Victoria Harris
  • Home
  • About
  • Blogs
    • Adoption & Identity
  • Videos
  • Contact

Identity: Embracing Your New Name

7/25/2017

0 Comments

 
When I was engaged I struggled with the “name changing” decision. Do I keep my last name? Do I completely get rid of it? Do I hyphenate it? I have had my last name for 20-something years. That should count for something, right? How could I completely get rid of it? I earned that name. More people knew me as Victoria Ratliff than would ever know me as Victoria Harris. That was my thought process. It was about me. 
    Now, almost seven years into our marriage, I want to change my name on our checks to read, “Mrs. Billy “Tate” Harris.” But why now? Because I now understand what it means to take on someone else’s name. It means that you belong to that person, fully and completely. 
    When Tate and I got married it was new and exciting. I wanted more than anything to submit to him in every way, but it didn’t happen right off the bat. And, while it still doesn’t happen as much as I would like, my willingness to submit to him in everything, including completely taking on his name and everything that comes with it, gets easier everyday. ​
Picture
Your new name:
When we submit to Christ, God becomes our Father. By doing so, we belong to Him, which includes taking on His name and everything that entails as part of our new identity.  During this transition our image changes. Consider what Paul told the church in Corinth about the resurrection: “The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven” (1 Cor. 15:47-48). In the prior verse he reminds them that first comes the natural (aka, Adam, a man of flesh), then comes the spiritual (aka, Jesus and the Holy Spirit). When we make the decision to be adopted by God as his son or daughter things change. We no longer desire to act on the flesh. Rather, it should be the desire of our hearts to be aligned with God’s heart, that he put on display through His Son, Jesus. 

     This was the problem with the church in Corinth. They claimed to follow Christ, yet plunged themselves into immoral sexual acts (1 Cor. 6:12-20), jealousy (1 Cor. 3:3), quarreling and lawsuits (1 Cor. 6:1-10), boasting (1 Cor. 5:6; 8:1-2; 1:25-31), selfishness and lack of self-control (1 Cor. 10:33-34; 7:5), and worldly company (1 Cor. 15:33-34). Rather than staying as babies nursing their mothers, Paul boldly encourages them to grow into their new identity so they too can eat solid food. He gently and humbly tells them that they are called into fellowship with God’s Son, Jesus Christ, their Lord (1:9) and that they have now have the mind of Christ (2:16). 
    A professor of apologetics at Biola University, Clay Jones (he has a new book coming out next week titled Why God Allows Evil: An Eternal Perspective Theodicy, click here to read an interview with him and McDowell on this new release), calls a group of people who claim to be Christians, but whose life lacks evidence to support it as Chinos: Christians in Name Only. While he was joking (but still a bit serious), it is true! How many of us have been “Christians” for 5-, 10-, or 30 or more years, but still acts as Chinos? It would be better for the church if those people did not claim the name of Christ at all. 
Christian
    So, where did the name Christian, come from? Acts 11:26 says, “The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.” In the first century people were identified as a follower of a specific leader by adding “-ian” to the end of the name. For example, in Mark 3:6 we see the name “Herodians,” which refers to the followers of Herod. Likewise, the first followers of Christ were called Christians. 
    What did it mean to be a Christian? Looking at the the rest of the New Testament what it meant was simple: you lived what the evidence told you. From the perspective of Luke, who chose to “carefully investigate” the eyewitness accounts of Jesus life, death, and resurrection, he opens Acts by saying,

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
   This is only the first of nearly 30 mentioning of the resurrection in the book of Acts. Do you think the apostles would have listened to these commands had it not been true? Would Luke have identified the evidence as “eye witness” accounts of the risen Lord had there been a possibility of any part of the story being fabricated? Highly doubtful. Acts and the books that follow are full of bold men and women who stood up for Jesus and suffered in His sufferings, even to the point of death, without recanting their testimony of what they were firsthand witnesses of. These first Christians were willing to suffer and die to be called a follower of Christ. 
Suffering for the name:
​
     This makes me think about our newly adopted son, Asa. When he said “Yes” to being our son, it meant that he now must embrace all of us. Not just the good. He also gets the bad. The same goes for us. By saying “Yes” to him being our son, that didn’t mean that we got him from that point forward. No. It meant that we got all of him, including the first ten years of his life that we missed. The abandonment, attachment difficulties, loneliness, fear, and rejection as well as the joy, friendships, and stories of people that mothered and fathered him until he was in our arms. All of him is now ours, the good and the bad. 

