When you sing a song, do you pay attention to what you are
actually singing? In church, as you worship God through song, do you think
about the meaning behind the words you utter? If you don’t, you should. Lyrics
are powerful things—words set to music that emblazon themselves in our minds
and resonate in our hearts. It would do us well to consider them carefully.
Hopefully, the music leader at your church chooses songs
whose lyrics proclaim truth and reflect an accurate understanding of God and
man. Even in such songs, though, sometimes there can be lines that are puzzling
and require us to think a little deeper to fully understand their meaning. I
touched on one of these lines from the hymn “Jesus Paid It All” a few weeks
ago, and today I’d like to look at a more modern song, “Here I Am to Worship.”
There’s a line in the bridge that reads, “I’ll never know
how much it cost to see my sin upon that cross.” One day several years ago, as
I sang this song with the congregation at church, I suddenly realized that these
lyrics didn’t seem to make much sense at face value. I had sung that line
countless times before but was just then truly thinking about what it said.
Why was I singing I would never know how much it cost for my
sin to be placed on Jesus at the cross? I knew exactly what it cost. It cost
Jesus His life. It cost Him His fellowship with the Father. Scripture shows us
this. So what could that lyric be talking about?
I kept thinking.
I knew cognitively what the price of my sin is—“the wages of
sin is death” (Rom. 6:23)—and that Jesus paid that price for me so that I don’t
have to. Ah, wait.
He paid it so that I
don’t have to.
Maybe that was the key. Yes, cognitively I knew how much it
cost for my sin to be placed on Jesus at the cross, but experientially I’ll
never know how much it cost—because He took my punishment.
In ruminating on that simple line, I came to have a much
deeper realization of and appreciation for Jesus’s work on the cross. While
it’s true that His death was about much more than simply saving individual
souls (it was about restoring all of
the broken relationships that resulted from the Fall—those between God and man,
between man and creation, between man and man, and between man and himself),
it’s not untrue that it does have profound, eternal implications for individual
souls.
Not the least of these is the possibility His death creates
for us to escape the wrath of God, because it involved the pouring out of God’s
wrath on His own Son, who had taken on the sin of the entire world across all time.
So now, when we repent from our sin and believe in Jesus’s
perfect life, substitutionary death, and victorious resurrection, not only are
we are free to live an abundant life honoring to Christ, having been released
from the bondage to sin in which we are born, but also we can say with
confidence that we will never have to know the full extent of the punishment we
deserve.
What a blessing—one whose magnitude, by the grace of God, we will never
fully comprehend.
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