What's In a Name? Wk 5 | Holy is His Name

As I said, we are in a series right now where we are talking about the names of God that we encounter in scripture.

Seeing the importance of recognizing when God says certain things about who

he is and that his name is linked to his identity. It's linked to his character.

And these 30 verses are chalk full of names of God. Lord, son of God, Holy

Spirit. Did anyone get that one? Holy Spirit, Jesus, son of the most high. And

it all culminates in this song that Mary sings with names like the mighty one has

done great things for me. It's a fascinating song. It's a song that has

become to be known as the man magnificant and it's spelled magnificat.

So it's not to be confused with a magnificent cat and I have to tell you this this name of

this song. So Jeff and I both have gone gone on to study theology. We preach. It

took us several years and we were super embarrassed when we realized the entire

time that we had been pronouncing it incorrectly. We had been calling it a magnificant,

but it's a magnific. So, you're welcome for that. If you want another piece of really fun information,

the song that Zachariah sings right after that is come to be known as the Benedictus. And both of those titles are

because the first word in the Latin rendition of these songs are that

my soul doth magnify the Lord.

It's interesting within this song that she sings, we not

only hear the name that God gives Mary, from now on all generations will call

me, do you know? Blessed Mary blessed from now on all

generations will call me blessed for the mighty one has done great great things for me. The Lord has given Mary a name

and identity in his kingdom just as he has for each and every one of us. And when we slow down and look at scripture

we see scripture is chalk full. And Mary owns the fact that within God's kingdom

she is blessed. We'll get more to more to that here in a

minute. But we also encounter in this song a fascinating repetition of a

unique aspect of God's identity that's first spoken about by the angel in verse

35. So, if you have your Bibles open from our life in the word time, keep them open because I'm going to reference

several things that we can see here in the text. And I want you to have it open

so you can follow along if you would like. But if you look at verse 35, there

is this encounter that the angel has with Mary. And the angel says to Mary in

verse 35, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high

will overshadow you." So the holy one to be born will be called the son of God.

Okay, that is my NIV translation. This is the translation that I use pretty

frequently. You can see it's duct taped together. The NIV is a pretty middle-of the road translation, which means that

it kind of falls in between translating word for word versus thought for thought. But if you take a look, this is

a Jewish annotated Bible. Verse 35, this encounter with the angel, the angel says

to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Therefore,

the child to be born will be called holy,

the son of God. And then Mary in her song reiterates,

"From now on the all generations will call me

blessed, for the mighty one has done great things for me. Holy is his name.

And so whether your English translation capitalizes a title of God or maybe your

translation like the NIV just says the holy one of God, the holy one to be

born. We can kind of read over that, but the actual phrase, the actual

terminology is God is to be called holy. And then Mary reiterates it. Holy is his

name. I'm curious as as if as as you were counting names of God, did anyone

get that one? Holy. No. We kind of read right past it

because at least in mine, it's not the name of God isn't capitalized. But when we talk about the names of God,

we're talking about his character. It's interesting. Mary's reiteration of

the fact that God is to be named holy is no joke. It's his identity. It's who he

is. God is holy. And then after that, the angel makes an even more bizarre

claim in that she then link the angel then links the name of God to what comes

before and what comes after. So if you look at it in the original word for word

translation, the Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of the most high will overshadow you. Therefore,

the child to be born will be holy.

And then it links to what comes after, which is the story of Elizabeth and the

fact that she was barren and is now with child.

Huh? So, if we're reading this correctly, the

idea of God's holiness is linked not only to his miraculous birth, but the

idea of God's holiness is linked to the miraculous period.

How do seemingly impossible acts of God, like a child born through the Holy

Spirit and a child born to a woman in her old age, linked to the holiness of

God? Why is he therefore to be called

holy? I told this story a handful of years ago. So, if you were with me the first

time I told it, you can take a nap. I'll wake you up in a few minutes. But a handful of years ago, I shared a story

of when Jeff and I first went on the mission field. And it was kind of a miraculous story in and of itself. It

was 2007. It was right when the economy was tanking. and we had wanted to become

missionaries and move to Vienna, Austria, which meant that we were actually asked by the organization to

try to reduce the amount of debt that we carried into the experience with us so

that we weren't putting a huge burden on those who were coming alongside of us. So like, okay, well, what do we do with

our house? Let's try to sell our house. 2007.

