The word Christian is not a religious category, a cultural label, or a denominational affiliation. It is a name — and every name carries the weight of the person it belongs to.
Names matter because the people they belong to matter. When a child is given a name at birth, something is being spoken over them — an identity, an inheritance, a connection to someone or something larger than their own small beginning. And when a name is claimed rather than given — when a person takes on a name as an act of belonging and allegiance — the weight of that name is even greater. Because a claimed name is a declaration. It is a public statement about who you have chosen to be identified with, what you have decided to let govern your life, whose reputation you are now in the business of carrying.
The name Christian is a claimed name. It was given first, in Antioch, to people who had so thoroughly aligned their lives with Jesus Christ that the surrounding city — without any theological training, simply by observation — concluded that these people must be identified by the name of the One they so clearly belonged to. The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. (Acts 11:26) They were not called Christians by themselves, as a self-designation they had chosen. They were called Christians by the world around them — because the world around them could not explain who they were except by reference to the person who had so completely occupied them.
That is the origin of the name. And the origin carries within it the standard that every subsequent person who has taken the name is called to meet. The question is not primarily: do you identify as a Christian? The question is: when the world around you observes your life — your choices, your priorities, your character, your manner of moving through every relationship and every difficulty and every ordinary day — do they see enough of Christ in what they observe to conclude, as the people of Antioch concluded, that you must be named after Him?
The catechism that opens this teaching asks three questions, and the answers to those three questions constitute a compressed theology of Christian identity. Before a single obligation is listed, the meaning of the name is established — because you cannot know what a name demands until you know what it contains. And the name Christian contains three distinct but inseparable realities.
To be a Christian is to be incorporated into something — the Body of Christ, the Church. Not membership in an institution or an organisation, but organic union with the living community of everyone in whom Christ dwells. The name is not a private spiritual status. It is a corporate identity. You are not a Christian alone.
The name carries a relationship — and the relationship is not one of equal partnership or casual acquaintance. It is the relationship of servant to Lord. The one who takes the name has, by the act of taking it, placed themselves under an authority and accepted a direction for their life that proceeds from Christ and not from themselves.
Every name carries its bearer's reputation. Every time the name Christian is spoken, Christ is referenced. Every life lived under that name either honours or dishonours the One whose name it borrows. The Christian life is, at its most fundamental level, a life that has agreed to be evaluated by reference to someone other than itself.
These three realities — membership, servanthood, naming — are not three separate conditions that can be held independently. They are three dimensions of the same single reality. The person who wants the name without the membership — who claims Christ privately while avoiding His body — has not understood what the name means. The person who wants the membership without the servanthood — who attends the community while reserving the governance of their life for themselves — has not understood either. And the person who carries the name without the corresponding life has borrowed a name they are not yet living up to, and the borrowing has consequences in both directions: for their own soul and for the reputation of the One they have named themselves after.
"The name Christian is not something you add to your existing identity. It is something you are absorbed into — and the absorption is meant to be total."
The word Christian has suffered a long and largely uncontested inflation in the contemporary church — the process by which a word gradually expands to cover more and more ground until it no longer carries the specific weight it was coined to carry. A name that in Antioch was given to people who so thoroughly embodied Christ that the city noticed has become, in the modern era, a label applied to anyone who holds a broadly favourable opinion of Jesus, was baptised at some point in their childhood, or identifies with the Christian cultural tradition of their community.
This is not a trivial inflation. It is a catastrophic one — because a name that covers everything means nothing. And a Christianity that requires nothing produces disciples who expect nothing of themselves and are perplexed when the name they carry does not produce the life it was designed to describe.
"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."
Matthew 7:21 — KJVThe people Jesus is addressing in Matthew 7 are not pagans. They are people who have used His name — who have prophesied, cast out demons, done wonderful works in His name. They carry the label at the most active and visible level. And He says to them: I never knew you. The name and the relationship were disconnected. The label was present; the Lord was not at home in them in the way the label claimed. And the distance between the name they carried and the life they lived was the distance Jesus addresses with the most sobering words in the Sermon on the Mount.
The problem is not that too many people are calling themselves Christians. The problem is that too many people are calling themselves Christians without ever seriously asking what the name means, what it demands, and whether the life behind the name is sufficient to justify its use.
The catechism's answer to what the name Christian demands lists four obligations — and they are worth examining not as a checklist of requirements to be satisfied but as a description of the interior architecture of a genuinely Christian life. They are not four things you do. They are four dimensions of what you become when Christ is genuinely at the centre of you.
This is the foundation that the other three rest on. Not Christ as an occasional reference point — consulted in the difficult moments and set aside when the moment passes. Not Christ as a decorative element of an otherwise self-directed interior life. But Christ as the permanent occupant of the centre — the one whose presence in the thoughts and heart consistently shapes what is desired, feared, pursued, and refused. The Apostle Paul gives this its most radical expression: "For to me to live is Christ." (Philippians 1:21) Not Christ is important to my life. Not Christ enriches my life. Christ is what my life is. The name Christian has always carried this claim — that the person bearing it has been so thoroughly displaced from the centre of their own existence by the presence of Christ that the self is no longer the primary reference point for any significant question.
