‘Standing before the cross we see simultaneously our worth and unworthiness, since we perceive both the greatness of his love in dying, and the greatness of our sin in causing him to die’ John Stott wrote ‘Our self is a complex entity of good and evil, glory and shame, of creation and fall…we are created, fallen and redeemed, then re-created in God’s image’ …. We need to sing about our worth from God’s perspective, not ours or our cultures, and God’s perspective centres in on the cross. We know that our culture calibrates human worth by measures of wealth and status, skills and achievement, beauty and youth, power and so on, but we don’t always appreciate how deeply those values are ingrained into us and how effective they are in driving our behaviour. From the first occasion it was sung it was clear that the theme resonated powerfully as people began to join in.
The song went through numerous drafts and redrafts, but eventually it settled. I made several attempts over several years to let loose that big idea, but during a writing session with Keith and Kristyn Getty I bounced my seed idea off them and the process began. It is a theme I have explored before in songs, in fact one of my earliest performance songs is called ‘How much do you think you are worth’, but here it came again and I saw a congregational song in potential. Some years ago I was struck by the simple phrase ‘My worth is not in what I own’ and sensed a ‘big idea’ in waiting. Like the sculptor running their fingers over a rough block of marble and laying out their tools, or a potter feeling the weight and texture of a fresh lump of wet clay, the imagination has to see something that doesn’t yet exist. Lyricists are always on the lookout for a big idea, a concept or phrase that might just have a song hidden inside it.
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