In 60 days, I think two people looked at it and it was kind of getting a little

bit like, what are we going to do here? Miraculously, our sending church, our sister church in Nampa, actually ended

up renting our house because they were bringing up a missionary couple to start a Spanish-sp speakaking service in that

congregation. And so we found out really quick turnaround, we're not going to sell the house. We're going to rent the

house and we have two days to get out of the house. And I will tell you, we came back from

the mission field and we were unpacking boxes of literal trash because we were packing so fast that we were just

throwing stuff in boxes because we had to get out of the house. And it was that

weekend. We had two days. We had stuff packed up. We were trying to get it onto a truck. A friend of ours had lent us

his truck and we loaded that thing up. We had stuff hauled out into our grass in our front yard and it is I mean we're

rolling on like 10:00 at night on the second night and it's starting to get a little tight and he goes to start the

truck so we can make our first round to our storage unit and the truck doesn't start

and he's like, "Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. Um uh we'll figure this out." And so he pops the hood, he messes around

with it. He's like, "Okay, I think it's the battery. Let's go grab a battery. Jeff and him run to Walmart. They grab a

battery. They come back. They put it in. Doesn't work. So, at 11:30 at night, the

night before, we're supposed to be out of the house. We unload everything off of the truck. We place it in our front

yard and then we stand there and look at each other like, "Now, what are we going

to do? I don't know what to do." And I wouldn't say panic. It wasn't a panic

that I was feeling, but it was definitely a sense of, "Yeah, I don't have an answer." And I remember

distinctly, the rest of our stuff was in the yard. The rest of it was in our living room. And I'm looking at all

these boxes of stuff. It's 11:30 at night. And I remember it was almost more

of a wish than a prayer. But I just said, "Lord, we need a moving truck."

And then I kind of went on and I was sorting more stuff and cleaning and two minutes later we hear this giant

and we're our house is right at the edge of the neighborhood and I walk out in the front yard and this giant moving

truck huge rounds the corner into our neighborhood pulls up to our house

stops. window rolls down. Hey guys,

it's one of Jeff's roommates who had lived with him in that house before we

got married. And he even even though they hadn't connected in a while, he had

bought a house on the other side of the neighborhood and had just found out that his work was relocating him and had

given him a moving truck for him to take home that night and then pack up his truck the next day and move it.

and he just so happened, even though his house was on the other side of the neighborhood, to decide to go through

the neighborhood at 11:30 at night with the moving truck.

And so he rolls the window down. He's like, "Do you guys need a truck?"

Um, yeah, I'll never forget it. I will never ever

forget it. And I look back on it in light of this reality, in the light of what I read in

the gospel story of Jesus's birth, and I'm left with the question, how did his

holiness, the aspect of his character, make the seemingly impossible scenario

in my life a reality? Why is that the aspect of his character

linked to the miraculous? Why does the angel then say shortly after that the

child who is going to be born to Elizabeth who was considered to be barren for with God nothing is

impossible. It all comes down to how we choose to

understand and claim the idea of the word holy.

If you look at holy in the Greek text in the in the way it's used here, the old

Greek word signifies an object of awe or it can instill like aversion when

something is so awe inspiring, so out there and different that you actually

have to kind of look away but it denotes a state and not an

action. And then you trace it even further back to the Hebrew, the original

Hebrew. And what's fascinating, the word kadosh, meaning holy, set aart, sacred, pure, or

distinct, used for God, for people, and for places. It's an odd word. And it's

an odd word because there's nothing quite like it in the original Hebrew. In

fact, scholars and theologians and pastors have struggled throughout the

years to properly define the idea of God's holiness because there's not

really anything else to compare it to. In the Hebrew, the only way to

understand the word holy in the original language, the only way is to know its opposite,

which is really interesting. It's a really interesting way to define a word. And the opposite of holy

means common or profane.

