Casting Crowns - A Live Worship ExperienceSample

Great Are You Lord

A worship song needs to say something, obviously, but the music needs to say it too. A lot of times, a song has great lyrics but the music doesn’t effectively communicate them. This is not one of those songs. Everything about this song projects a desperation to offer gratitude to God. When I sing it, I’m left with the realization that nothing is mine, God owes me nothing, and if he never blessed me again I’d still be singing this song because even the breath in my lungs belongs to him.

Sometimes I think the most piercing messages are the simplest ones, like this song. The book of Revelation records several worship songs that we will sing in heaven, but the one that sticks in my head reads simply, “Holy, holy, holy are you Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come.”

When I sing worship songs, a visual often pops in my head, especially when I hear the words Holy, Holy, Holy: Here we are kneeling before the throne of God, and I see our worship as waves crashing against the base of Christ’s throne as he sits on it. Nobody has to tell the waves to do that. They keep coming and never stop. They just lap against the shore and lap against the shore and lap against the shore, forever without end. This song was one of the first ones to prompt that visual as I worshipped, and I think it’s the rhythm of the lyric, “And we pour out our praise, we pour out our praise….”

In our workaday world, we’re in such a hurry to get things finished and move on in life. But I visualize that picture when I sing this song because we’re so small and so tiny and our waves don’t even get up to his toes, but it’s everything we have to offer. And to say that even the breath in my lungs belongs to God is to get past what he’s done for me. It’s beyond the thought that I worship God only because he helped me with this or healed me of that. While that may be true, the greater truth is the simplest message of all: The only reason I’m sucking air through my nose right now is to point to Christ.