Lyrics Awesome God

Alternative lyrics to 'Our God is an awesome God'

With all due respect to Michael W. Smith, Rich Mullins and the multitudes who love the popular Christian song “Our God is an Awesome God,” I would like to suggest an alternative set of lyrics that focus more on the life and work of God’s son, Jesus Christ, rather than on the judgment and wrath of God. I do so not to contradict or diminish the truths in the popular song, but rather to extend them to include aspects that are of core importance to Christians — that Jesus, the son of God is the Messiah, the One who heals and delivers. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

The lyrics sprang from the seeds of some thinking I was doing recently about how we view God and how that affects our worship, our discipleship, our interaction with others and even our parenting.

Generally, discipleship is following a master or teacher. In the case of Christian discipleship, it is following Jesus Christ, learning about and learning to do what He teaches.

Jesus’ primary teaching is that we are to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. He teaches that one’s words and deeds flow, not from obedience to rules, but from the “heart,” the all-encompassing center of one’s being, which includes the intellect, emotions and will. He teaches that it is God’s Holy Spirit, given to each professing believer, not a set of “laws,” that guides and empowers us to know and to do the will of God.

In His teachings about the Sabbath and legalism, He emphasizes that keeping rules is not the way to be faithful to God,. Rather, we are faithful to God by loving God, and we love God in part by loving others and “not merely look[ing] out for [our] own personal interests” (Phil. 2:4).

Underlying all of this is how we view God. Do we see God as primarily a God to be obeyed, primarily a disciplinarian? Or do we see God primarily as a God to be loved, primarily as one who leads? In either case, God is a God who loves us. But, how we view God will determine how we respond to God’s love for us.

If God is primarily a God to be obeyed, then our response will be like that of the Pharisees, emphasizing rules in even the minutest things. But Jesus taught that the Pharisees’ emphasis on obeying rules to please God, to become more like God, leads to hard-heartedness, judgmentalism and neglect of more important things such as mercy, justice and faithfulness.

Alternative lyrics to 'Our God is an awesome God' - Mennonite ...

Alternative lyrics to 'Our God is an awesome God' Mennonite Weekly Review (blog)By Tom Beutel [Editor's note: Tom's alternative lyrics are on page 2 of this blog post.] With all due respect to Michael W. Smith, Rich Mullins and the multitudes who love the popular Christian song “Our God is an Awesome God,” I would like to suggest ...

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