The Story Behind the Song
Don Moen has written or co-written more than a hundred worship songs, including “God Will Make a Way,” “Arise,” “Blessed Be the Name of the Lord,” “Hallelujah to the Lamb,” “I Offer My Life,” “Mighty Is Our God,” “I Want to Be Where You Are,” and “I Will Sing.” He has led worship on every continent except Antarctica, recorded dozens of albums, and won numerous Dove Awards (honors by the Gospel Music Association for outstanding achievements and excellence in the Christian music industry).
But all those accolades and accomplishments are not what he wants to be known for. “If you ask Don Moen why God put him on this planet, he’ll tell you, ‘To be an architect who designs products and events that help people experience God’s presence in a new and fresh way.’”
“I Will Sing” was birthed from one of those new ways that God revealed Himself to Don. He had been on a week-long writing retreat, trying to get new material for an upcoming album. In an interview (click here to hear that full 4-minute interview), he stated his thinking going in to that week: “I really desperately need God to meet me in those times, ‘cause I don’t have a lot of time, God. I just need you to meet me here.”
However, at the end of the retreat, he had no new music. He said, “I was so disappointed because I had been doing some fasting and praying and I really thought God was gonna just pour out all kinds of great songs. I drove away from that week…with nothing. Really, really nothing. And I was so disappointed. I was disappointed in God because He didn’t answer my prayer.”
Have you ever felt like Don Moen did at that time? Like “the heavens over your head [are] bronze, and the earth under you [is] iron” (Deuteronomy 28:23)? Have you ever echoed King David’s words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?… Be not far from me” (Psalm 22:1, 11).
As Don drove back from the retreat, he voiced to God his sense of being separated from Him. He jotted down his honest thoughts and told himself, “When I get home I’ll crumple up the paper and throw it away because one day when I die I didn’t want anybody to find those words and say, ‘Oh my goodness, Don had some major issues. He’s saying God is a long way away and I thought he was so close to God.’”
But Don didn’t throw that paper away. Instead, he took those painfully authentic lyrics and set them to music. Then he faced another problem—what was he going to do with the song? He thought that churches would not want to sing a song about feeling distant from God; wouldn’t that show a lack of faith? Didn’t people come to church to leave feeling better than they did when they came in?
With some trepidation he shared “I Will Sing” with some close friends, and their responses were affirming. They said that they also had times like that—seasons of feeling out of fellowship with God—and that the church needed to be able to sing that truth as much as they sang other truths about God’s power and mercy and worthiness to receive praise.
The prophet Habakkuk lived and ministered just before the time that Jerusalem was invaded by the Babylonians. He saw a people who seemed to go from bad to worse with impunity, and he couldn’t understand how God was working. His short book details his questions and God’s answers. First, he asked why the evil in Judah seemed to go unpunished (1:2-4). God answered that the Babylonians would be His instrument of justice (1:5-11), which brought up Habakkuk’s second question: How could a just God use a morally reprehensible nation like Babylon to punish His own people (1:12-2:1)? God answered that, after they had served His purpose, Babylon would get its due recompense, and the truly faithful would be rewarded (2:2-20).
Habakkuk then ended his book with a prayer confessing his trust in God. At the conclusion he said that, regardless of his circumstances, he would sing. “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (3:17-18). If he had lived 2,600 years later, he might have written: “I will sing, I will praise. Even in my darkest hour, through the sorrow and the pain, I will sing.”
Will you?
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Anastasia Music 