    Just after the martyrdom of Stephen and the persecution of the church in Jerusalem, God told a man named Ananias to to go to Paul. When Ananias bucked at this command due to Paul’s history of killing the Christians, God says, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”
    Being a part of an earthly family means you rejoice during the graduations, birthdays, weddings, and milestones, but it doesn’t stop there. It also means that you suffer with one another. Consider the death of a family member or a sibling struggling to make the right decisions. 
    The same happens when you are adopted into God’s family. Being a son or daughter of God may mean temporary suffering by natural or moral evil, but you can be sure that it is one thing: temporary. Thankfully, just like Jesus’ Father walked Him through His suffering, He will always walk us through ours. We rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who are mourning.
The Spirit testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children, and if children, also heirs - heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ - seeking that we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.     -Romans 8:16-17
  They didn’t just accept suffering, they embraced it. They understood that Jesus suffered by taking up His cross for us, and that we should also be ready to literally carry our cross just like Jesus! This suffering would be part of our purification “so that we may also be glorified with Him.”
    Being identified as a Christian meant to be a 100% sold out Christ-follower, living a bold life for him, relying on His power to proclaim His name, and being willing to die an excruciating death like Him for His sake. Those first called Christians were true God-glorifiers. Embracing the family name meant fully participating. Are we fully participating? Or do we call ourselves part of the team in hopes of getting a participation trophy when the season is over?
*Reading the entire book of 1 Corinthians in one sitting will help you get the big picture of who God expects you to be as His daughter.*

Author

Victoria Harris holds an M.A. in Christian Apologetics from Biola University.  Victoria is a lover of Jesus, a wife, biological mom of a preschooler and adoptive mom of a tween. She is a former Miss Florida Teen USA and Mrs. Florida United States. Follow her on twitter @VictoriaDHarris, Facebook at www.facebook.com/vdharris or instagram @VictoriaHarrisInsta.

0 Comments

Five Reasons We Know God Wants Christian Women to do Apologetics

7/7/2017

0 Comments

 
I ran across this article tonight and thought it was a fantastic read for all women!
Read the original post.
God has commanded us as women not only to share that we believe in Jesus Christ but also the reasons why. Here are some evidences in scripture that God has called women to learn and share the evidential reasons for believing in Christianity, which is the ministry of apologetics. Think of the five R’s:
​

1. We as women are created as rational beings who are called to love the Lord our God not only with our hearts, but also our souls, and minds (Matthew 22:37). Our trust in Christ is grounded not in blind emotion, but in an intellectual appraisal of evidence that has convinced us of the truth of Christianity and given rise to a reasonable faith. Luke 10:38-42 records Christ’s visit to the home of two women named Mary and Martha. When Martha complained that Mary was a slacker for not helping prepare the meal, Jesus praised Mary for listening to his teaching. Though he likely appreciated Martha’s efforts in the kitchen, we can reasonably infer that he affirmed Mary’s intellectual curiosity and commitment to pursuit of truth.

2. We as women are relational beings who are called to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:39). Our neighbors include people in our spheres of influence, starting with immediate family members. For instance, God urges us to love and respect our husbands (see Ephesians 5). How can apologetics strengthen our marriage? If our husband is a believer, we can affirm the truths to build his faith as well as our own, and help him when he struggles with doubts. What about those of us who are married to unbelieving husbands? When we learn the evidence for our faith, even if our husband is hostile to Christian claims, we can love him while not being shaken in our own faith. We don’t use knowledge as a weapon against him. Instead, we are freed from defensiveness to practice 1 Peter 3:1-4, seeking to live out before our husband a life transformed by Christ so that he “may be won by [her] conduct.” Former atheist and author of The Case for Christ Lee Strobel said his wife became a believer, and the change in the way she treated him and the children was so appealing that he embarked on his own search and eventually trusted Christ.

