Stories Behind the Songs - January 25, 2009

"Sing to the King"

This song was written by Billy James Foote. The song is based upon the hymn by Charles S. Horne. Here are the original words penned in 1910. Notice the similarity between Horne's words and Billy's adaptation of the song.

Sing we the King Who is coming to reign,
Glory to Jesus, the Lamb that was slain.
Life and salvation His empire shall bring,
Joy to the nations when Jesus is King.
Refrain: Come let us sing, praise to our King,
Jesus our King, Jesus our King,
This is our song, who to Jesus belong:
Glory to Jesus, to Jesus our King.

Billy and his wife Cindy live in San Antonio. Billy started leading worship in 1990, right out of college. Back then Christiandom didn't demand bands. They were satisfied with simplicity. Billy played his guitar and led worship by himself until several years later. He added a drummer (Joe McArthur) first and then a bass player (Shawn Skeen) and then Cindy joined in with vocals in 2001. Sometime around the year 2000 Billy began having vocal trouble which turned out to be a neurological condition called hyper-disphonia. There's really no cure for this condition. So Cindy began singing more of the lead vocals over time. Though Cindy sings most of the songs, Billy is still the person giving direction to the worship time and, of course, he writes most of the songs the band plays. Billy began song writing in the late 1990's. He's written several well known songs including:"Break Our Hearts", "Goodness and Mercy", "You Are My King (Amazing Love)", "Sing to the King", "I Have a River", "Die the Death", "You Are God Alone (not a god)", "You Are Welcome Here" and "Welcome to the Cross".

Learn more about Billy's ministry on his myspace website & ministry website:
www.myspace.com/billyfooteband

Learn more about Billy's ministry here:
www.billyfoote.com/

Here is a version of the song led by Kristian Stanfill, a worship leader out of Atlanta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zX2nWXGYeA&fmt=18

"Everlasting God"
This story behind the song "Everlasting God" is excerpted from an interview that Brenton Brown (one of the writers of this song) did with Worship Leader magazine:

The worship teams needed prayer. Fearless, and forward thinking, Brenton Brown led them out of Oxford on a cold and rainy afternoon. It was about six years ago when he was the worship pastor at his church in England. And like any good leader, he planned a worship weekend getaway. In Whales. Brenton, however, isn’t from England. Looking at the distance on the map and allowing for what he felt was a reasonable estimation of the time/distance ratio, the South African native overshot his allotted travel time by about five hours. It rained. They were hungry. They were disparaged by some Welsh locals who weren’t too excited to share their pub with a bunch of musicians from their neighboring country. Pulling into the campsite, well past midnight, having to let go of the plans he had for the first evening, Brown decided to do the safe thing.

“I said to my team, ‘Why don’t we just pray before bedtime and we can all go to sleep.’ I was hoping everyone would wake up in a better mood in the morning,” says Brown. “I brought along a lot of percussion instruments because I have a very short attention span. Most of the people I work with are the same way. So I handed out the instruments and asked everyone to pray for the weekend, and while we were praying we played the drums. “Pretty soon we really got into it-we felt the presence of the Lord. Some of the people started playing the guitar, just one chord with the rhythm. Because we were all tired and it was the end of a long week, the words ‘Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord’ just came out of my mouth. That’s where it started. We sang it for like 20 minutes, there was nothing else to the song.”

Phase Two
Most of us came into contact with Brenton Brown through the Vineyard releases in England that took a big role in the worship movement in that country. His songs include “Lord Reign in Me,” “All Who Are Thirsty,” “Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing).” And it was during that time in the UK that he led the weekend retreat where the chorus to “Everlasting God” was birthed. But the song came to full fruition through the experiences of daily living. A couple of years after writing the chorus, both Brenton and his wife were diagnosed with a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Among the many features of CFS, one of them is severe mental and physical exhaustion from even small amounts of exertion, and sleep does little to alleviate it.

“Some songs for me come out of tears and strong emotion and those songs come out very quick,” says Brown. “And some songs come through study and, I guess the Pentecostal in me would say, the revelation of the character of God. It’s the truth about God, knowing and studying who He is and what He reveals to us through Scripture. ‘Everlasting God’ was a bit of both. It wasn’t like I got a word in the night and woke up and I heard God say, ‘Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord.’ It wasn’t one of those special moments. I mean I do remember people praying that over me. Of course, the danger with suffering from a chronic illness without being healed is you grow cold to some words. But I was pretty intentional about it. This is God’s promise to us. However it works out, however he chooses to bring His strength. He hasn’t chosen the way I would have chosen, so to sing those words, for me, it’s almost a redeeming action. This is where I am at, this is the truth of God, and this is His promise. He will look after my wife and me, and he will carry us through this time.”

Life Lessons
The chorus of the song comes from Isaiah 40:28, “Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and His understanding no one can fathom” (NIV). As a chapter in the Bible that is significant in Brown’s life, it makes sense that it would come out in his lyrics. He worked on the song with a friend who led the Youth For Christ band in England, and they basically filled the guitar parts with the verse and pre-chorus. After that it got shelfed again until Brown started working on his first solo record.

“I wanted to have that song on there,” he says. “It was a prayer that I was praying daily: ‘God you’ve got to help us. You may not be tired, but we really are tired, we need your help.’”

