James’s Blog: Now That’s What James Calls Worship #5.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about music, so here’s another one of my worship picks. The song is ‘Everlasting’ and the band is Juggernautz.

In my first post in this series I mentioned that you’d probably be hearing from Mortal again, and here we are. Juggernautz includes Jyro Xhan and Jerome Fontamillas, who are also the geniuses behind Mortal. Musically, it’s less heavy and more reminiscent of Fold Zandura (another Jyro & Jerome project) but it still bears some of the hallmarks of Mortal, most notable in the lyrical excellence. For example…

Fade away, we fade away

If not for divine intervention’s sake.

Your power restores the soul,

And Your voice commands the machines of fate.

I would love to be singing something like ‘And Your voice commands the machines of fate’ on a Sunday morning. There’s not much good poetry in contemporary worship these days.

Typically, when a worship song mentions our response to who God is, it’s framed in terms of what we do – and it’s usually a reference to the act of worship itself: ‘God is X, so I will sing/praise/dance…’, that type of thing. As someone who is barely musical at all, I find that hard to relate to. ‘Everlasting’, however, frames even our response to God in terms of who God is. The line ‘Don’t let my vision conceal the truth: who You are’ is nigh on perfect as far as I am concerned. The sentiment is: Your greatness requires a response from me, and whatever it ends up being, don’t let it – no matter how well-intentioned – actually work against revealing who You are. Simply put, the closer I get to God, the more concerned with God I become. It’s an even better line when paired with its tweaked twin at the end of the song, ‘Let my redemption reveal the truth of who You are’.

You’re probably getting an idea now of the sort of thing I appreciate in my worship songs, and it’s not just to do with the style of music. I’ll try and think of something really interesting to cover next time…