Come all you weary, with your heavy loads, Lay down your burdens find rest for your souls. Cause my yoke is easy and my burden is kind, I’ll take yours upon me and you can take mine.
Come all you weary, move through the earth, You’ve been spurned at fine restaurants and kicked out of church. I’ve got a couple of loaves, so sit down at my feet, Lend me your ears and we’ll break bread and eat.
Come all you weary Come gather ’round near me Find rest for your souls
Come all you weary, crippled you lay, I’ll help you along, you can lay down your canes. We’ve got a long way to go but we’ll travel as friends, The lights growing bright further up, further in.
Come all you weary Come gather ’round near me Find rest for your souls
Rest for your souls
Come all you weary Come gather ’round near me Come all you weary Come gather ’round near me Find rest for your souls Rest for your souls Rest for your souls Rest for your souls
Come All You Weary Thrice The Alchemy Index, Vol. 3 & 4: Air & Earth
Jason Boyett wrote a great post on things that annoy him about “worship” (the first being that people seem to assume that worship only happens during the singing portion of a church service). Anyways, one thing he mentioned has been eating at me for awhile.
Okay.
More like a few years.
Why are the lyrics to many worship songs (and many Christian songs in general) so thoughtless?
One example he uses that I can relate to is the line “Show me Your glory”.
Sounds good, right?
There are several songs with this line or a variation.
I mean, what’s wrong with asking God to show you His glory?
Oh, that’s right. Because when Moses asked God to show him His glory God warned him that it would KILL HIM! (Exodus 33:18-23)
Here’s another example – a song that, while not theologically incorrect, is still annoying because of it’s vagueness. It’s called You Are.
You are the love of my life. You are the hope that I cling to. You mean more than this world to me. I wouldn’t trade You for silver or gold. I wouldn’t trade You for riches untold. You are, You are my everything.
I wouldn’t take one step without You. I could never go on. I couldn’t live one day without You. I don’t have the strength to make it on my own.
You are the love of my life. You are the hope that I cling to. You mean more than this world to me. I wouldn’t trade You for silver or gold. I wouldn’t trade You for riches untold. You are, You are my everything.
Until the world stops turning, until the stars fade from the sky; until the sun stops striving, I’ll need You in my life, and here’s the reason why.
You are the love of my life. You are the hope that I cling to. You mean more than this world to me. I wouldn’t trade You for silver or gold. I wouldn’t trade You for riches untold. You are, You are my everything.
Could those lyrics be describing Jesus?
Yeah.
They could also be describing your prom date.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t sing songs that declare our love for Christ and dependence upon Him. But those songs shouldn’t be vague. Seriously – if the first time I’d heard that song had been on the radio, I would have never associated it with Jesus. I would have thought it was the latest Top 40 love song.
For those who think Les Paul is just the name of Gibson’s flagship electric guitar, you have much to learn.
Les Paul is, or was until this morning, a real person, without whom music would be a VERY different world. Dissatisfied with the acoustic guitars of the day, in 1939 Les Paul created one of the very first solidbody electric guitars (Leo Fender and Adolph Rickenbacher also created their own namesake models during the same time period), nicknamed “The Log”, which was nothing more than a length of common 4″ x 4″ lumber with bridge, guitar neck, and pickup attached. For the sake of appearance, he attached the body of an Epiphone hollow-body guitar, sawn lengthwise with The Log in the middle. This solved the two main problems he had with acoustic guitars: feedback, as the acoustic body no longer resonated with the amplified sound, and sustain, as the energy of the strings was not dissipated in generating sound through the guitar body.
In the 1950’s Gibson Guitar Corporations presented Les Paul with a guitar they designed based on his innovations and the rest is history.
Sort of.
While most think of Les Paul as a electric guitar pioneer, he had many other musical accomplishments and innovations. You can thank Les Paul for recording effects such as overdubbing, tape delay, sound-on-sound delay, phasing and even multi-track recording itself. He is also a Grammy award winner and inspiration to dozens of guitarists across several genres. So next time you’re drooling over that Gibson Les Paul hanging in a music store, remember the man behind that name.
If you don’t follow The Resurgence Blog, you need to. Great posts from a variety of writers like Mark Driscoll, Tim Smith, Matt Johnson, Bob Thune and others.
