Name the Name. Say It.

By Dr. Latayne C. Scott
When my son Ryan and I read through the Old Testament when he was in high school, we used The Narrated Bible (now re-titled as The Daily Bible). We read a section out loud every morning.
Old Testament names can be tongue-twisters. But I insisted we sound them out and say them. "After all," I reasoned, "if God honored someone by having their name in His eternal Word, we should at least say them aloud."
We named the names.
Something similar happened when I began to read The Gulag Archipelago, the memoir of Alexander Solzhenitsyn that Time Magazine called "the best book of the 20th Century." I read the abridged version (I’m a wimp—the three-volume original version is a bazillion pages long) and kept getting characters mixed up in my mind.
Finally, I realized that I needed to read the unfamiliar sounds of the Russian names out loud. I did this for the whole book. After a while, the cadences and inflections of the Russian language helped me see patterns in names and consistency.
I named the names.
In a way I may never fully understand, naming the Name of Jesus has power beyond its syllables and sounds. (I capitalize the word Name, because its identification with God partakes of His holiness—see Acts 5:41).
The Bible repeats over and over
the idea of calling on His Name.
For the last year, a prayer practice of naming the Name has become an essential part of my daily life. And for at least 1600 years (that we have documentation of), my brothers and sisters of Church history have prayed a simple prayer known as The Jesus Prayer.
"Repetition" to many Protestants is irretrievably linked to the word "vain”, as if all repetitions are meaningless. (They don’t know what to do with Psalm 136 and others, I guess.)
The Jesus Prayer is simple:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.
For my students, this is the Agent/Patient relationship in its purest form. It is anthropology and supernatural cosmology in a single sentence.
For unnumbered Christians for millennia, it has become as natural as breath, and as ever present. What effect has it had on others? I hear stories. But I have one of my own.
I’ve never had a problem with wanting to access porn. (I’ve got plenty of other sins; that just happens to be one that doesn’t tempt me). But one day I was reading a news report that described the kind of porn that is being depicted in library books for students in the public schools. The description was of an act I hadn’t thought about before. Then I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
Here’s a good thing about getting older. Whereas I was able in the past to mentally juggle several lines of thought and activity in my head, now I’m basically two-tracks.  I can do physical things, but my mind has only two other tracks. And the act, played out in my mind, became like background music. I didn’t want it to. But it did.
So with two tracks available to me, I did this: Something physical like walking or unloading the dishwasher or even listening to an audiobook—and when that act came into my mind, I prayed the Jesus Prayer.  I found I was functioning in the physical activity. I was following and enjoying the audiobook. And with the Jesus Prayer crowding out the "act," there was no mental room for anything else.
It took me a week, but that thought was kicked downstairs, so many floors, so repeatedly, that a door closed to a hellish basement.
I named The Name. And it helped. Can this ancient prayer help you?
Blessings to you, Latayne