Not Far Gone

Listen to Never Too Far Gone on Spotify. Jordan Feliz · Song · 2016.

Jordan Feliz is one of my favorite artists because he does a wonderful job of tackling tough issues and circumstances while uplifting the people struggling through them.  In “Never Too Far Gone,” Feliz gives hope to those who feel far away from God, who have done wrong, who have hurt others, who have hurt themselves, and reminds them that there’s no place they can be physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually that God does not have covered in His loving presence.

The message of this song describes how, even when we run away from God, it takes only one step in the right direction to be back in His loving embrace. It takes only one action to be forgiven, only one action to be found, to be caught.

People all over the world are currently lost or in the process of losing themselves. Some may be stumbling around in the dark already, dazed, confused, blind, in despair and unable or unwilling to call out for someone to turn on the lights. Some are sprinting at a breakneck speed away from the light because it stung their eyes, and they think they will find comfort in the darkness.

There are two images I get from the lyrics in Feliz’s song. The first is kind of like a chase scene in a horror/slasher movie. If you’ve ever seen one, you know that the protagonist is sprinting as fast as possible away from the killer, who often appears to be casually walking, but never seems to lose him. No matter how fast the protagonist runs, nor how cleverly he disguises his path, the killer is always there.

In a way, that’s kind of what running from God is like. No matter how far or fast you run, God’s always right behind you waiting for you to slow down and give in, to recognize that it’s not a killer who’s after you, rather, in a parody of a horror/slasher situation, it’s a friend and guide who wants to help you escape from death.

I imagine that it might feel scary or daunting in some ways to those who only see the bright light of God from the darkness, who have never experienced the warmth and love that His light provides. And I personally think we don’t give enough credence to the fact that God can be scary to people who don’t know Him—Christianity can be scary to people who don’t truly know it, who have only ever seen it from the outside, or maybe just experienced the worst parts of believers and the church.

The second image/scenario I envision involves a large room filled with swirling darkness. The darkness ebbs and flows and changes constantly, seeking to block people in the room from seeing the light shining from the exit. The darkness is disorienting and confusing, causing those within to stumble and wander, losing all sense of direction. Even if they manage to spot the light, the suffocating darkness moves to cover it up, leaving them without a clue which way to go. But the God of light does not need to stay at the doorway; when someone calls out from the darkness, He goes to them, cutting a swath through the darkness with His light, picks them up, and carries them to the exit.

I don’t have to imagine reality for this scenario; I’ve been through things just like it. I’ve tried to walk myself out of the darkness of emotional and mental health struggles. I’ve tried to walk myself out of the suffocating room wherein I feel trapped. I’ve tried to combat my sin and temptation on my own. But it was only when I called out to God that He carried me free of those things.

In Sunday School this week, we touched on a related topic as we discussed grief and other hard-hitting emotions: the idea that Jesus, that God, has felt everything we could feel. And that’s true. We can attribute this experience of Jesus to His suffering and death on the cross. In those moments of His death, He felt every last bit of every sin. Before yesterday morning, I had never really given thought to the idea that Jesus had felt the same shame, guilt, failure, etc. that I’ve felt, that you’ve felt, that we’ve all felt. Not just that He has felt shame, guilt, failure,

Whenever I thought about Jesus being able to relate to me, I always dwelled on things in general; I never made the emotional, relational connection specific to me. But when He died on that cross, He felt all the bad, the things that God doesn’t, can’t, shouldn’t feel. A perfect God can feel no shame or guilt, but He did. He suffered under the weight of guilt for us. He suffered the load of shame for us. He suffered the pain of failure for us.

And He did not just generically feel those things. He felt the exact shame I feel whenever I give into lust or anger. He felt the guilt of each time I sinned and knew I was doing it. He felt the weight of every failure I have committed. Why? So He could chase us down, seek us out, pick us up, and show us with the scars on His hands, His feet, His side, and His head that we are not too far gone to be rescued.

Knowing the Plan

What’s in store for you and me? What’s ahead of us in our futures? Which choice should I make? Which option should I pick? These are thoughts that likely run through any given person’s mind fairly often. I know I think about them, probably more than I should. And I decided to write about this today because it’s recently come up in my church community.