In a bit of a cryptic way, God’s answer to Brown’s plea for strength was, “I am the everlasting God.” “Most of my songs are basically an exploration of our two basic prayers: thank you and please,” explains Brown. “So my please in this song is give me strength, and God’s response is I’m the everlasting God. So before we got the final melody I kind worked up lyrically where I wanted it go. The second half of the pre-chorus we had the sense that God can help us. And then the chorus is ‘You are the everlasting God.’ That’s the punch line to the chapter in Isaiah; it explains God’s qualities as a deliverer. And then, ‘You’re the defender of the weak, you comfort those in need’ are thoughts taken from the Psalms and from the same chapter in Isaiah: ‘speak comfort to my people.’ ‘He lifts us up on wings like eagles,’ again from Isaiah 40.”

Writing Chops
The process that powered the writing of “Everlasting God” was an intentional fusion of head and heart. The rhythm and feel draws you in, but to get the true punch of the song, you have to be tracking with it. Learning valuable lessons as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, that simply became a way for Brown to approach his songs. “When I’m writing a song I kind of need to know what the point is,” he says. “In my second year of university one of my professors would give us one or two paragraphs and he’d ask us to work up the arguments. He wanted us to identify the steps in the argument and there’s a language and vocabulary used for this. Basically in an argument there are pre-clauses or clauses-a statement that backs up the argument-and at a certain point in the argument there is a completion. So it’s A and B, maybe C and D, therefore E. Those are the points of the argument. So when I write a song a like this, I need to know the point of it. What do we want to sing about? What truths of our God do we need to affirm? What truths of our life do we need to affirm? And then why is that true?

“I mean it’s not a complicated song. Lyrically it’s quite short. But in the end, I felt like we made this one strong point, why don’t we just stick to that? And hopefully it’s enough. That’s the cool thing about congregational songs. The temptation is so go, well I can’t find a really good, simple melody or lyric, so I’m just going to make a very complicated one. At least I’ve got my complexity if it doesn’t work out. The challenge is to risk going as simple as you can for the sake of the song.”

No Need
This simple, single-verse song is profound in its proclamation of God’s attributes and it is a promise that strength will come. Possibly even more so knowing that it comes from the pen of an artist who will always struggle with feeling a lack of strength. It’s a proclamation that requires our faith and also renews our hope. “Our hope is that He is near, and that not only is He strong, but He cares,” says Brown. “The Scripture says our God is powerful and compassionate. This is God that we serve. This is what He’s like. For me that’s where the joy comes from.”

Here is a video of Brenton Brown leading the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGPTK24hQxc

"What A Friend We Have in Jesus"

Joseph Scriven was born in 1819 of prosperous parents in Dublin, Ireland. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. At the age of twenty-five he decided to leave his native country and migrate to Canada. His reasons for leaving his family and country seem to be two-fold: the religious influence of the Plymouth Brethren upon his life estranging him from his family and the accidental drowning of his fiancee the night before their scheduled wedding.

From that time Scriven developed a totally different pattern of life. He took the Sermon on the Mount literally. It is said that he gave freely of his limited possessions, even sharing the clothing from his own body, if necessary, and never once refused to help anyone who needed it. Ira Sankey tells in his writings of the man who, seeing Scriven in the streets of Port Hope, Ontario, with his sawbuck and saw, asked, "Who is that man? I want him to work for me." The answer was, "You cannot get that man; he saws wood only for poor widows and sick people who cannot pay." Because of this manner of life Scriven was respected but was considered to be eccentric by those who knew him.

"What a Friend We Have in Jesus" was never intended by Scriven for publication. Upon learning of his mother's serious illness and unable to be with her in far-off Dublin, he wrote a letter of comfort enclosing the words of this text. Some time later when he himself was ill, a friend who came to call on him chanced to see the poem scribbled on scratch paper near the bed. The friend read it with keen interest and asked Scriven if he had written the words. Scriven, with typical modesty, replied, "The Lord and I did it between us." In 1869 a small collection of his poems was published. It was simply entitled Hymns and Other Verses.

After the death of Joseph Scriven, also by accidental drowning, the citizens of Port Hope, Ontario, erected a monument on the Port Hope-Peterborough Highway, which runs from Lake Ontario, with the text and these words inscribed: Four miles north, in Pengally's Cemetery, lies the philanthropist and author of this great masterpiece, written at Port Hope, 1857. The composer of the music, Charles C. Converse, was a well-educated versatile and successful Christian, whose talents ranged from law to professional music. Under the pen name of Karl Reden, he wrote numerous scholarly articles on many subjects. Though he was an excellent musician and composer with many of his works performed by the leading American orchestras and choirs of his day, his life is best remembered for this simple music so well suited to Scriven's text.

Ira D. Sankey discovered the hymn in 1875, just in time to include it in his well-known collection, Sankey's Gospel Hymns Number One. Later Sankey wrote, "The last hymn which went into the book became one of the first in favor."

Quoted from "101 Hymn Stories" by Kenneth Osbeck.

Enjoy this version by Bart Millard, the lead singer of MercyMe, from his hymns album, "Hymned Again."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w55gVIT7s0w