Love Songs

Some worship songs published in recent years are focussed on striving for greater intimacy with Jesus. Here are a few, with samples of the lyrics:

"Hungry" - 

Hungry I come to you for I know you satisfy / I am empty, but I know Your love does not run dry / So I wait for you

I'm falling on my knees / offering all of me / Jesus, You're all this heart is living for

"Breathe" - 

This is the air I breathe / Your holy presence living in me

And I'm desperate for You / And I, I'm lost without You

"Where You Are" - 

In this quiet place again, / I can hear You on the wind / whispering to me

In this quiet place again, / I have found a friend / who understand me

Where You are / Is where I want to be / In your arms / You will comfort me

Far away from everything I used to be / You know I have come so far to be where you are

"Draw Me Close" - 

Draw me close to You / Never let me go

I lay it all down again / to hear You say that I'm Your friend

You are my desire / No one else will do

'Cause no one else could take your place / To feel the warmth of Your embrace

Help me find the way / Bring me back to You

One of these just got bumped off our regular rotation. Can you guess which one, and why? (answer at the end)

Some people complain that songs like these just sound like top-40 love songs, and that they don't convey the sense that the object of the affection is God Himself. They call them "Jesus is my boyfriend" songs. And in a lot of cases they're right. Generally speaking, at VCC we've tried to not use songs if a casual reader could not easily tell that the lyrics are directed to God or Jesus.

The argument FOR songs like this is that many of the Psalms sound like love songs, too.

Two of these songs - "Hungry" and "Breathe", express a desire to be closer to God, though they use human terms of love that don't even come close to describing God fully.  But they mention Jesus by name or describe a Godly attribute (holy presence).

"Where You Are" does not name Jesus, but the expressed desire to be "where" Jesus "is" fits with John 12:26 " If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also."

The one that got bumped is "Draw Me Close". It's been in our repertoire (I really like the melody), but hardly ever sung. While a Christian might identify with some of the sentiment expressed in this song, the casual reader could just as easily see it as a song to a boyfriend or girlfriend. Also, the line "I lay it all down again" gives the erroneous theology that it is we who sacrifice in order to have a relationship with God, and that we can make this sacrifice repeatedly, when the truth is that it is Jesus who sacrificed everything, and it only needed to be done once. So, pretty song, but bye-bye.