Without getting into the specifics of other people’s lives, there are a couple people in my church who don’t really know the details of what’s ahead of them in their lives. It’s likely that a lot of things will be changing for them. To paraphrase, the individuals said, “We don’t really know what we’re going to do next. We don’t really know the plan.”

I spoke to my worship pastor about it after service, and I said, “I think it’s okay to not know the plan. When we know the plan, we tend to get in God’s way and mess it up.” He said I should probably write about that subject, and I at first kind of dismissed it because I wasn’t sure how to tackle the subject, but I heard a song on the way home from church by Avicii that hit me. It’s not even a Christian song, but it had just the words I needed to inspire this:

These are the days we've been waiting for
Neither of us knows what's in storeYou just roll your window down and place your bets
These are the days we won't regret
These are the days we'll never forget!

Think about that for a minute. Really, from the moment you give your life to Christ, you should be waiting for the day He says, “Go, it’s your turn to make disciples. Here’s what you’ll do.” I think that comes in the moment you’ve grown in Christ enough to spread the Gospel, because there is a certain level of spiritual maturity you need to reach for that, in my own opinion.

It’s kind of like how we all grow up. You spent a majority of your younger years being cared for, fed, and nurtured by your parents, ideally, and then, once you’re grown in maturity, you go out on your own. As Christians, we must be fed by the Spirit and nurtured until we are capable of going out and spreading our faith. So, really, you should be spending every moment you are being nurtured by the Spirit preparing and waiting to be sent out into the unknown.

I’ve talked about not knowing what’s in our future before, briefly, when I wrote about Tenth Avenue North’s song, “What You Want.” But I want to expand on the not knowing. I think all throughout the Bible we have examples of all the things that happen when we know God’s plans for us, and very few of them are good. We often end up causing problems for ourselves due to our own unbelief and prejudices.

Moses, for example, when told that God wanted him to free the Israelites by speaking to Pharaoh, was so worried over his own oratory skills that he tried to avoid going through with it. He tried to stop God’s plan because he was worried he couldn’t do it. Jonah tried to run from God because he knew His plan for Nineveh and didn’t think the people could be changed. The Israelites got themselves banished to wander the desert for 40 years because they knew God wanted them to wage war against the peoples in the promised land to uproot them and thought they couldn’t do it.

But when people didn’t know exactly what God had in store for them, they were able to rely on God rather than be discouraged by what they saw in front of them. I think of the disciples shortly after Jesus returned to be with the Father. They didn’t know exactly what they had to do. But they did know which direction they had to go in. Would, perhaps, Peter have been too scared to go to Rome if he knew ahead of time that he would die there? Would Paul have gone to all the places he went if he knew how he would be received?

Perhaps even the most telling story about this is Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his own brothers. Do you think he would have trotted out to them as carefree as he did if he knew what they would do to him? If he knew the pain that would come from it? Even if Joseph knew it was God’s plan for him? I wouldn’t have.

And therein lies the problem: when we know too much, we come up with regrets. We bring up all the things possible we can to convince ourselves that the upsides to our choices will be far less significant than the downsides. Our fear often outweighs our faith and our lives are unbalanced. The more we know about what’s ahead, the more courage we need, and that is something we sadly lack.

To put it in more concrete terms, it’s kind of like asking someone out on a date and being rejected. The first time you go to ask a girl or guy out on a date, it might not be that hard, especially the younger you are. You’re either confident he/she will say yes, or you’re sure you can handle the pain that comes from rejection. Why? Because you don’t know what that feels like yet. But each subsequent time, asking that question becomes harder and harder because you know how much it hurts to be rejected, and you fear that pain. Since you know it hurts, you’re less likely to do it.

But what I urge everyone to do is to not focus on the pain, which is why I think it’s beneficial for us to know less rather than more about what God has in store for our lives. When we hear from older, wiser folks about their lives, it’s not often that we hear about the hurts as they reminisce. It’s far more common for them to retell the good things.