Another relationship in which apologetics can be helpful is with our children. Titus 2: 5 describes women as “keepers” at home who teach their children. “Keeping” implies watching over or guarding. Apologetics knowledge equips us to watch over and influence our children’s worldviews. Before we can guard our children’s worldviews we must first learn what a worldview is, the evidence that affirms the truth of the Christian worldview, the assertions of other worldviews, and how to respond to those assertions to show that Christianity makes the most sense. That’s apologetics. Then, when our child comes home from school saying her friend is a Hindu, for instance, we can answer when she asks why Hindus have shrines in their homes and Christians don’t.

Our relationships with other women can also become redemptive and edifying, as we seek to introduce unbelieving friends to Christ and to mentor younger women in the faith to mature in their relationship with Christ. Titus 3:2-5 asks us as maturing women to be “teachers of good things” (NKJV) to women coming along behind us. We can’t opt out of this call. Younger women desperately need us to take them under our wings and encourage them to live for Christ in a culture becoming increasingly hostile to Christianity. Finally, women are uniquely equipped to engage unbelieving women in faith conversations. For some groups of women our willingness to engage them is their only hope for hearing about Christ in an understandable way. For example, only Christian women can reach Muslim women who are not comfortable talking to men.

3. We as women are responsible to bear witness of what we have seen and heard regarding Christ’s identity and resurrection, and the numerous evidences for Christianity God has instilled within the created order. According to Mark 16:1-11, women first witnessed the empty tomb and were instructed to go tell others. If Jesus entrusted women with the responsibility for speaking the truth about the single most pivotal event in human history, then we, too, can bear witness. And we can share not only our personal experience with Jesus Christ as the women at the tomb did, but also the historical, scientific, and philosophical evidence provided for us by our loving God. In so doing, we as women fulfill his command to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19-20).

4. We as women are called to be ready to give cogent reasons for our beliefs, even if we must suffer to do so. 1 Peter 3:15-17, a banner scripture for apologetics, tells us to “always beready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear; having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed. For it isbetter, if it is the will of God, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil” (NKJV). It is interesting that in the first seven verses of 1 Peter 3 he addresses first husbands and then wives. Then, in verse eight, which culminates in the command of verses 15-17, Peter says, “Finally, all of you,” including both men and women in his subsequent appeal. So, both men and women are called and honored to participate in Christ’s suffering in defense of the faith.

5. Finally, we as Christian women are to be renewed in the spirit of our minds (Ephesians 4:11-24). We do not have to remain babies in Christ, not understanding the basics of our faith, and being easily swayed. A friend once told me after reading The DaVinci Code that she wished she had never read it because it caused her to doubt. When we fail to renew the spirit of our minds with truth, we are tossed about with every new doctrine that arrives on the scene. Apologetics knowledge grounds our beliefs in strong evidence and makes our faith in Christ the most reasonable response to a God who has saturated the universe with witnesses to his presence and character.

So, when someone asks us why we think God wants women to do apologetics, we can share the five R’s. We can explain that God made women rational and relational beings, endowed us as responsible bearers of the truth, and provided the knowledge with which to ready ourselves and be renewed in our minds so that we share the overwhelming evidence that Christianity is true.
0 Comments

    Author

    Victoria is a wife, mom, ambassador of Jesus, and a lover of all things that involve learning. 

    Archives

    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    September 2016

    Categories

    All
    Apologetics
    Biblical Reliability
    Interviews

    RSS Feed

Blog

 

Videos

 

Question?

 
© COPYRIGHT 2015. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About
  • Blogs
    • Adoption & Identity
  • Videos
  • Contact