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Why Jesus Doesn’t Want Our PR

By on December 13, 2019 in —Leading a Congregation, —Songs of Lament

An online Forbes article says the aim of a public relations (PR) firm is “promoting clients and making them seem as successful, honest, important, exciting or relevant as possible.” The keyword in that definition is seem. If you work for a PR company, it really doesn’t matter whether or not your clients are actually “successful, honest, important, or exciting.” Your job is just to make other people think they are. When it comes to leading songs that direct our thoughts and affections to Jesus on Sunday mornings, our task couldn’t be more different. We don’t have to make stuff up about Jesus or pretend he’s something he’s not. God wants …

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Dealing with Darkness at Christmas

By on December 23, 2016 in —Christmas, —Family

It seems each Christmas I hear more people talk about how difficult this time can be for those who are suffering, depressed, or struggling with loss. Posts like When Darkness Falls at Christmas, What Grieving People Wish You Knew at Christmas, and The Problem with Our Holly Jolly Christmas Songs remind us that in spite of the parties, sentimental commercials, holiday greetings, and family reunions, all is not “calm and bright.” For many of us, Christmas is troubled and dark. My daughter, Brittany Hope, has had a tender heart for those kinds of people for years. A wife whose husband’s life was snuffed out too early. A young couple burying …

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Who Would Have Dreamed?

By on December 21, 2015 in —Christmas, —Sovereign Grace Music, —Worship and Christ

Who would have dreamed or ever foreseen that we could hold God in our hands? That question comes from a song I wrote last year with my good friend, Jason Hansen, called “Who Would Have Dreamed?” for our album Prepare Him Room. We were trying to express the amazing miracle of the Incarnation. Theologian J.I. Packer says the Christmas event of Christ’s birth is where the “profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. . . . Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.” Nothing in fiction is so fantastic. That means stories of Santa Claus, elves, Grinches, sugar plum fairies, and ghosts …

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From the Archives: Sentimentalizing, Sanitizing, and Spiritualizing Christmas

By on December 18, 2014 in —Christmas, —Worship and Christ

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to overstate the significance of the Incarnation. Writers, philosophers, poets, and composers through the centuries have searched in vain for words that adequately capture the wonder, mystery, beauty, and power of Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us. The miracle and meaning of the Incarnation can be so difficult to grasp that we can give up and start to view Christmas in ways that leave us impoverished and unimpressed with the real story. Even in the church our songs and reflections about about Christmas can fail to leave people gasping in amazement or humbled in awe that God would come to dwell among us. Sometimes …

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O Come, O Come Emmanuel [Studio Sessions]

By on December 6, 2014 in —Christmas, —Sovereign Grace Music

Here’s the fifth installment of studio session videos from our Christmas album, Prepare Him Room. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel has a rich and varied history. The tune originated somewhere in 15th century France, while the lyrics have their origins in the centuries old O Antiphons, sung or recited by some Catholics and Anglicans at Vespers from December 17 to December 23. Each verse of the carol focuses on a different title for Christ. Depending on which version you sing, we hail Christ as Emmanuel, Rod of Jesse, Dayspring, Key of David, Desire of Nations, Wisdom, and Lord of Might. The most common version of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel was …

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The Songwriting Process – Prepare Him Room

By on November 17, 2014 in —Songwriting, —Sovereign Grace Music

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Neil DeGraide, Steve Cook, and my son, Devon, to talk about different aspects of our new Christmas album, Prepare Him Room. One topic we discussed was the songwriting process. Songs rarely come instantaneously. And that can be an encouraging thought for someone currently in the midst of writing a song that sounds remarkably mediocre. When we hear a song on an album we have no idea of the dozens of hours of labor, thought, editing, prayer, conversation, and study that went into it. We only hear the finished product. So in the video below we take time to talk about some of the things that went into …

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“O Holy Night” Revisited

By on November 3, 2014 in —Christmas, —Songwriting, —Sovereign Grace Music

A few years ago, my friend, Kevin Hartnett, wrote two new verses for the classic and well-loved carol, “O Holy Night.” We ended up recording his version on our new album, Prepare Him Room. We called it O Holy Night (Hear the Gospel Story). Any time you mess with a “classic and well-loved” carol, you’re bound to get some questions. Why change something that has been popular for so many years? Why fix what ain’t broke? The original lyrics for “O Holy Night” were written in 1847 by Placide Capeau, a Frenchman, at the request of his parish priest. The author was so encouraged by what he had written that he asked his Jewish friend and composer, …

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Prepare Him Room Releases Today!

