Blessed Be The Name of The LORD

It´s really a song born out of the whole of ´life´, a realisation that we will all face seasons of pain or unease. And in these seasons we will need to find our voice before God. The church (and indeed the world) needs its songs of lament.
A few weeks after 9/11, we wrote the worship song ´Blessed be Your Name´. It wasn´t written consciously in response to those dark events, but no doubt being immersed in the spiritual and emotional climate of those days was an important factor in birthing it. Many people ask if there was a particular life event which triggered off the writing of this song, and in all truth the answer is no. It´s really a song born out of the whole of ´life´, a realisation that we will all face seasons of pain or unease. And in these seasons we will need to find our voice before God. The church (and indeed the world) needs its songs of lament.

The people of God have always had their laments. The Psalms are filled with a whole host of intense emotions and expressions towards God. So many of them were birthed in times of suffering and struggle. Psalm 3 was written as King David fled for his life from his own son Absalom. Psalm 56 was inspired when the Philistines seized him in Gath. In Psalm 57 he´s on the run again, this time from King Saul, and wrote the song whilst hiding in a cave. These are songs formed in the fire of affliction. They are the desperate cries of a worshipper on the road marked with suffering. In fact, Eugene Peterson estimates that around 70% of content in the Psalms is lament-based.

Clearly therefore, songs of lament are a very biblical thing to sing in worship. Yet they are also a relevant thing to sing, for we live in a world full of anguish and heartache. As Christians, yes we live in victory, but in paradox we also exist as strangers in a foreign land, aching for home, and knowing deep within us that the world we see before is not as it should be. So the question is this: if songs of lament are firstly thoroughly biblical, and secondly extremely relevant, then why on earth are there not more songs to help us voice these heart-cries? As Frederich W. Schmidt Jr writes, these Psalms do three things:

´They give us permission to ask our own questions about suffering. They model the capacity to ask questions we might otherwise suppress, but can never escape. And they model how those questions might be asked without fear of compromising our relationship with God or with other people.´


Matt and Beth Redman