You Take My Rights Away

Album: Invincible (2000)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song explores the notion of happiness as a Christian. Skillet frontman John Cooper explained in a Listenin.org interview: "'You Take My Rights Away' was an interesting song because there's lots of different facets to the idea. One of them is that it is freeing when, I believe, you find God and all of a sudden you find purpose in life, when you've never had purpose in life - it's everything. But the revelation that I felt I had when I wrote that song was that for so many years growing up in church, I had been told over and over and over basically that God wants me to be happy, and God wants this... and all of a sudden I just kind of realized, you know what? God's ultimate agenda for my life is not that I'm happy, it's that I do what He tells me to do. And I am happy being a Christian, it's kind of like ... it's a result of being a Christian as happiness, but I think true joy comes when you know that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. So that's what 'You Take My Rights Away' is, it's a bit of a radical concept. I heard someone else talk about it, is where I got it from, so I didn't make it up, haha."

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