Anyways, Matt Johnson has written a series of posts called Thoughts on Music for the Media-Gorged and while they’ve all been great, part 5 really spoke to me. One point Johnson made was especially relevant to me, and that is how many Christians take a hardline approach to music and claim that you should only listen to Christian music and that listening to secular music pollutes your mind and soul (can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the “garbage in – garbage out” explanation). Which of course Johnson rebukes by showing how, “if Paul hadn’t “polluted” his mind with pagan poetry, he wouldn’t have had sermon material to work with when he spoke on Mars Hill in Acts 17.”
Johnson also points out that scripture does not give us freedom for freedom’s sake, but that “mature Christians in step with the Spirit can cautiously engage thematically raw music, while not allowing a blank check mentality for sin.”
But that’s just a taste of what Matt Johnson wrote about. Check out part 5 and also the complete series.
This past weekend me and some friends went on a little road trip to Dallas, Texas. Our original plan was to go to the All Hope Is Gone World Tour show featuring Slipknot, Coheed and Cambria and Trivium. Of course, being that close to Fellowship Church, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit and when I found out they have a Saturday night service, I had to go.
Awesome service. Dex and the band did four songs (including Forever, my favorite off the new CD), then Christine Caine shared a powerful message about allowing God to fulfill his promises in and through our lives. Of course, Ed was there, and it was cool to see him in person. Must say, I’m still cracking up every time I think about what he said in reference to churches/pastors that talk trash about other churches because they’re too big, too loud or too progressive They can’t say anything bad about the message being preached but they sure can find fault in the presentation. As Ed put it, “Big steeple, few people.”
Also at Fellowship we hooked up with an old friend of mine, Lance Philips. He moved to the DFW metroplex in 2007 and has been attending Fellowship Church for the last several months. It was great getting to catch up with him. Definitely have to go back now as I know someone in the area other than my relatives.
Anyways, onto Sunday. We stayed at my aunt’s house, so it was cool to catch up with her and my uncle as I haven’t seen them in at least two years. Sunday afternoon we went to Grapevine Mills and had lunch at the Rainforest Cafe. They were even kind enough to make me a Grateful Dead even though they’d never made one before. Luckily, I had my iPhone so I could Google the recipe.
After wandering around the Mills for a couple hours (I lost count of how many sword/knife stores there were) we headed to Grand Prairie for the show. The Nokia Theatre is definitely one of the nicest venues I’ve been in. It isn’t too big (seats a little over 6,000) and feels really intimate, even in the balcony, yet it provides enough ceiling height and floor space to accommodate any band. And being a geek, I had to get a pic of the FOH position. Of course, being Slipknot, they were running Meyer Mica line arrays, Meyer MJ212A monitors and Meyer M2D delays for those of us in the balcony. The lighting was awesome as well. There was one truss above the stage with 20 intelligent lights on it which were used for Trivium and Coheed. Slipknot also used it, but I’ll get to that in a bit. After the show I went down and introduced myself to Dave Nicholls (audio director for Slipknot) and chatted for a bit.
The opening band was Trivium. Before Sunday night I wasn’t much of a fan. I mean, the only song I’d even heard was their cover of Metallica’s Master of Puppets. But they definitely put on a good show and I’m going to check their stuff out now. After Trivium we had a quick set change and then Coheed and Cambria took the stage. I felt so bad for Claudio, as he was having problems with his pedal board or guitar. His guitar tech was still working on the pedalboard in the first song (which, for those interested, was Welcome Home). They finally got the problem solved during the second song. Their final song was the best though – they showed why they deserve to be on a metal show, even though they lean more hard rock. Claudio ripped a solo behind his back, then with his teeth, and to top it all off humped a Mesa double stack while soloing.
And then the curtain lowered. There was no curtain for the Trivium/Coheed set change, so we knew something was up. That something turned out to be a beast of a stage set, six additional lighting trusses, multiple stationary LED’s that were about six feet tall each and two Meyer line arrays used for side fills. And their performance: unbelievable. Slipknot definitely lived up to the hype, as they are consistently voted one of the best live shows year after year.
Slipknot set list (Runnin’ With the Devil was played over the FOH system to warm up the crowd, Iowa and 742617000027 were played over FOH as Slipknot’s intro and ‘Til We Die was played over FOH at the end as Slipknot threw pic, drumheads and drumsticks into the crowd.)
To view some professional photos taken at the concert click here.
