The Name Under the Lanyard

For the volunteer who has answered a hundred questions today and can't answer this one.

You've been on the door since half past seven, and you've been good at it.

You've found four people's seats, fixed a jammed printer with a biro, and talked a woman with a pushchair through a fire exit she wasn't meant to use. Everybody's had a lanyard. Everybody's had a smile. You've been the person the room runs on, and nobody's had to ask you twice for anything.

Then a man in his sixties picks up a check-in card, reads it properly the way almost nobody does, and looks up at you with the pen still capped. "This line here. Affiliation. What do I put if I don't have one anymore?"

And you, who have answered everything all morning, find that you've got nothing.

Because you can't tell him what you'd put either. You know exactly what you believe. You've known since you were twenty four. What you don't know is how to say it in front of the eleven people queuing behind him without starting something you'd then have to finish.

You carry a name older than the line on that card, and it was never issued by a desk. The written Word records it being given in a trading city before any later name existed, and the Holy Spirit keeps it live in your mouth today rather than leaving it in the account.

What a Morning of Good Answers Doesn't Prepare You For

The strange part is that the hard question was the easy one.

The printer, the fire exit, the seat numbers: those all had answers you could give at normal speed without checking who was listening. This one has an answer too, and you can feel it sitting in your chest, and it won't come out at the front of a queue.

That isn't doubt. It's the learned reflex of somebody who's watched one word cool a friendly room too many times. You've got a version for church people, a version for work, a shorter version for your sister's husband. You've been maintaining all three for years without ever calling it work.

It is work, though. It's the quiet, continuous labor of translating the truest fact about you into whichever dialect the room can take. Nobody asked you to take that job on. You just noticed one day that you had it.

A Word Given in a City Full of Strangers

There's a city in the account called Antioch, a long way north of Jerusalem, crowded with traders and people who weren't from there.

Believers scattered by trouble arrived and started speaking about Jesus to Greeks, which hadn't been planned and hadn't been agreed anywhere. A great many of them trusted Him. Barnabas came up to look at it, and the account says that when he saw what was happening he was glad. He went to find Saul, brought him back, and the two of them taught in that city for a full year.

The closing line of the verse reads:

And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.Acts 11:26 (KJV)

Nobody issued that word. There was no council, no founding document, no meeting where believers settled what they ought to be known as. Neighbors made it up out of the only name those people kept saying.

You're named for whose you are before anybody prints a line for which sort you are. Scripture hands that name to disciples who never applied for it, and the Holy Spirit keeps the description current in you rather than historical.

The Oldest Name Was Never Issued to Anybody

Here's what I'd take out of that hall if I could carry only one thing.

A lanyard is issued. Somebody prints it, somebody hands it over, and somebody has the authority to ask for it back at the end of the day. That's what makes it a lanyard rather than a name. Every word that gets issued can be withdrawn by whoever issued it.

The word given at Antioch wasn't issued by anyone. There's no office it came from and no desk that could take it back, because it wasn't a credential in the first place. It was a description, made in the street, by people watching how a group of ordinary workers lived when nothing was at stake.

That's why the man at your desk can lose an affiliation and not lose this. His membership was issued. His belonging wasn't.

You hold a name that no desk issued, so no desk anywhere can ask for it back. The written Word gives it as something observed rather than granted, and the Holy Spirit is the one producing the resemblance that got observed.

I'm Not Asking You to Hand Anything In

Let me say this plainly, because there's a version of this message that would hurt you and I won't write it.

The name your own church gave you isn't a corruption of anything, and I'm not asking you to take it off. Somebody in that tradition loved Christ at real cost long before you arrived, and part of the reason you know His name is that they did.

This isn't a replacement for it. It's the neck the lanyard hangs on. If this word ever became one more affiliation to print on a card, it would have turned into the very thing it describes the absence of, and I'd rather it went unsaid.

You can wear the later name and stand on the older one, because keeping both costs you neither. Scripture sets the Antioch name underneath every later name without canceling a single one, and the Holy Spirit keeps it load bearing instead of competitive.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Jubilee This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.