By on September 29, 2014 in —Christmas, —Sovereign Grace Music

In June of 2013 I received an email from my friend, Marty Machowski. Marty serves on the pastoral team of Covenant Fellowship Church, a Sovereign Grace Church near Philadelphia. He has writes children’s books and devotionals, most notably The Gospel Story Bible. Marty asked me if Sovereign Grace Music wanted to produce an album to accompany an Advent devotional and curriculum he had written for New Growth Press. I was instantly intrigued by the idea. Our first and only Christmas album, Savior: Celebrating the Mystery of God Become Man, came out in 2006 and I thought we were long overdue for another Christmas project. Marty’s devotional had …

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The Unbelievable – Acoustic Preview

By on September 22, 2014 in —Christmas, —Sovereign Grace Music, Videos

This coming Monday, Sept. 29, our second Christmas album, Prepare Him Room, is coming out. And we’re pretty excited. I’ve been breaking all my rules for “no Christmas music before Thanksgiving” and loving it. In preparation for the album, we’ve put together four acoustic videos to preview some of the songs. They aren’t the versions that went on the album, but they give you an idea of what to expect. The Unbelievable is the fourth video we recorded, written by my good friends Steve and Vikki Cook. We’re so familiar with nativities, carols, and the Christmas story, that we often lose the sense of awe, wonder, and amazement that the incarnation …

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Prepare Him Room – A Video Preview

By on September 9, 2014 in —Christmas, —Sovereign Grace Music, Videos

This is the third video we put together in anticipation of our upcoming Christmas album, Prepare Him Room: Celebrating the Birth of Jesus in Song, due out Sept. 29. It’s the title track, Prepare Him Room, and was written by Rebecca Elliott and Dave Fournier. They started it at our songwriter retreat back in January and after a number of revisions came up with the current version. Here are some thoughts from Dave on how the song came to be: One helpful brainstorming strategy, when songwriting, is to start with potential titles. When we worked on Grace Has Come, for instance, a reading through the text yielded twenty or so titles that I thought …

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He Who is Mighty – Video Preview

By on August 18, 2014 in —Christmas, —Sovereign Grace Music

I know it’s a little early to be talking about Christmas songs, but the last few weeks I’ve been listening to the tracks of our upcoming album, Prepare Him Room. I am so excited for you to hear these songs. We’ll be releasing the digital album on Sept 29 (not Sept 1 as I previously wrote) and the physical CD at the same time. As I explained in an earlier post, this album came about through the request of my good friend, Marty Machowski. He had written an Advent curriculum and devotional, Prepare Him Room, and wondered if we wanted to record an album to accompany it. We were more than happy to do so. In anticipation of the full release …

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New Christmas CDs (and One Old One)

By on November 5, 2008 in —Music Reviews, —Song Downloads, —Sovereign Grace Music

Christianity Today offers a review of twenty Christmas CDs that are new this year. Hard to believe that many are being published. Artists include Travis Cottrell, Sara Groves, Fernando Ortega, Shane & Shane, and more. I hope to post any songs I find that may be worth considering. If you haven’t heard Sovereign Grace’s Christmas CD, Savior: Celebrating the Mystery of God Become Man, you can preview samples at the Sovereign Grace Music site. We put this CD together a few years ago to add to the songs that glory in the Incarnation of our Savior. You can download the whole CD for 6 bucks at the Sovereign Grace store, purchase it  for 8 bucks, …

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Should We Even Celebrate Christmas?

By on December 6, 2005 in —Christmas

I wanted to respond to a question I received in case anyone else had a similar thought. Whit asked if we should even focus on Christmas. He wrote, “As C.H. Spurgeon (one of my spiritual heroes) said about Christmas in his sermon on 24/Dec/1871, “We have no superstitious regard for times and seasons. Certainly we do not believe in the present ecclesiastical arrangement called Christmas. First because we do not believe in any mass at all, but abhor it, whether it be sung in Latin or in English: Secondly, because we find no scriptural warrant whatever for observing any day as the birthday of the Savior; and consequently, its observance is a superstition, …

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