The God of My Strength

In the past few months, I do thank God for revealing the meaning of my name to me.I didn’t ever thought my name Gabriel would have any meaning behind it until I searched out the Hebrew meaning. It means God is My Strength.

In Hebrew, names are very interesting. They are not just given because the parents of the child loved the name, like how it happens now. But the parents would give the child a name because of a certain circumstance or what they desire the child to become.

For example, Daniel: God is My Judge. What a timely name it is for a man who lived in the Babylonian captivity of Israel! How Israel longed for God to be their judge, to vindicate them of their injustice from the Babylonians. And Israel had Daniel during that period whose very life exemplified that God was their judge.

For me, I thought it was just pure coincidence having my name as Gabriel. After all, my parents named me Gabriel because it is the name of an angel, a messenger of God, not quite about God being my strength.

But I felt God really teaching me an important lesson quite recently on him being my strength.

Since young, I have been always reliant on myself, very motivated to achieve what I wanted and I was successful to quite a large extent. Well, I could say that I had worked hard and reasonably achieved my well-deserved results. To my amazement, I was really that good that I could actually boast in quite a lot of things.

As I grew, I felt that I could do things as long as I put my heart into doing them. Inspired by slogans like ‘Impossible is Nothing’, ‘Have faith in yourself and you can achieve’, I would always wanted to achieve something close to impossible so that I could be pleased with myself.

Thank God I was built weak, otherwise, I would have boasted in my strengths.

Now that I’m older, I am being to experience failure. I being to realise that I am a very ill-disciplined person. I have little or no perseverance in things that I set my heart to accomplish. Others could work hard and achieved their goals, but I just couldn’t. Each time I would lack behind, unable to achieve my goal due to my half-heartedness and poor willpower.

I just couldn’t feel satisfied. I always wanted to be a very good basketball player. I knew for sure I needed to go for sprints and improve, but my mind just wouldn’t do it, fearing all the pain and difficulties the body would have to go through.

I began to wallow in self-pity, seeing others succeeding and claiming glory while I was still remaining in my cycle of failure of underachieving.

More so, quite recently, I knew I had certain problems in my christian life, certain sins I had to get rid of. I knew for sure that these were serious things that I have to change. Those sins were pulling me down and unpleasing to God.

So I set my heart to change, to put a stop to those sins.

I tell you what happened. ‘Impossible is Nothing’ didn’t just became ‘Nothing is impossible’. It became ‘It is impossible!’

Yes, it was impossible. I couldn’t stop those sins. The more I tried to overcome, the more I failed, the more I was depressed and was angry with God. I was really mad at God. I was trying so so hard to please him, to end those sins, but I couldn’t.

Then, I remembered my name.

And God used my name to teach me what I needed to know.

Philippians 4: 13 -  “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.”

Though this was a familiar verse, it suddenly dawned on me that God could strengthen me. So, I prayed with this verse in my mind to overcome.

I still failed and began to doubt this verse. Then, I began to realise another truth.

John 15:5 - “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing.”

I knew the true meaning of my name. It isn’t just God strengthening me for me to overcome, it is God overcoming for me. Apart from God, I could do nothing. It isn’t just about adding God’s strength to mine, it is about me having absolutely no strength of my own. All my strength was God’s. He is My Strength.

What a wonderful thing it is that I can overcome because he has overcame.