I was raised in what is called The Sacred Name Movement.  The only names we could use as we were growing up to refer to “God” or “Jesus” was their Hebrew names “Yahweh or “Yahshua”.  We did not pronounce the titles “God” or “Lord” or the Greek translation of Yahshua, the name “Jesus”  because they were all considered to be of “pagan” origin and were not their real names but inferior titles.  My own name, Rebekyah, which contains the Hebrew name “Yah” is from this origin.

There was something about the Hebrew language that was considered sacred and holy in itself that was subtly emphasized  in this religion. If something could be translated into Hebrew instead of spoken in English or another language it was much more acceptable.  Because of this, among those who are involved in this movement you will still see a lot of words and names  translated into Hebrew and a lot of words avoided if they were believed to have their origins from a pagan origin… as most all other languages were.

In addition to having to pronounce the correct name of God as a condition of salvation, there were various Old Testament Jewish laws and traditions that we also had to keep.  We didn’t eat pork. Our Sabbath was on Saturday on which we did not work, buy or sell but spent most of the day singing and reading the bible except for short breaks when we could play outside. We kept the Old Testament Holy Days, Passover, Feast of Unleavened Bread, Feast of Tabernacles and so on….  We didn’t celebrate the Christian holidays Christmas or Easter.

I can remember as a child my desk being moved outside the classroom door to a corner away from everyone else since I could not participate in such celebrations for Christmas and Easter.  Every once in a while there was another child’s mom, one in particular, who would remember me and would bring me a special cupcake without all the holiday decorations on it, an ordinary coloring page or craft instead of the holiday centered ones and a specially designed bag of candy and goodies just so that I could remain included and not feel so left out and have to leave the room.  Today I am so thankful for her grace and thoughtfulness.

I use to think my upbringing was bizarre but in hindsight I can see it really wasn’t so bizarre. There were some bizarre things in my childhood, but the fact that we worshipped a name,  a tradition, a language, a set of rules instead of a person, really wasn’t as bizarre as I once thought it was.  The person of God and Christ are replaced with these items everyday by Christian’s and other religions.  Sometimes instead of worshipping the person, we worship a habit, a tradition, one particular truth over all others, a particular doctrine, a denomination, a ministry, a particular way of doing something, and we totally miss the person because of it. These are our gods, not Jesus Christ.  When we hold up these items to the exclusion of everything else as we idolize them and make them ultimate rulers in our lives and try to get others to bow down to them also.  When we catch ourselves doing this, we are no longer worshiping a person, Jesus Christ, or seeking a relationship with God the Father, instead we are worshiping and seeking something else.

In The Sacred Name Movement, we held a name high, one truth high and made it sacred above all else but totally missed the person who wore it.  That always surprised me looking back. How could I have missed Him? It was almost as if we had fallen in love with His shoelaces and that was it.  There was still so much of Him to be known and revealed but we never looked beyond what we already knew which was very little and mostly out of context. I didn’t know Him at all.

I didn’t meet Him until after I met my husband, Tim, who introduced me to Jesus, Yahshua, by helping me see the person behind the name and taught me to look up to Him, to read the bible for what it says alone and not  according to what everyone else around me believed or taught. Tim showed me who Jesus was and talked to me about grace, which was so contradictory to what I believed.  I was all about good behavior. If you wanted to go to heaven, if you wanted to please Yahweh, you had to be good. It was simple. Grace didn’t make any sense to me then and seemed unfair and unjust,  but that was only because I still saw myself as a good person and  didn’t see my own need for grace before God.

Tim  was relentless. He would continually challenge me not to believe what anyone told me, not even him, but to go to the bible, the word of God and read it for myself, read the New Testament and see what it said and taught. I borrowed Tim’s pagan KJV version Christian bible and read it along side my Holy Name Bible just to be sure they matched. As I read through the New Testament it was like reading the bible for the first time. I was 20 at this time. I had read the bible several times during my life already.  I considered myself very familiar with it, even more knowledgable then most having studied it since childhood and grown up in such a religious home.  As a child, my mother would have all of us line up and sit down as a family, taking turns reading from the bible every evening for an hour religiously and then all day on Sabbaths except for short play breaks. Yet here I was reading it again and it really was as if I was reading and comprehending it for the very first time. (Years later my older sister would have the same baffling experience, to which I could only reply, I know; it was like reading it for the first time for me too.)

After reading all the way through the New Testament because I couldn’t just stop with one book, everything needed to reread and re-examined, I understood that Jesus did die for my sins and because He died He taught grace to all who believed on Him. (John 3:16, Romans 10:10) This truth was so thick through out the scripture and so obvious that I wondered how I ever missed it before. How had my mother missed it?  How had my grandmother missed it? How had my brothers and sisters missed it?  God had opened my eyes.  I once was blind but now I saw.

But seeing and accepting are two different things. I have to confess although I saw grace through faith in Jesus Christ was God’s way of salvation and I knew it to be true, I could not immediately accept it. I didn’t know how to accept it. I knew Yahshua was the Savior. I had known that my whole life.  But whenever my fiance Tim, mentioned his name, I would suddenly start crying. Something was wrong.  I had no confidence in my salvation.  No trust in Him. I knew who Yahshua was, believed He was the Son of God, didn’t mind calling Him Jesus but that did not save me.  I see now that it was a simple head knowledge I had then. Knowledge and truth can not save anyone. I wish they could. I use to think they could, especially after I was saved. I told everyone what I knew. I presented them with the truth and I thought that would be enough if they only heard the truth, because it had made such a huge difference to me the first time I had heard, but I soon learned Jesus alone saves. He may and often does use truth and knowledge as tools of light to draw us and convict us, but He alone saves and in His own time and not mine.

I actually wrestled with the idea of being saved by grace alone through faith seven years before I could accept it.  One evening it clicked like a light bulb and although I didn’t completely understand it, I knew it was true. This was a different kind of knowing then I had ever known before. This was no longer head knowledge. This was deeper and some would call heart knowledge. I only know that at that moment I knew that it was by grace we are saved, through faith – and this was a gift of God, it was not by works so that no one can boast. ( Ephesians 2:8-9) This is what the bible said and taught and I had to accept it.   God said it, I believed it and that was it.  It was settled. Those were my thoughts.  From that moment on, I had found a saving faith. I no longer doubted my salvation.  To doubt my salvation would be to doubt God Himself, to doubt His word and everything that the New Testament taught. I trusted God. I trusted in Jesus. I knew the bible was God’s promised word. I knew I had no other hope of salvation but Him.   Blessed Assurance there is nothing like it.

This was the beginning of our relationship.  Soon after I would be baptized for the 4th or 5th time,  for the final time into the name of Jesus.  But that’s another story…