Your Mercy

Album: Your Mercy (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • This confessional song is an acknowledgment that when we mess up, God's mercy is still there. Paul Baloche told NewReleaseToday the story of the song:

    "We were at a songwriting retreat at Camp Harvest with the Harvest Bible Church and Vertical Church Band worship teams and others a couple of hours north of Chicago. We spent a couple of days praying, worshiping and eating, and we split up half the days with other songwriters.

    One of the days we happened to choose this little spot over by a lake. It's a pretty rustic setting, and I was with Andi Rozier and Jonathan Smith. We were sharing ideas from our journals back and forth with each other. The idea of the song opens with confessing our testimonies to the Lord. Andi and I have similar testimonies. We grew up outside of the church and had our conversion experience with the Lord in our late teens and early twenties, when we had our coming to Christ transformation moments. In our conversations about that is where the first few lines of the song came from. 'I once was lost' opens the song, like the hymn 'Amazing Grace.'

    Instead of immediately saying 'I once was lost and now I'm found,' we go a little bit deeper into the transformation story and the process by not immediately expressing being found, but with a similar acknowledgment like in 'Amazing Grace' where we allow the story to go a little deeper and then express our gratitude for God's mercy."
  • Baloche incorporates Romans 2 verse 4 on the bridge:

    Or do you show contempt for the riches of His kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance? (NIV version)

    He explained: "I've wanted to include the Romans 2:4 Scripture in a song, and originally I thought it was going to be the chorus, but in this song it is the bridge: His mercy and His kindness leads us to repentance. We bring it down really quiet with almost no music there and sing in almost a whisper, 'Your loving-kindness leads me to repentance.'

    As the song builds, we offer that prayer to the church, 'Lord, let Your kindness, let it lead us to repentance.' It is a collective expression when we go into that final chorus. That's how I picture it as a songwriter. It starts off personal and intimate and confessional and ultimately brings in the community to join in the prayer together, and it goes from personal to corporate."

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