In other words, the essential nature that belongs to the sphere of God's

being and activity is distinct from the common or the profane.

that which is uncommon, that which is totally unique unto its own, unlike any

other, holy. There are only nine places in the entire

New Testament that speak of Jesus himself being holy. And one of them is

here in verse 35. He is holy. And that holiness is linked to his birth. And

it's linked to the idea of the impossible being made possible. It is

only that which is unique unto its own

that can address what is common in all of us. The desire to put ourselves on the

throne. Ha el ha kadosh the holy god.

I love what Isaiah 43 says about the father. It says, "Now this, this is what

the Lord says. He who created you, oh Jacob, he who formed you, oh Israel, fear not, for I have redeemed you. I

have summoned you by name, you are mine. I have summoned you by name." So again,

in our our Jewish lens, our our ancient Neareastern lens, if you didn't have a

name in the ancient Neareastern world, you didn't exist. So God is not saying, "I'm summoning you by the name that I g

that your parents gave you at birth." He's saying, "I'm summoning you by the very core of who you are, your identity,

you and you are mine. And when you pass through the waters, I will be with you.

And when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep you away. When you walk through the fire, you will not be

burned. The flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord your God, the

Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

That's a good spot for an amen. Yeah.

The idea of our identity being linked because he calls us by name and he is

wholly other. He is wholly unique. He is able to do what no one else can do. And

there are echoes of this in Mary's song. I like reading her song. I like it

because there's only one verse. If you look at it, there's only one verse,

verse 48. For he has been mindful of the humble

state of his servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed. For

the mighty one has done great things for me. There's only one verse that fixates

on the personal benefit of being the mother of Jesus.

Everything else is linked to God, who he is. And even her name that she declares

and that is called out in his kingdom, even that is spoken about in pointing

people back to Jesus. We're doing a lot of identity work in our disciplehip group these days,

and we have to be reminded often that sorting out who we are in the kingdom is

not for our benefit. It's for the settling of our souls

because we are souls ill at rest. And we grasp and we struggle and we fight and

we grieve because we don't understand what about the what the Lord says about who we are

and we try to operate out of our boundaries. But more importantly, when we understand

who we are, it's what truly points people to Jesus. It's what changes a culture. Elizabeth's

baby wept or wept leapt in her womb. Elizabeth's baby, John the Baptist, as

we read about later in Luke 1 and in Mark chapter 1, understood who he was in

the kingdom of God. And he made it pretty clear that that was so that God could be glorified.

This wonderful, holy, set aart God. I also like Elizabeth's song or Mary's

song, excuse me, because when she shares what happens within her, what the Lord

has done, she cannot help but break out in joyous praise for what God has done

for her. for God's salvation, his greatness, his holiness, his mercy. They

all go hand in hand. You look at all of these and you can't have one without the

other. He has saved us. The Holy One of God has saved us. As she has said, "My

spirit rejoices in God, my savior." And that it's his mighty acts. It's the

El Shadai. It's the God who acts in history who has done great things for

us. And what are those great things? He's shown us his mercy.

He's acted in strength in history. He deals with the proud. He lifts up the

lowly and the hungry. He helps people stay true to his word. All of these

things are things she declares in the song. And Luke, more than any other gospel writer, declares that God came

for the least and the lost and the lowly. that he came in his holiness.

El Shadai, salvation, the mighty one, mercy. All of these are declared in the

humble praise of Mary because they are all facets of the same jewel.

That God can be all of these at once. That he's the mighty one, that he's

Lord, that he's the Holy Spirit. And that jewel

is called holy because it is set apart from everything

else around it. I don't know about you, but some of

these things I read on this passage from Isaiah seem pretty impossible.

Walking through fire and not getting burned. Walking through a river and not getting swept away. having a moving

truck show up at your house at midnight. Having $40,000 show up the day that

you're trying to plant a church and you have a place and the Lord says, "I know what you need." The day that someone who

is past childbearing years discovers that she's pregnant. That having a child

through the Holy Spirit who can save the world as a free gift to the world, all

of that is unique and utterly impossible. except God.

It is God's holiness that allows him to operate completely differently than

anything else. And it's his holiness that he offers to us. First Peter 1:16,

"Be holy, therefore, because I am holy."