The distinction between living according to the Spirit and living according to the flesh is one of the most developed themes in the New Testament — and it is not primarily a distinction between dramatic sin and visible virtue. It is a distinction in the governing principle of a life. The flesh — the self operating from its own resources, desires, and instincts — produces a certain kind of life, with a certain character, a certain direction, a certain set of inevitable outcomes. The Spirit produces a life of an entirely different character — not because the Spirit overrides the person but because the Spirit progressively transforms the person from within, producing in them the desires, the character, the fruit that flesh alone can never generate. (Galatians 5:16–25) Living according to His Spirit is not a programme of religious behaviour. It is the sustained surrender of the self to a transforming presence — daily, habitual, without declared endpoint.
Imitation is a stronger word than inspiration. Inspiration means that someone's example moves you emotionally and perhaps motivates some behaviour change. Imitation means that you are studying the example closely enough, continuously enough, and seriously enough that your own behaviour is being actively shaped by it — that what you do in specific situations is increasingly what you have observed the one you are imitating doing in equivalent situations. The Christian is called not merely to admire the life of Christ but to imitate it — to bring the pattern of His engagement with people, His use of power, His response to suffering, His treatment of the marginalised, His refusal to be governed by reputation or fear, into their own daily context as the operative standard. This is why the Gospels are not merely historical documents for the Christian. They are the field manual for the imitative life. (1 Peter 2:21)
Colossians 3:1 is not a statement about geographic or cosmic location. It is a statement about the direction of a person's fundamental desire — the things they are genuinely moving toward, the goods they are actually organising their life to obtain. "Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth." (Colossians 3:2) The word for affections here is the word for the deep, sustained desires of the heart — not momentary preferences but the settled orientation of what a person most fundamentally wants. The Christian's life is structured by a desire for what is above — not in the sense of disengagement from the world and its real responsibilities, but in the sense that the world and its goods are evaluated by their relationship to the things that are above them rather than being treated as ultimate in themselves. Wealth, reputation, comfort, influence — these are not wrong. They are temporal. And the Christian who has understood the name they bear does not organise their life as though temporal things were final things.
Everything written above might give the impression that the name Christian is primarily a weight to be carried — a set of obligations so comprehensive that no honest person could claim to fully meet them. And it is true that the name is demanding. Any name worth carrying is. The question is whether the demands are the primary reality of the name or whether they rest on something that makes them not burdensome but genuinely possible and genuinely desirable.
They rest on grace. The obligations of the name do not precede the grace of the name — they flow from it. A person does not first meet the obligations and then receive the identity. They receive the identity — are incorporated into the Body, named after Christ, placed under His lordship — and the obligations follow as the natural direction of the life that has been given. Paul's letters consistently move in this order: theology first, then ethics. You are this — therefore live accordingly. The indicative precedes the imperative. What you have been made is always the foundation from which what you are called to do proceeds.
"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."
Galatians 2:20 — KJVThis is the reality behind the name. Not a person straining to become something they are not by nature, pulling themselves toward an ideal by sheer moral effort. But a person who has been united with Christ in His death and resurrection — in whom Christ genuinely lives by the Spirit — living out, in the flesh, the faith of a Son of God who loved them specifically and gave Himself for them specifically. The obligations of the Christian name are the natural expression of this reality when it is genuinely present. They are not the means by which you earn the name. They are the evidence that the name has found its proper home in you.
The three questions of the catechism are not questions asked once at the point of initial profession and then set aside. They are questions that the name Christian asks every day of the life that carries it. Every morning is a new moment in which the name is either being justified by the life behind it or quietly being borrowed by a life that has not yet caught up to what it claims.
What is your name? Christian. Does the day ahead — the conversations, the choices, the things you will pursue and the things you will refuse, the way you will treat the people you find difficult and the way you will manage the resources in your care — does the day ahead justify that name? Not perfectly. The Christian life is not a life of perfect performance. It is a life of genuine direction. But genuine direction means that the questions the name asks are being asked — and answered — honestly and daily, rather than assumed to have been settled once and for all by a single act of profession at the beginning.
"If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth."
Colossians 3:1–2 — KJVThe if in that verse is not a doubt — it is a foundation. If ye then be risen with Christ — since you have been, since that is the reality of what you are — then seek accordingly. Live from the reality rather than toward it. The name you carry is not an aspiration you are working to deserve. It is a description of what you already are in Christ — and the daily obligation is simply to live in a way that makes the description visible in the world that is watching.
The world gave the first Christians their name because they could not explain those people any other way. That remains the standard. Not: do you call yourself a Christian? But: when the world around you looks at your life with honest eyes — your actual life, not the version you present in the sanctuary — does it see enough of Christ in what it observes to conclude, without your help, what your name must be?
To call yourself a Christian in the full sense of what that name has always meant is one of the most serious acts a human being can perform. It is not the claiming of a religious preference or the registering of a cultural affiliation. It is the public declaration that a specific person — Jesus Christ, the Son of God, crucified, risen, seated at the right hand of the Father — is the governing reality of your life. That His thoughts are the standard for your thinking, His Spirit the source of your living, His life the pattern for your conduct, His kingdom the ultimate object of your desire.
That declaration is a gift. It is also a charge. The gift is the grace that makes the declaration possible — the grace that incorporates you into His body, places His Spirit within you, and names you after the One who gave everything to make the naming possible. The charge is to wear the name in a way that honours the Person it belongs to — not perfectly, but genuinely, not impressively, but honestly — in the ordinary contexts of the ordinary daily life where the name is most needed and most consistently tested.
You were named after someone. His name is above every name. See to it that the life behind the name you carry gives the watching world every reason to conclude that He is real, that He is alive, and that He is genuinely in residence in the person who bears His name.