The headline was short and it stopped me: Chandler Moore and Elevation Worship cracked the Billboard Hot 100 — a first for both. A worship song, sitting on the same chart as everything else people are streaming on their commute, in their earbuds at the gym, over the speakers at a coffee shop somewhere.
I don't know the whole story behind it, and I'm not going to pretend I do. But I know what it means when a song about Jesus turns up in a room nobody organized for Jesus. It means praise got out of the building.
Praise was never meant to stay indoors
There's a line in the Psalms that has always struck me as oddly specific about what happens next:
"He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the LORD and put their trust in him." (Psalm 40:3)
Notice the sequence. God does something in one person. That person starts singing about it. And many — people who were not part of the original story, who weren't in the room when God moved — see it, and something turns over in them, and they trust him too.
David isn't describing a concert. He's describing what a rescued person can't help doing. He had been in the pit, in the mud, and God lifted him out and set his feet on rock, and now there's a song coming out of him that wasn't there before. The song is the evidence. And the evidence travels.
That's why a worship track on a mainstream chart isn't a novelty to me. It's Psalm 40 doing what Psalm 40 does. Somebody sang about what God had done, and the song went further than the singer did.
You already have a new song
Here's where I want to be careful, because it would be easy to read a story like this and file it under "things famous musicians do." It isn't. The new song in Psalm 40 wasn't written by a professional. It was written by a man who had been in trouble and got helped.
If God has done anything in your life — and I'd guess he has, though you may not have said it out loud in a while — you have a song. Maybe it's the marriage that should have ended and didn't. The anxiety that used to run the whole day and now only gets the first ten minutes. The prayer you prayed in your car in the church lot that got answered in a way you couldn't have arranged. The body that got better when the doctors were guarded. The peace that showed up in a week that had no business being peaceful.
I watch the Holy Spirit do things like that in our church now, quietly, on ordinary Tuesdays. Not always loudly. Not always in the timing we asked for. But he does move, and when he does, you're holding evidence.
And here's the thing about evidence: it's no good in a drawer. Most people who come to faith don't come because of a stadium. They come because one person they already trusted said, out loud, let me tell you what God did. That's the chart that matters. That's the song crossing over.
When you can't sing
Some of you are reading this in a stretch where the song is gone. You prayed and the answer hasn't come. The healing didn't happen, or hasn't yet. You're not going to fake a chorus, and I'm not going to ask you to.
Read Psalm 40 again and see that the new song came after the waiting. "I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry." There was a long, wordless stretch first. God was not absent in it. He was listening in it. If you're in the silence today, you are not outside the psalm — you're in the first verse of it. Stay there. Let others sing over you until your own voice comes back. That's part of what a church is for.
Send it further than you can go
Psalm 96 takes it one step out: "Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples." Praise has a direction. It leans outward, toward people who haven't heard yet.
That's exactly the instinct behind Mission Sunday here on October 4 — the conviction that what God has done among us was never meant to stop at our own walls, our own county, our own comfortable circle. A song that ends up somewhere it was never booked, a gift sent to a worker we'll never meet, a testimony told over a fence in Ravenna: same Spirit, same direction.
Jesus is the reason there's a song at all. He came down into the pit with us and carried us out of it, and every new song since is an echo of that one rescue. Let yours be heard.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.