But one thing I’ve noticed as I have matured is that even when you have to tell about the pain in your life on the way to big things, you rarely end up saying you regretted making that decision. In fact, I don’t know anyone who has regretted getting the courage to ask their now wife on a date. I don’t hear anyone say they regret taking the chance on asking their boss for a promotion for all the hard work they’ve been doing when they’ve made it to the manager position. I don’t hear anybody who stepped out into the unknown on the word of God say they wish they’d never done it.

Why? Because they didn’t allow themselves to get in God’s way and mess things up. They didn’t let their fear or pain control their lives. They didn’t let sorrow or shame make their choices. They let courage and faith step out for them.

Do you think Peter regretted walking on water? Do you think he would have regretted it if the rest of the disciples picked on him as Jesus told him he had little faith? No. I’m sure he regretted doubting as he stood on the water, but I know in my heart that he didn’t regret taking the step out of the boat for a single second after all was said and done.

And it’s likely something he remembered doing for the rest of his life. It was something he could share with others thousands of times as he preached the Gospel and showed them who Jesus was and why they needed him. That one small act of faith when he stepped into the unknown, not knowing what would happen, could have impacted thousands of lives. Just like you stepping out in faith when you don’t know what’s in store could do the same for thousands more.

You don’t need to know the plan. In fact, I still say it’s better you don’t. Lean on your faith in the one who’s writing the story, the one who holds your tomorrow, and know that He will work everything together for the good of those who love Him.

Listen to The Days on Spotify. Avicii · Song · 2014.

Free, Different You

Sanctification is a process. That’s probably something we don’t mention enough in the church, but it is something that we acknowledge nonetheless. You don’t choose to follow Christ one evening and then wake up following His will perfectly. The chase after Christ is a progression of tiny, yet radical, steps designed to make large changes overall.

But we’re impatient, faulty. We seek clear, unique, and massive changes in our lives and our actions because of Christ, and sometimes we try to engineer those things when they don’t need to be done. We try so hard to be others because they look like they’re doing it right, or for whatever other reason we concoct in our hearts and minds. But that’s not what we’re supposed to do. You are called to be uniquely you, doing what God has called you to do, changing how God has called you to change, and being different from the way you used to be.

I’ve touched on this subject in the past briefly, but I felt the need to reiterate it today. It’ll be somewhat of a running theme across today’s and Wednesday’s post. Here it is: Your job is to be different from the worldly you, not like other believers. Your job is to be salt of the earth, bringing out unique flavor from where you are, not where others are.

I think people get this idea that they have to be a pastor, a teacher, a worship leader, or a missionary in the Congo to make an impact for the kingdom, and they try so hard to make themselves into one. And I don’t fully blame this on the church, but I somewhat do, because we have stopped being the salt of the earth.

We don’t look any different from nonbelievers. We don’t act any different. And worst of all, individual members of the church are not doing their jobs of going and making disciples. And we’ve created this false dichotomy that only church leaders can spread the gospel, not because it’s true, but because they’re the only ones who are actually doing it.

And we dig deeper and find that younger Christians see this happening, and whether they fully understand it, they’re basing their faith on that. And now, instead of modeling their life after Christ and seeking what He has planned for them, they’re fixated on becoming pastors and teachers and worship leaders and missionaries in the Congo because “being a stay-at-home mom can’t further the kingdom. There’s no way that’s what God wants for my life,” or “working a 9-5 office job won’t allow me to spread the gospel. That can’t be what I’m called to do.”

The song of the week comes in with this theme: God makes you free to be you not someone else. It’s time we stop modeling our faith after the faith of others and start modeling our lives after Jesus and let the faith come along with that. Stop trying to live like your pastor or your mentor and start trying to live like a you who knows Jesus.

See, the way that this works is actually a pretty simple equation. Without God, you are unable to be who you are supposed to be. Why? Because you are made in the image of God, and without Him being Lord of your life, you can’t live up to everything you are, only part of it. So, when you come to know God, you are enabled to be fully you. When you become fully you, you enable God to be fully Himself in your life. If part of God’s character is being Lord of your life, then when you know Him, you give Him this part of His identity.

The equation is thus: a broken you + God = Fully You and Lord God. Because all of you is equivalent to a you who follows God’s plan. A you who chooses to follow someone else’s life is not fully you. Who you are is dependent on who you follow. So, stop trying to be other people. You’re free to be you only in Christ Jesus, only when following His will. So be you.

