What do people call you? A name, nickname, or maybe just, “Hey, you!” Or maybe “Mom” or “Grandma.” What will God call you – sinner or saint?

What other people call you matters little. What God calls you matters a great deal. One name God has for you, if you have put your faith in Jesus Christ and joined with him, is “Daughter” or “Son.” God also has a special name for you that no one else knows, a name that perfectly captures you in all your complexity. Jesus says in the book of Revelation, “To the one who overcomes, I will give … a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.”

That name, God’s special name for you, which only the two of you will know, will fit you to a T. That is because God knows you, knows you in a way no one else does, knows everything about you. He knows about the most embarrassing things in your past. He knows you love to sing. He knows what happened in your life when you were two. He knows what you thought at four in the morning on June 16^th, 1977, when you couldn’t sleep. He knows your fears, your sins, and your strengths. He knows what you have done and what you would have done had things been different.

No one knows you like God knows you. He knows everything there is to know – absolutely everything: the good, the bad, the brave, the foolish – and knowing you like that, he loves you completely. Knowing you like that, he came in the person of his Son to rescue you. That is love.

You are absolutely unique—we all are. Your biological makeup – the length of your nose, the color of your eyes, the complexion of your skin, the intricacies of your brain – were written like software on your DNA.  

DNA is contained inside of chromosomes, and every human has 46 of them. The DNA nucleotides are strung around each other in two chains. There are 3.2 billion nucleotide pairs on all human chromosomes, and every one of those pairs can combine in four possible ways. 

What that means is the number of possible combinations in any one person is greater than the total number of atoms in the universe. The combinations that made up you (and me) are unlike the combinations that make up any other person in the world. Even identical twins are not identical: they have, just for example, different fingerprints. In fact, they are different from each other in a myriad of ways.  

There is no one else in all the world just like you. You was designed by God to be the one and only you – altogether unique. One in 7 billion. There is not another you on earth. 

Unique things are valuable, and God made each of us totally unique. The world’s most expensive car is a Rolls Royce Boat Tail. Rolls Royce builds only three of them and each comes at a price tag of $280 million. A Boat Tail has 1,800 individual components. But that does not compare to a human being, who has about 30 trillion cells in her body. And God didn’t make three of each person; only one.

Even a Rolls Royce will deteriorate and depreciate over time. But God made humans to become more than they were. They were made to develop in beauty and complexity. It is true that sin has caused us individually and as a species to deteriorate, but God has made it possible to reverse that forever.

Forever. A moment ago, I just wrote that God “made humans to become more than they were,” using the past tense. But God knows us in the present, “for all,” as Jesus once said, “are alive to him.”