Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Do you know your Secret Name?

One of the unexpected highlights from attending the recent Igniting Souls Conference was being given my Secret Name.  What is a Secret Name?  Have I joined a cult?  No, Your Secret Name is the name granted to you by the One who made you.  In his book Your Secret Name: Discovering Who God Created You to Be author Kary Oberbrunner calls us to stop accepting the world’s labels and start wrestling with God to discover our true identity.

During the Friday evening session Kary Oberbrunner and David Branderhorst led us through an exercise where we listed our given names.  Our given names are the names we inherit while living life in this world.  Some of mine are Son, Barak, Child of God, Babe (just to Victoria), Provider, and Not Enough.  It’s the last one that stood out to me as we went through the exercise of reviewing our given names and choosing the ones that have held us back in life.

One of the most important points of the session was that you and I can never outperform our own self-image.  Did you get that?  Our self-image limits our performance!

Another important point from the session was that you and I won’t find Eden (the place where we can live in a state of happiness) by what we DO or who we KNOW.  Don’t we often tend to try to find our worth by what we DO or who we KNOW?

As Kary and David related the story of Jacob wrestling with God (see Genesis 32:22-31) the practical application really hit home for me.  You see, we make a choice in every situation, every day, whether we are going to choose our way -or- God’s way.

At the end of the session as I sat and listened to live worship music and waited on the small still voice of God I heard Him whisper my Secret Name…Redeemed.





Would you like to learn your Secret Name?

2 comments:

Kirsten said...

Barak - thank you for beautifully distilling that special session at #ISC14. Life-changing.

Barak Strickland said...

Kirsten, thanks for stopping by and reading. Sorry we didn't meet during the conference. Maybe next time.