Listen to Free to Be Me on Spotify. Francesca Battistelli · Song · 2008.

Not Your Mistakes

One of the greatest lies of the world is that you are what you do. This sentiment is expressed in hundreds of arguments, such as “well, I’m a good person, so I’ll get to heaven,” or, “he cheated on her, so karma will get him,” or even in seemingly innocuous phrases like, “once a thief, always a thief.”

But the Bible tells us that what you do is merely a product of who you are, of how you think, of where your heart is. Sin comes from a broken heart that is focused on selfish pleasures. Goodness comes from a heart that is the home of Jesus Christ. But another thing the Bible tells us is that, when you are saved from your past, you are saved into a new being, one that is defined not by who you are, but by the God who has claimed you.

I briefly touched on this topic last week with Casting Crowns’ “Who am I,” but I wanted to expand on the idea of God’s claim on us and how a life after that moment can look from Tenth Avenue North’s “You Are More.”

There's a girl in the corner
With tear stains on her eyes
From the places she's wandered
And the shame she can't hide

She says, how did I get here?
I'm not who I once was.
And I'm crippled by the fear
That I've fallen too far to love

Here are some thoughts that, personally, I’ve had before. And I think many people probably have thought some of these things. Constantly, I think back to choices I made that I would like to have again to change who I am now. I can pinpoint the day and the time that caused me problems for ten years and changed who I was, and who I became to be. And I think many people feel this way, and the fear that comes from these thoughts can be incredibly crippling when you try to move forward.

Sometimes, it feels like you’ve messed up one too many times. And I actually think that’s something we don’t discuss a lot in the Christian community, especially if you grew up in church. We have a problem of trying to tackle actions and past choices but not actually discussing and confronting the issues that are from the heart and the mind. And pardon me for saying it, but that’s kind of pharasaical.

You are more than the choices that you've made,
You are more than the sum of your past mistakes,
You are more than the problems you create,
You've been remade

Two things I love about this: it covers the past mistakes and the current problems that are created. For believers, who you are is not found by adding up every choice you’ve ever made. You are not your thoughts and your actions combined. You are not defined by your sins or your good works. And you are most certainly not defined by the sinful thoughts and actions you still struggle with. As a follower of Christ, you have been spiritually and mentally remade, formed into something new.

Well she tries to believe it
That she's been given new life
But she can't shake the feeling
That it's not true tonight

And here’s where we get into the practical application of this song and the message I’m bringing tangentially through it. Even when you know you’ve been given a new life. Even when you know that God has saved you and you know the results of that, sometimes, you still doubt. Maybe you don’t doubt God, but you doubt that you’re doing the right things, that you’re thinking the right way.

And here’s the important thing: these things don’t just magically go away when you get saved. The process of sanctification, of being made like Jesus, isn’t immediate. It takes time for you to be fully transformed, some people take longer than others. And these doubts will always be present. The heart is misleading and untrustworthy, so of course it will occasionally lead you astray, and no amount of knowing you’ve been remade can combat that sometimes.

She knows all the answers
And she's rehearsed all the lines
And so she'll try to do better
But then she's too weak to try 

Sometimes, it’s just not enough to know the words and actions. I can speak to that from experience. This idea that salvation comes from effort is not new, but it’s so close to how Christians are supposed to live that it seems like it’s real. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in, “well, if I just knew more of the Bible,” or, “if I just didn’t give into sin that one time, then God would help me more, then God would save me from it.” But you’re too weak, I’m too weak, we’re all too weak to do these things, so we are trapped by our lying heart into thinking we’ll never be okay. 

'Cause this is not about what you've done,
But what's been done for you.
This is not about where you've been,
But where your brokenness brings you to

This is not about what you feel,
But what He felt to forgive you,
And what He felt to make you loved

But here’s the thing: there’s only one thing you need to know, and it’s not the Bible by memory, it’s not the mistakes you’ve made, it’s not how you’re going to do better in the future. The one thing you need to know is what’s been done for you. The one thing you need to understand is that it’s not about feelings or thoughts, it’s about the one action that Jesus Christ made, and that no matter what, once you’ve chosen to believe in Him and what He did, you are claimed by Him and nothing can change that. No mistakes, no thoughts, no feelings. Nothing. Take refuge in that.

