a question I did not realize I had not asked.  As we listened to the sermons in the car, we prayed the prayers right along with Jamie on the podcast and low and behold, God showed up, loud and proud, somewhere in between Bend, Oregon and McCall, Idaho and maybe even the loudest for our son, Oliver (whom we didn’t realize was listening).

We’ve discovered that when you hear from Heaven about the name that the King of Kings is calling you by, and you start operating within that name, not only does everything start making a whole lot more sense, but all of the sudden the stuff you thought was SO important isn’t SO important anymore.  I’ve been blind sided by how crystal clear the order of my day has become when before my feet hit the ground, I just listen.  Listen for Jesus to call me by name.  Listen for him to speak into order my identity, my purpose, my freedom, my day.  BUT! Buyer Beware!  If you want to pick a fight with the devil, try living by the name Christ has given you, and get ready to go to war.  Isn’t that the kind of battle you want to spend your short time on this earth fighting though?

Winship makes the joke that one of the comical things about hearing from God is that He calls you by a name you could never imagine calling yourself.  When he gives this message to college students and they hear a name like, “Magnificent One” they are often too embarrassed to even repeat it out loud.  Of course the enemy would want to instantly make you self conscious or doubt your God-given name.  He knows very well that he’s gonna be naked and up a tree when you claim the authority of your name given by the name above all names!

Oliver heard Jesus call him by the name of Warrior of Goodness, Warrior of Kindness and Warrior of Peace.  Dude! Chills!  Can you imagine having known what the creator of the universe calls you out as when you were ten years old!?  Talk about a butterflies and hurricane moment!  Of course he’s ten, and there’s still a lot to discover about what this means, but the freedom that comes from being able to spend the bulk of your life, especially the formative years, with a title from the heavens that screams with direction on how to approach every single scenario of your life on earth is straight dope.  Whether it’s homework, soccer practice, raising children, managing a career or saving your marriage.  So what do you do with information like this when you’re ten, or forty for that matter?

As his parents, we recognize that everything Christ is calling him by are in fact all the things he feels tremendous struggle with in his life.  His belief system about himself does not feel good or kind.  He does not walk with peace.  He does not feel like a warrior of anything.  We’ve been praying for peace and kindness in his life for years.  We have spent hours, days and years on our knees for his sense of freedom.  We have spent even more time talking and talking with him about freely giving kindness away.  Why has this been so hard for him?  We’ve questioned our parenting, we’ve questioned his mood, we’ve questioned God.  We’ve raised him with gobs of unconditional love and encouragement,  we’ve tried to demonstrate and live out kindness and grace and peace.  He’s become an incredibly deep, tender and intelligent kid.  What’s more, he’s always had a spiritual understanding far beyond his years (no credit to his Dad or I). So why is it literally like forcing a cat into water to get him to be free with his kindness? He’s not mean, he’s just locked up. I feel like I can almost see a physical presence keeping him afraid of relenting to the identity he’s been called to.  But isn’t that exactly the way the enemy works?  He moves in early to terrorize our minds, shame us, bathe us in insecurity and self doubt over the very things God has named us by.  He’s so subtle though.  Even I’ve been duped, as the Mom.

From a parent’s perspective, you just figure this kind of stuff can be parented out of them, your will against theirs, and eventually they’ll get the picture and hopefully you’ll have raised a polite, moderately authentic human being that can at the very least hold a job and conduct themselves with some manner of grace.  Sure there are plenty of places in your life as a parent where you have to set the limits, draw the boundaries and create the kind of space and information conducive to learning the social norms that keep them from getting beat up on the playground.  But then HOLD UP for just a second! When does it cross over from being just an immature, developing brain to a straight up spiritual stronghold?  That’s when knowing your own identity gets pretty freaking important.

The devil’s not sleeping on the couch.  If he can figure out the name that Jesus calls us by, wouldn’t it make sense that he would do whatever he could to disrupt those things in our lives before we can become effective in them, perhaps as early as we are born? Wouldn’t it be just like him to make us doubt the very things in life that we are called to?  And when you start waging war on his schemes to mess with your true identity, then of course he’s going to pull out all the stops and start introducing thoughts and fears like “God’s not real,” even if you’re only ten years old.

So how do we war?  How do you teach a ten year old that Jesus is real?  You don’t, you let Jesus do that, BUT, you do teach them what their weapons are, and you do go to war on your knees, and you do operate in the identity God has called YOU by.  You aren’t going to convince anyone of anything if you are not yourself living by YOUR true name.

Weapons of Warfare

Just in the last 4 weeks, I have physically watched in my own life, the veil be lifted over my own confusion, my anger, my fear, and my anxiety when I obediently trade it in for my true identity.  By the enemies standards, he is winning when he can keep you distracted battling the human stuff: money, marriage, your body, your time, your fears, your anxiety.

Keeper of Truth is what God calls me by.  It means a lot of things, many of which I’m still learning, but at the foundation Jesus has revealed to me that He has called me out as His daughter to persist in being true- and speak honesty and truth over my own life and the lives of others.  One definition of the word keep is, “to continue or cause to continue in a specified condition, position, or course… or to charge, to continue doing or do repeatedly or habitually.  Boom! There’s my weapon.  When the struggle bus starts rolling in, when I feel the reality of this broken planet, when I see the wars being waged on my children’s lives,  I’m real certain how God wants me to fight.  I fight with an unrelenting position about what is true, not the truths of man, but the truths of Christ.  I do it repeatedly, I do it with charge and I do it with a posture of authority because Christ has given us all His authority to overthrow and demolish strongholds. 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 says:

“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (NIV)

That’s how you teach your children to fight.

I feel like we have front row seats to this revelation of intel in Oliver’s life.  He is shaking up, confusing and paralyzing the enemy as he wars under a new name, under the covering of his true, God-given identity.  The enemy set up camp early, convinced him young that he’s better off quiet, scared, irritable, stuck, and frantic with anxiety.  He has used scare tactics and fed him lies that we cannot and will not be able to parent out of him.  There is no amount of reassuring we can do that has or will EVER convince him or bring him a lasting peace. UNLESS! Unless we know our name too!

Before my feet hit the ground this morning, I listened for Jesus to call my name, to call me out of bed.  “Hey, Keeper of Truth, wake up!  Get up and face this day with a veracity of truth, keep to it, stand in with habit, with sincerity in action, with steadfastness of mind.  This is what I have called you to.  Let me flow through you the living waters of my truth.  Don’t burden yourself with finding the answers.  Keep my truths and adorn your children, your husband, and your life with them”….AND…. I’m up!

Best battle plan EVER.

Now I am learning how to move.  Habitually, repeatedly, steadfastly and sincerely speak truth to Oliver.  Because the truth is, Oliver has been singled out by His Heavenly Father to wage war on these lies, with his own arsenal of weapons sourced from the name he was created for: Kindness, goodness and peace.  The very thing that we struggle with in our own flesh, the very thing that Satan has used to steal, kill and destroy us with, is in fact the very thing that God is using as our training ground – the very thing that will allow us to rise up and wage war on anything that threatens His name, or the name He calls us by.  Oliver is in fact called to be a warrior of the very thing that has kept him stuck and scared. So am I. So are you.  Your deliverance is waiting right next to your obedience to act in your true identity.

I will likely wake up tomorrow morning (yes, in part because of my bladder) tempted to be tired from the battle of the day that hasn’t even begun yet.  But before my feet hit the ground, I will listen.  I will listen for Jesus to call my name, to call me out of bed.  “Hey, Keeper of Truth, WAKE UP!”

‘Sup now, Devil?