And you look at verses 51- 53, if you still have your Bible

open, Mary declares, "He has performed mighty deeds with his arm. He has

scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has

lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things, but he has sent the rich away empty." These verses are

fascinating because they are spoken in what is called the aortist past tense.

You're welcome for that. It's a fancy theological grammatical term for saying

that she is looking forward in a spirit of prophecy and counting what God will

do as so certain that she can speak of it in the now as having already been

accomplished. Did you catch that? She's saying he's performed mighty deeds

with his arms. He's going to do it. I'm so certain he's doing it. I'm declaring it already done.

He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He's brought down rulers. He's lifted up the humble. She's

so certain that he can do what he can do because he's so unlike any other that

she's speaking of things as if they have already happened. Do I have that kind of

courage? I don't know that I do. And I have to tell you, in the last

year, as God has spoken very clearly to our church about what he's going to do in our midst over and over and over

again, I have been really quick to say, "Yeah, God is going to do that thing.

However, do I have the confidence to say, "My God

is so good and so holy and so unlike anything else around him and so good and

so creative that I'm going to speak as if he's already done what he said he's going to do."

That's a courage that Mary exemplifies that's offered to us when we understand

what it means to name God as holy to speak of what God is going to do

to speak of Jehovah Madesh. That's why I can look back at the

miraculous stories in my life and I need to learn to link them to his holiness

because if I don't then his holiness gets swapped out for attempts at

perfection. His holiness gets swapped out for my

very tenuous, very self-reliant, very unpredictable,

very self-absorbed throne.

And I think in our world, we have lost the wonder and the awe of the holiness

of God. And our culture, especially in America,

has done one of two things. It has either pendulum swung so far over into

wanting people to be comfortable that we're going to say, "Yes, do whatever you need to be comfortable at your own

discretion and wants and needs." that we're not going to push you or

challenge you or we've gone so far in the other way that we've said your whole

ability to earn the kingdom is based on what you can do. Have you earned it?

Have you done enough? And that is because if we do not understand the

holiness of God, then what comes next has to be determined by me.

And I'm not very good at determining what should come next. In fact, I'm pretty bad at it.

And I think that sometimes the exhaustion we feel,

the sense of control we feain, the fear that we allowed to dictate our

reality is because we've lost a sense of a God who can do the miraculous

of the holiness, the awe, the uncommonness

of God. He is holy, completely, uniquely

trustworthy. There's none like him.

And yet sometimes I don't let him surprise me anymore

because I've come to believe that he's just like any other person who will eventually let me down.

So I'll rely on my perfection to get me by.

There's this book that I read years ago. There's been several books in my journey

that have had a pretty profound impact on me. Um, and this is one of them. It's a a prayer book called Blessing Your

Spirit. And she talks about praying the names of God. And when it comes to Yahweh or Jehovah Madesh, the holy one

of God, she says this. She says, "Yet his plan of redemption called for Jesus

to take your sins on himself and die to make you holy in him."

You cannot make yourself holy. No matter how hard you try or how perfectly you you live, your perfection is not

holiness. Jesus was the only perfect one who ever

walked this earth. And he has offered that freely because he's the only one who can. Why? Because

he's holy. He's so unlike any other. That jewel is so unlike anything else

that exists. He's the only one who can say to us, I can offer that to you, too.

In me, that we need to be challenged in the way

that we live. that there is a challenge to the

complacency that Western Christians have all too often gotten very comfortable with. Not

because what we do earns our salvation, but because over and over and over and

over and over again in scripture when people encounter the holiness and the awe of God, it evokes response in them.

It evokes change. It invokes wonder. As God has revealed himself more and more

throughout history, we can find that the names that we encounter in the Bible are not stand alone. He can't be just

without being merciful. He cannot be holy without acting mightily in ways

that we cannot. Did you catch that? He can't be holy unless he can act mightily

in ways that we cannot. As the people of God experience the

revelation of his name, his identity in the story, so do we get to experience

more and more of who he is when we choose to take the journey. And we are meant to be changed by it.

Remarkably, however, he also chooses to dwell amongst those whom he has redeemed.

