The First General Rule states:
It is therefore, expected of all who continue therein that
they shall continue to evidence their desire of salvation, first, by doing no
harm, by avoiding evil of every kind, especially that which is most generally
practiced, such as The taking of
the Name of God in vain
The first evil which
is most generally practiced on Wesley’s list is The taking of the Name of God in
vain.
This happens to be #3 on God’s top 10 list of thou shalt nots (Exodus 20; Deuteronomy
5). But it’s so common now (so generally practiced) that most of us
don’t even flinch. Christians do it,
too.
When we exclaim, “Jesus! Good Lawd! OMG, ”we use God’s name with grammatical irreverence. When we use His name as an adverb for the
degree of damn, as an interjection to express our emotion, or as an expletive or
filler word to demonstrate our lack of vocabulary and imagination, it’s
disrespectful and grammatically incorrect.
There’s also conversational vanity.
“A son honors his father, And a servant
his master. If then I am the Father, Where is My honor? And if I am a Master,
Where is My reverence?” Says the Lord of hosts to you priests who despise My
name.
Yet you say, “In what way have we
despised Your name?” (Malachi 1:6)
God is real and He hears our prayers
(Psalm 65: 2). When you yell, “Jesus
Christ,” the actual living Jesus Christ hears you. Being God transcendent and omnipresent, He
can handle all of the prayers in the universe all at once; but ----- you ever
have somebody call your name and after you stop what you’re doing and leave
where you are to respond they say, “Oh.
Nothing”? You know how
irritating that is? Now multiply that by
7 ½ billion.
God is real. If you’re going to call Him, have something
to say. Just basic conversational
courtesy.
It’s common to take the name of God in
vain grammatically conversationally and deceptively.
The 9th Commandment is “You shall not bear false witness against
your neighbor;” (Exodus 20:16) or, as we often paraphrase, “Thou shalt not LIE.”
Now check this out.
The Hebrew word translated vain or in vain in the 3rd
Commandments (Exodus 20:7; Deuteronomy 5:11) is the same word rendered false in the 9th Commandment.
To take the name of the Lord in vain is
to lie ---- and put your lie on God. It’s
to be so vain that you speak for God what God hasn’t spoken.
When you declare and decree and prophesy that sowing a $200
seed in your service, or ordering the anointed bottle of holy water with the
Dasani label scraped off, or liking and sharing that picture of stacks of $100
bills with a photo-shopped White Jesus in the background will force God to give
them a blessing---- you are taking God’s name in vain.
And the Lord said to me, “The prophets prophesy lies in My
name. I have not sent them, commanded them, nor spoken to them; they prophesy
to you a false vision, divination, a worthless thing, and the deceit of their
heart.” (Jeremiah 14:14)
How many times do you have to NOT
receive what they declared and decreed before you stop replying, “I receive that,
in Jesus name”?
And if you say in your heart, ‘How shall we know the word
which the Lord has not spoken?’—when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord,
if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which
the Lord has NOT spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall
not be afraid of him. (Deuteronomy 18: 21-22)
Make up motivational stories if you want to, but leave
Jesus’ name out of it.
Grammatically
Conversationally
Deceptively
And (last one) relationally.
I am a child of God. I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I’m a servant
of the Lord, indwelled by the Holy Spirit. I wear the Lord’s name as a token of
identity, purpose, and spiritual authority.
But, I have these little quirks, these
habits, these tendencies to do the evil that I don’t want to do. I have a sin nature. You do, too.
But, if I’m going to call myself by His name then I can’t let what comes naturally define
me. I’m supposed to be a different.
Therefore, if anyone is in
Christ, he is a new creation;
old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. (2 Corinthians
5: 17)
So, I struggle. I wage an internal war against my flesh. And if I fall, I don’t use His name as an
excuse. No. His name on my life compels me to humble
myself, and pray and seek His face, and turn from my wicked ways (2 Chronicles
7: 14)
We can’t just go, “Mmm. Nobody’s perfect” It would be dishonoring the
Name we bear. We would be like the
people Isaiah and Jesus confronted.
These people
draw near to Me with their mouth, and honor Me with their lips, but their heart
is far from Me. And in vain they
worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ ” (Matthew 15: 1-3, 7-9, referencing Isaiah 29: 13)
We can’t do that. I know
everybody else does. But we can’t. Not if His name means as much as it should.
---Anderson T. Graves II is a writer, community organizer and
consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.
Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of
Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;
executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization
(SAYNO); and director of rural
leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).
Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
#Awordtothewise
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