A fun family song to help memorise the names of the twelve disciples and a little bit more besides.
Ken Spence
Leeds UK
The 12 song challenge was to write a theme song for your church. This is mine and hopefully it should be applicable to any church. After all surely it is our mission to share Christ's love by means of a big dose of the fruits of the Spirit.
The song that took the 2023 Resound Worship song-writing retreat by storm. You may listen and ask why.
I often travel by train from Leeds to London for work and the train journey can be a fertile place for songwriting inspiration. This is one example. The song is really about how God sees us, through the light of His glory. That’s a very different picture to the one we most probably have of ourselves. God sees us as we can be, a perfect creation …. Let that sink in!
Once we start seeing ourselves as God sees us it is much easier to be that person and become the embodiment of His Kingdom, sharing His amazing unconditional love and praising Him through everything we do. To be able to love others as God loves us it helps if we can first love ourselves in the way God does.
A song about how God talks to us. If you are envious of people who relate stories of how God has spoken to them, join the club. That type of thing can be both encouraging and discouraging prompting us to think “why doesn’t God talk to me like that?” Perhaps God does and we just don’t recognise the voice.
Perhaps we are expecting thunderclaps and flashing light bulbs? Hmm …... I know God speaks to me but I often don’t realise it until some time afterwards when I have an “Oh, yeah” moment and often I don’t realise it at all.
The reality is that the Holy Spirit is whispering to us all the time “help that person, share your bread, your friend needs a hug etc etc”. And “shock, horror” the Spirit whispers to everyone, not just Christians. But the biggest revelation to me was that God speaks to us all the time through every part of his creation.
Listen to your own heartbeat and there is a whisper of God. “Every breath we take, every single heartbeat, every smile in the street” is a whisper of God’s voice. Wow!!!!!
This song is simply a prayer to ask the Holy Spirit to enable us to let go of all the stuff that prevents us from experiencing the full power of His presence.
Whether we come from a traditional or charismatic church background we can have cultural baggage which gets in the way of us genuinely releasing ourselves to the Spirit’s work in us. From either background there is a pressure to conform to what we think is the accepted norm and also to judge others around us on that basis.
Worshipping in Spirit and truth is a place where what happens is between us and God, the actions of others…. well that’s between them and God. What happens next? Well that’s between you and God. My prayer in this song is that you are able to let go of all your baggage and inhibitions and let the Spirit work in you.
The more I discover about God the more I am amazed by the depth of love and freedom the LORD gives us. I also realise how we carry around a great deal of baggage emanating from what I call ‘bad church’; our received cultural heritage of “what the bible says” rather than a true understanding of what it really does say and mean. This song is about one particular issue that we may carry some hang-ups about - confession.
Being brought up as an Ulster protestant it is not surprising that I might see confession as a ritual to keep us feeling bad and fallen and under the thumb of a controlling church, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Confession is a fantastic gift from our loving God who only wants us to be set free. There is nothing we can do that could make God love us less, we just think there is. We carry hurt, self-loathing, all sorts of pain, and Jesus simply says, “Give it to Me, I will take it away and release you from it”. That is what confession is for, to release us. We never have to be ‘good enough’ because Jesus is. Give all the rubbish you carry up to him, He’ll take it all and it is gone. And it isn’t a contractual arrangement where we have to confess it for Christ to take it away. We are forgiven already, the confessing is for us to surrender the hurt, pain, and wrong, so that we can let it go too and be released from it. So whatever it is that you are carrying, give it up to Jesus and just bask in His love.
About me
Originally from Northern Ireland, Ken has been writing songs for nearly 50 years and leading worship for most of that time too. In the last decade his worship song-writing has taken off and some of the many songs he has since written are showcased here.
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