Phil Wickham got a text from Brian Johnson, of a short voice memo of him humming into his phone and strumming his guitar a little bit, saying, “Hey, Phil, I’ve got this idea, and it’s just a melody”. And he started humming it, and there are just a few lines in there that just kind of reminded me of a hymn. I replied, “what if this was the verse and we just made this song really verse heavy like a hymn and just had a refrain”, and he loved that idea. We didn’t know what we were going to call it. At first, it was going to be called, “Heart Deep”, like, your love goes heart deep. As we were writing this song, these lyrics about, this unfathomable, uncrossable chasm between our unholiness and God’s holiness, and how Jesus bridged that gap, burst into our darkness. Then the next verse asked the question, “How did he do it”? He did it with the cross, the empty grave, and now he calls me because of what he did.
In the next verse, we decided that we couldn’t just talk about the cross without talking about the resurrection. And then this really special kind of verse came out about the roaring lion rising from the silence of the grave.
Through it all, we just thought there needed to be a different idea, and this idea about his love going heart deep, I think this song is all about God flooding our lives with hope and life. I came across this idea in the scriptures where Peter talks about living hope, you know. We’ve been born again into a living hope, and it really made me kind of start searching into it. What did Peter mean when he said a living hope? What is that translated from, and what is this all about?
You know, the stars are going to fail, but outside of this universe is a God who never will. Another meaning of that living hope is when it enters our life when this hope with Jesus enters our life. It’s not simply a hope that the future is going to get better one day, but it’s a hope that starts coming alive in our actions and our words and our plans and our dreams. It starts forming everything we are, so it becomes a living thing in us. So Brian and I thought, “What a cool statement to Jesus Christ at the end of the ‘Living Hope lyrics’”. It was really one of those songs where it wasn’t, like, man, we need to write a song about living hope. We started unearthing a song that we both felt was really special, and I think a lot of it, too, was Brian helping direct kind of where the lyric was going.
I think there’s a lot of things speaking into this song, and I’m just so thankful for it and for what it’s already become in my church. It’s only been out for a few months at this point and already has so many hundreds of videos from different churches just leading the song. It just brings tears to my eyes, literally. I’m just so thankful for it.