In a sense, who you are is not about you at all. Who you are is all about God and how He loves you enough that He would sacrifice His son, over and over and over again if that was what it took, so that He could say, “You are mine.”

Now, here’s a call to action for the Christian community out there. Let’s stop doing the things that cause people to think this way. Let’s stop making our thoughts and actions and gossip about who did what and what happened from that (let’s just stop gossiping anyway). Let’s stop thinking that once someone confesses belief in Jesus that everything’s perfectly fine for them.

Let’s start leading people to grow closer to Christ. Let’s start encouraging those who make mistakes. Let’s lean on the gospel and not on our feelings of Jesus. Let’s aid those who are lost in their thoughts and emotions and don’t know where to go. Let’s tackle the heart and the mind, not the actions. Let’s dive deeper into how we can help others rather than stick to the surface because we feel like it’s not our problem.

When Jesus died, He didn’t just wipe away the actions of sin. He changed who we are and how we thought and felt. He didn’t stick to the surface and do an incomplete job. He fully and thoroughly cleaned us and made us whole. We’re supposed to follow the example of Christ, so let’s follow this example first.

Whose We Are

There are a few giants when it comes to the Contemporary Christian music world. Bands like Elevation Worship, Hillsong and all its variants, and Bethel Music pretty much own the worship music industry in my experience. Folks like Chris Tomlin, TobyMac, Lauren Daigle, and Jeremy Camp run the radio world with their musical brilliance.

But on top of all these groups, there stand a few lyrical giants, including Matthew West, who I have mentioned before as being a master of the rhythmic word. But another very popular group does a fantastic job of making music that can be dissected spectacularly, and that is Casting Crowns.

(What a fancy introduction I’ve written just so I could hype up one of the earliest Casting Crowns songs written all because I love the absolute weight behind the seeming simplicity of some of the lyrics.)

“Who Am I” was, indeed, one of the earliest songs performed by Casting Crowns, written by member Mark Hall. When I talk about lyrical genius, I’m really not stretching the truth. There is so much emotion conveyed by the words in this song, and many of their songs, along with a startling complexity if we really break down what’s going on behind all the words.

While what I really want to talk about is the pre-chorus, we’ll start from the top. Mark Hall stated that the emotion behind this song stemmed partially from this question: “Who am I to think that I can just call up to God whenever I want, from the middle of nowhere, and expect Him to hear me?”

Speaking for myself, I never really had this thought, but I also grew up in church being taught that God loves me and wants to hear from me, but I try to imagine this now: what is it like to not know that God cares for you so much that He wants to hear from you, and indeed, seeks you out when you’re in the middle of nowhere? I think it’s integral to get the background of this song to truly understand where the lyrics come from.

Who am I, that the Lord of all the earth
Would care to know my name
Would care to feel my hurt?
Who am I, that the bright and morning star
Would choose to light the way
For my ever-wandering heart?

To one who doesn’t know our God, these questions seem incredibly valid, but even to those who do know our God, doubt sometimes causes us to feel this way. Because, really, who are we to receive such special care from an infinite being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent? How does He even notice us? To Him, we are smaller than ants.

But the great part of these lyrics is that they ask these questions without ever denying the intrinsic truth behind the actions the Lord takes. We know from the Bible that He forms us in our mother’s womb; He knows the number of hairs on our head. We know that He felt our hurt as Jesus who came and felt not only all our hurt, but all the eternal hurt that we should feel from the consequences of sin.

We know that we have a God who chooses to be the lamp to our feet and light for our path not because we follow the path well, but in spite of our inability to walk in a straight line. 

But we know what God has done and continues to do for us. That subject fills a majority of the time spent teaching, preaching, and proselytizing. But what we oh so rarely consider, beyond the surface truth of being sinners who are either relishing sin or saved from it, is who we are in comparison to God. Really: who are we in comparison to omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence? With our lifespans of 85 years and our meager strength and will that isn’t even capable of consistently choosing to do what is right, who are we?  

