What will it feel like to receive a fitting new name from your Creator, Jesus Christ?
When I became a Christian at age 20, the experience was so dramatic, I had an impulse to change my name. My conversion was like how Jesus describes the “pearl of great price”: the person who discovers its value would give up everything to gain it. I wasn’t sure if my current name was still “true” because my past life felt like a throwaway in comparison to the new life I felt.
The Old Name Carries Baggage
I didn’t dislike my name. But I desired to leave behind the feeling that I didn’t belong. My name, my self-image, was strongly tied to the past which was full of uncertainty and insecurity. Families hand down more than genetics. They hand down verdicts. And verdicts, repeated long enough, start to sound like identity (a false one).
Growing up, I felt like I didn’t belong in my own family. I was and still am the “odd person out.” I wanted different things than everyone else — that ambition was the original non-belonging, long before anything I pursued. The “I don’t belong” message became self-fulfilling. I didn’t know what to do with how different I felt. I decided to pursue meaning beyond my family. I reached for something else and that something else turned out to be Jesus.
Decades later, I still cling to the promise that Jesus makes to the one who overcomes: “I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17).
A New Name Doesn’t Erase You
Here’s where it’s easy to misunderstand. When we hear “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), there’s a temptation to discard the self entirely — as if following Christ means annihilating your personality and starting from zero. But that isn’t what denying yourself means. What must be denied are the sinful desires, not the person God made.
The old name can carry baggage. Healing means denying the baggage — the lies — not the personality. My intensity, the drive that made me “different”: those are temperament, part of how God wired me. The lie was the verdict attached to them — you don’t belong. A new name doesn’t erase who I am. It frees who I am from the lies I learned about myself.
Named by the Creator, Not the Stand-In
A common name like “Matt” doesn’t scream, “you have a unique, irreplaceable identity.” But the actual name is not the issue as much as who does the naming.
We all need to have the experience of being named by our Creator rather than by our stand-in earthly parents. My parents were placeholders — doing a job that was never ultimately theirs to finish. Their naming doesn’t bind an identity permanently. Only the Creator’s does.
And look at the pattern. God renames the people He claims. Abram becomes Abraham, “father of many nations,” before he has a single child of promise. Jacob the deceiver becomes Israel, “he strives with God,” on the night he wrestles. Simon the unstable becomes Peter, “rock,” long before he acts like one. In every case, the new name isn’t a description of who they’ve been. It’s a declaration of who they are to Him.
A New Name Only the Two of You Know
Notice something about the white stone: the new name is written on it, “which no one knows except the one who receives it.” This isn’t a public rebranding. It’s intimate — a private language between God and the believer, like a name whispered between lovers that no one else hears. The purpose of the new name isn’t image management. It’s connection and an accurate appraisal.
I still feel the old verdict sometimes. The belonging I long for may not be fully realized this side of heaven. But the stone is already cut, and the name is already written. No childhood experience or misaligned verdict can overrule it. The One who made me will tell me, face to face, who I really am — and I will finally hear my true name from the only voice that gets to decide.
Living Under Your New Name
Whose verdict are you still living under? Get specific: what message did your family, your failures, or your own inner critic hand you — and in what moments do you hear it loudest?
Try this. Write the lie in one sentence: I don’t belong. I’m too much. I’m not wanted. Then write beside it what your Creator has declared over you — not based on what you’ve done, but on who you are to Him: claimed, known, renamed. Read the second sentence aloud.
Living under the new name starts before you ever see the white stone. It starts the moment you stop answering to the old one.
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