God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become

by John Mark Comer

I would argue that we need to get back to calling God by his name. I think the gradual shift from calling God “Yahweh” to using the title “the LORD” says something about the human condition. For all our talk about a “personal relationship with Jesus,” there’s a part of us that’s scared of intimacy with God. We see the fire and smoke up the mountain, and we shrink back in fear.

Jesus took this even one step further. He taught us to call God “Father”—the most intimate relational name there is. As one poet so eloquently said, God “waits to be wanted.”16 He’s aching for a relationship with you.

in Jesus, we see the Creator God’s glory—his presence and beauty—like never before. In Jesus, Yahweh becomes a human being.

God is more of a friend than a formula.

Prayer is what Moses did with God in the tent. What Jesus did with the Father in Gethsemane. It’s brutally honest, naked, and vulnerable. It’s when your deepest desires and fears and hopes and dreams leak out of your mouth with no inhibition. It’s when you talk to God with the edit button in the off position and you feel safe and heard and loved. It’s the kind of relational exchange you can’t get enough of.

Prayer can move the hand of God. Prayer can get God to change his mind—think about the gravity of that.

As the writer James put it, “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”35 Now, there’s a lot of mystery here, plenty of unanswered questions. How exactly does God’s will interact with our will? The classic “sovereignty versus free will” debate. Honestly? I don’t know. But I’m sure of this: prayer is not just going through the motions. It does something. Our prayers have the potential to alter the course of history. And God’s action in history is, in some strange way, contingent on our prayers.

Because there is an invisible world all around us that is just as real as the one we can see and touch and taste and smell.

It’s that in the universe God has chosen to actualize, love is the highest value, and love demands a choice, and a choice demands freedom.

But there’s a better way forward, a third way to come before God: not based on what you’ve done or what’s been done to you, but based on who God is—based on his mercy.

Oh, I know that God is “compassionate and gracious.” I mean, I’m writing a book on it, right? I know this. But at a subconscious level, part of me still feels like God is angry with me. Like I’m a frustration or a disappointment or a screw-up and I need to earn his love.

the best is yet to come.