I am a flower quickly fading
Here today and gone tomorrow
A wave tossed in the ocean
A vapor in the wind 

Let’s not shy away from this, because it’s incredibly important in helping us realize just how gracious our God is. These are things that, to our perspective, pass by quickly. A flower can be bright and blooming one day and ripped to shreds by a strong wind or swept away by floods the very next day. It is so weak. A wave peeks out from the endless mass of the ocean, looking separated, only to be tossed back down into the frothing waters of the sea. It is important, distinct, for all of a second before it no longer matters. A vapor, a wisp, of material in the wind is tossed about, unable to control itself. It cannot decide where it goes or stays; it just gets whisked by wherever the wind takes it. 

If that’s how we see these things, how much less could our infinite God see us as? We could go to sleep healthy and never wake up. We could seem like we’re important to this world for a moment, but how much do we matter in the grand scheme of things, in even just the timeline of humanity on Earth? 85 years isn’t a lot compared to roughly 6,000. With all the conflicting forces bouncing us around in this world, how much power do we truly have to get where we want to go? 

Who am I, that the eyes that see my sin
Would look on me with love
And watch me rise again?
Who am I, that the voice that calmed the sea
Would call out through the rain
And calm the storm in me? 

But out of all the dreariness, the tone starts to change. Because if you know our God, you know that even though we should be insignificant, we aren’t. Even though we mess up, sometimes, maybe often, more than we get it right, our God loves us. Our God picks us up from where the winds ripped us apart and pieces us back together. Our God sees every last wave and counts it as important to the ocean. Our God calms the wind and guides us through the breezes to where we belong.

The one with the power to calm raging oceans and stormy gales uses his mighty power to quell the tiny whirlwinds that go off in our hearts as we struggle through this life.

Why? Such a simple question with an incredibly simple answer that is complicated by our human nature. It’s not because of who we are or anything we could do. But because of the one we belong to.

Still you hear me when I'm calling
Lord, you catch me when I'm falling
And you've told me who I am
I am yours

Even though we are tiny and insignificant, our God directs His ears towards us. He’s always listening, always watching, always waiting. To hear and speak when we call out to Him. To hold us by the hand when we stumble. To pick us up when we fall. To carry us when we are too weak. Because we are not left out here on our own. We are His.

But again, why? Why does the Almighty God choose to call us His own? Here’s the lyrics I really wanted to talk about to answer that question:

Not because of who I am
But because of what you've done
Not because of what I've done
But because of who you are

Four lines that seem so simple at first glance reveal myriad truths about who we are, why God claims us as His, and why He continues to fight for us. Literally, these four lines are the pinnacle of precision when it comes to explaining the Gospel.

God chose us, but He did not choose us because of who we are or who we could be. None of us are so special as to be chosen over any other. We were saved because of what Jesus did. Because He did what we could not do, and He lived perfectly and died, taking on the wrath of God we could not handle. He provided a way for us to be with God for eternity, but He does not provide us eternity because of anything we did, do, or could do. He provides us salvation because it is who He is. Because His very nature is good. Because His very nature is love. And because we are His, He loves us.

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How He Loves

How do you see people? Do you even notice others when you’re out and about? Or are you so absorbed in yourself and what you’re doing that you’d miss a crime if it happened right in front of you? How do you love?

I’ve been on a kick about how we, as Christians, should love recently. Why? Because it’s the most important thing for us to get right because without us showing love as we are called to, we have no purpose here. Literally our sole purpose is to be an extension, a visual representation, of God’s love on Earth, and I write about it a lot because we fail to be that far more often than we succeed.

“We love because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19. Are we loving like He first loved us?

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It’s no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled on by men.” Matthew 5:13.

I’ve been thinking about this verse a lot when it comes to determining how nonbelievers see us. Have you ever thought that the world has denied Christianity so hard because we’ve become useless? Because we’ve lost our taste? They’ve thrown out God because the salt he’s using isn’t changing the taste of the world.

That’s because we see too much with our own eyes and hearts. When we look at others through our own eyes, they’re hard to love. All we can see are faults and issues. That’s why we need to look at things through God’s eyes and love people through His heart.

