WHAT IS IT IN A NAME?

“Let not my lord, I pray thee, regard this man of Belial, even Nabal: for as his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him: but I thine handmaid saw not the young men of my lord, whom thou didstsend.” (1Sa 25:25).

When my wife was pregnant of Samuel, our first son, I prayed that God should give me a name for him, and He dropped the name Samuel in my heart. In fact, the name made us to know that he was going to be a boy. His second name, which is a local name, came by inspiration too.
Long before the pregnancy, my wife wrote the name in her diary, and before our son was formally named that name, my elder sister that lives in another town called
me one morning and said that our son should be named the same name my wife had in her diary, and nobody had ever mentioned it to her before that time.
To me, that was enough confirmation that the name came from the Lord just as I had requested from Him.

A wrong name can be a scar, which can give the bearer a different identity from the one originally given to him by God. A good example is Jabez in 1Chronicles 4:9-10. Becoming the most honorable man didn’t happen when Jabez prayed, it had been the plan of God for him before his conception. His prayer only restored it back to him after the enemy tried
to steal it from him through the negative name his mother gave him.
When Jephthah was denied the right of inheritance in his father’s house, because of the fact that his mother was a harlot, the significant of his name came into play. The name Jephthah means, “He (God) will open.” As a door was shut against him due to the scar his birth gave him, his name opened another door for him.

Parents should be very careful with the names they give their children. In fact, God should inspire any name we want to give to our children. We should not give our children names just because we like the way they sound, we should always pray that God should give us names to call our children, and He will.
Every child is a carrier of destiny, and it is important that the child’s name be in line with his or her destiny. As our name is being mentioned, it leads us closer and closer to destiny.
From our text, Nabal’s name, which means folly led to his destruction. Change your name if God leads you to do so.
God had to change the names of Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, and Jacob to Israel because their former names were not only saying a different thing from what God had in mind for them, but their names
were also forming a different identity for them; God had to intervene. It shows how important a name is to someone’s destiny, if God took it serious we should also take it serious.