They are sanctified or made holy by God's manifesting himself to them, drawing them into a special relationship

with himself and making provision for their sinfulness. The holy people of God

are then called to live in a way that demonstrates the reality of their relationship with God and with one

another. The notion of a holy God among a holy people in a holy place is the

enduring esqueological hope found in scripture. a holy God among a holy

people in a holy place. We are challenged

to confront the reality of a God who is uncommon and unique.

We are challenged with a God who can do the miraculous and it's meant to change us from the

inside out. This weekend we're hosting a revival living within boundaries.

So that that title living within boundaries came from a prompt from what we are witnessing and hearing in the

lives of our people. A sense of depletion because everything around us

demands our perfection. Be be the perfect parent. Be the perfect

steward of your finances despite a difficult econom e economic season. Get

perfect grades. Never mess up at work. Manage 18 different sports your teams

are playing all at once and do it perfectly. Never need. Pursue the most out of everything. Be your own person,

but do so with the standards that I set for you. Be perfect.

That's not sustainable. God has created boundaries that we are

meant to live in based off of who he says we are and what he has for us in

his kingdom. And the only way that we can accept those boundaries is if we

come to the realization of the holiness of God.

That he's the only one who can do the things that he has done.

I cannot be all things to all people. And so we're going to talk about what

does it mean for us to surrender. We're going to talk this weekend about

what it means for us to receive. And we're going to talk about Yahweh,

our Jehovah Gyra, the one who provides. We are not required to be humanly

perfect. That's an earthly shadow of a heavenly reality. We are invited through Jesus, the only

Jesus, and only through Jesus to be holy and set apart through him. He who is

himself holy, we too are to be holy because he is holy. And this requires us

to stop. It requires us to grapple with the aspects of himself in order for us

to change the way we think. What if at the start of 2026, we place

ourselves in a position of surrender to receive from the one who is holy so that

we can stop pretending to be perfect and so that when we do so, we can experience

more and more of his character in our lives through the coming year. What if we're willing to stop and reorder some

things so that we can see what he has already uniquely done for us out of his own

holiness and live within those boundaries?

What if we choose to live as if peace in the midst of this life is actually

possible? That's what we're grappling this with this weekend. It's my prayer right now.

And the only way we can do it is if we begin to say yes Lord, I am going to

claim that you are holy. So I want to close in this prayer

just as it's very similar to the prayer that Mary prayed actually,

but I'm going to pray it over us as a way to almost set the stage for what he's going to do this weekend.

And so I'm going to say my child just because I can't say every single person's name in this room, but please

fill in your own name. We're going to close with this prayer. You can close

your eyes if you would like. Can listen if you would like. My child,

I bless you with knowing your holy father. I bless you with knowing how his

holiness is counted to your credit by the death of Jesus on the cross.

I bless you with knowing that nothing you ever do can make him love you less or love you more.

I bless you with freedom from your own perfectionism and the perfectionism of

others. Because through your father's eyes, he sees you as perfect and and as

perfect in his beloved son. I bless you with joy in holiness. Our culture does

not associate joy with holiness. But God says in his word that joyful shouting and singing are part of the celebration

of who he is. I bless you with celebrating the beauty of his holiness

and the glory of your holy one who accepts you completely and calls forth

the best in you. I bless you with receiving the truth

that your father treats you with special care because you are set apart to belong

to him. I bless you with the keen consciousness that you are set apart for

him, his purposes, for his pleasure and to his glory.

I bless you with knowing deeply in your spirit that you are clean, that you are

dedicated, that you are consecrated to God. I bless you with freedom from anything that would make you unusable

for your father's glory. I bless your spirit with being reserved exclusively

for heart's devotion and life's affection to your holy father. I bless you with appreciation that your father

knows you by name and will change the course of rivers and the nature of flames if necessary to keep his holy

promises to be with you. I bless you with freedom from fear

because of his guarantee that nothing can destroy you. I bless you with the

power and authority of his names by which he identifies himself as your God,

the holy one, your savior. I bless you in the name of Jehovah, Jehovah M.

Cadesh. May God bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you and be

gracious to you. And as we scatter out into the community until we gather again as a family, may the holy God turn his

face towards you and give you his peace. And all God's people said, "Amen." The names of God. It's

fascinating. Join us this weekend. I'm excited. God bless you. Have a great week. We'll see you real soon.

You are

worth