Brandon Heath is one of my favorite artists, and one of his top songs is “Give Me Your Eyes.” And in it, he covers this subject fairly thoroughly.

Breathe in the familiar shock of confusion and chaos
All those people going somewhere, why have I never cared

This goes back to my opening point: are you really seeing those around you? Do you actually care about them? Is your goal to show as many people as possible to Jesus? Do you care enough about them to reach out and attempt to save them from eternal damnation? Because all the people you come across daily are going somewhere after they die.

Step out on the busy street.
See a girl and our eyes meet.
Does her best to smile at me.
To hide what's underneath.
There's a man just to her right
Black suit and a bright red tie.
Too ashamed to tell his wife he's out of work, he's buyin time.

There are two ways you can take these lyrics. One interpretation is that, if you pay attention, you’ll find that many people wear their hearts on their sleeves, and you can see right into their lives if you actually try to see them and not just glance past while moving about your day.

The other is that you don’t know what people are going through just by passing them by on the street. We are incredibly crafty when it comes to hiding the things that hurt us because we don’t want people to know what it is that hurts us. We don’t like being vulnerable. And here’s the point: it takes time, effort, and love to learn of what troubles people you meet. It’s hard to do, but it’s one of those things that makes us like salt, makes us different enough that the world will recognize it needs us, and more importantly, the God we serve.

It’s difficult, and we can’t do it on our own. Thankfully, He first loved us and gave us the ability to love like He loves.

Give me Your eyes for just one second
Give me Your eyes so I can see,
Everything that I keep missing,
Give me Your love for humanity.
Give me Your arms for the broken-hearted
The ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten

Three key things are here: eyes, arms, and heart. We have to see others the way God sees them in order to see what’s troubling them. We can’t see people as a liar or a thief. We have to see them as a person who is broken and lost in sin.

We have to reach out for them with the arms of God to show them the love that only He is capable of showing, to comfort them, and to hold on when our own grip is too weak to drag them out of the hole they’re in.

Finally, we have to love with God’s heart for mankind. We have to love with the kind of heart that had God sacrifice his own son for the sins of all. Sacrifice the humanity in yourself that says, “well they deserve it because they did—insert crime here—”and dedicate yourself to loving to save them from what they deserve because Christ saved you from what you deserve. We cannot afford to forget any. We cannot afford to forsake any. Christ did not; we should not.

Just moving past me by, I swear I never thought that I was wrong
But I wanna second glance so give me a second chance
To see the way you've seen the people all along

I know it feels like it’s not wrong to treat people like the crimes and wrongs they’ve committed. I know that I will never live up to what I’m writing here perfectly, and neither will anyone who reads this. But how much better off do you think the world would be if we stopped viewing people as the sins they’ve committed and started viewing them as God sees them?

What if we saw people as broken rather than horrid? What if we treated people as fixable rather than permanently destroyed? What if we were actually the salt of the Earth, meant to make this place so much better than the sin that permeates it?

Burn the Ships

I don’t know about anyone else, but I grew up with music as an integral part of my life. My mom is a music teacher and was the choir director at my first church, so I was surrounded by, and practically bathed in, music for most of my life, and so I have a connection with it. There are some things that I just get better from music than anywhere else, but sometimes, lyrics don’t quite make sense the first couple times through, which is why I decided to start this section of my blog: lyric breakdowns.

See, for me, I sometimes hear God speak better when I’m listening to music. There’s something about worship that gets me focused on listening a little better than reading sometimes. So, without further ado, For King and Country’s “Burn the Ships.”

How did we get here?
All castaway on a lonely shore
I can see in your eyes, dear
It's hard to take for a moment more

This song starts with what I would deem the most ambiguous part of it, which makes sense, because it’s a query. That query is a question that I’m sure a lot of us ask when we struggle with sin. You get in so deep, and before you know it, you’re a castaway, abandoned on an island by yourself with no clue of how you arrived or where to go afterward.

If you check out the background of this song, you’ll find that Luke Smallbone, one of the writers, was driven to writing this partially by his wife’s battle with a prescription medication addiction. That’s where the last two lines of the first stanza come from.

Another part of the driving force behind the lyrics of this song has to do with historical figure Hernán Cortés, who, to ensure his men would follow through on their conquest of Mexico, ordered them to burn their ships, eliminating any chance of backing out.

We've got to

Burn the ships, cut the ties
Send a flare into the night
Say a prayer, turn the tide
Dry your tears and wave goodbye

While mostly self-explanatory, “Burn the ships, cut the ties,” is doubling down on eliminating escape routes. Basically, this is setting the boats on fire and then casting them off to sea, as well. So, not only are you destroying the integrity of the ship, you’re also sinking it so there’s no chance of salvaging any part of it.

“Send a flare into the night.” Flares are for emergency rescue situations. It’s a call for help because it’s so much harder to fight sin alone.

To turn the tide is to reverse the situation, as a tide turns from high to low. In the times of sailboats, the turning of the tide was extremely important to casting off to sea. If you were trying to set sail as the tide was coming in, it was far more difficult than if you cast out as the tide was going out. You had to put yourself in a favorable situation to more easily escape the harbor, and it’s the same with sin.

Step into a new day
We can rise up from the dust and walk away
We can dance upon our heartache, yeah
So light a match, leave the past, burn the ships
And don't you look back

I really love the first line of the chorus because it implies so many things. Not only is it mentioning a new beginning (“a new day”) but it also mentions that changing your life isn’t a passive thing. You can’t just let the new day come upon you, you must “step into” it. It’s an action of moving forward.

The second line re-enforces the first. Rising up from being knocked down isn’t something that just happens. You have to force your muscles into action, even against their aching protest (because you’d definitely be aching if you were knocked into the ground hard enough to kick up dust). And, you also have to “walk away” from the fight. A deeper implication here is that you have to pick yourself up and let someone take over the battle you were fighting, i.e., God.

And then, “dance upon our heartache” is significant in that it implies the necessity of joy, of finding the energy, the grace of God, to find joy even when you’re aching, in pain. I believe that’s important because we are called to have joy even when we are suffering.

Finally, “don’t you look back.” One of the most dangerous things about turning away from sin is the temptation to look back at what you’re running from. It’s dangerous because you see what you had, and you know it, and it attempts to draw you back in. Not looking at sin is the easiest way to avoid the temptation, I believe.

Don't let it arrest you
This fear is fear of fallin' again
And if you need a refuge
I will be right here until the end

For King and Country would agree with me, I think, based on the next stanza. We often consider the fear of the unknown as being literally that, fear of what you don’t know, but I’d argue that it’s more of a fear that we can’t handle what’s ahead. The first two lines are stating as such: don’t let the fear of failing stop you from moving forward. The next two lines serve as encouragement to go forward: even if you fall, there is a safe place where you can heal and rest to go forward again.

So long to shame, walk through the sorrow
Out of the fire into tomorrow
So flush the pills, face the fear
Feel the wave disappear
We're comin' clear, we're born again
Our hopeful lungs can breathe again

The last stanza to talk about is absolutely filled with metaphors that I could go on and on about, but I’ll keep it as short as possible.

One of the things that keeps us back from God is shame, feeling like we’re not enough and we won’t be accepted. Say bye to shame and go through the necessary feelings to shed that. If you have to be sad, hurt, in pain, walk through it. It’s something that’s here now, but there is another side to it where you’ll be free. You’ll eventually escape the “fire” and get to a new chance.

“Flush the pills” is another reference to Luke’s wife’s addiction, but it also serves as a symbol of any sin. Flush that down the toilet. Get rid of it in a way that you can’t go back for it. “Face the fear” of the unknown, of the uncomfortable and feel the unbearable weight that was prepared to come crashing down vanish.

Resurface from the water and breathe in the air, breathe in the hope of starting again, of being free from that pain and suffering of drowning.

I absolutely love this song, and I hope I’ve done a decent job of explaining it in a somewhat short manner. It’s filled with so much advice on how to combat sin in this life and really gets deep into the feelings that people who are suffering with these incredibly addictive sins such as drugs, porn, etc. feel as they’re trying to turn to God.

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