Just Let me Say
Another serving of Bullock soup…
Original Verision
Just Let me Say
Geoff Bullock, Nightlight Music © 1993
Just let me say how much I love You
Let me speak of Your mercy and grace,
Just let me live in the shadow of Your beauty,
Let me see You face to face.
And the earth will shake as
Your word goes forth
And the heavens can tremble and fall.
But let me say how much I love You
O my Saviour, my Lord and friend.
Just let me hear your finest whispers
As You gently call my name
And let me see Your power and Your glory
Let me feel Your Spirit’s flame
Let me find You in the desert
Till this sand is holy ground
And I am found completely surrendered
To You my Lord and friend.
So let me say how much I love You
With all my heart I long for You
For I am caught in this passion of knowing
This endless love I’ve found in You
And the depth of grace,
the forgiveness found
To be called a child of God
Just makes me say how much I love You
O my Saviour, my Lord and friend
Just makes me say how much I love You
O my Saviour, my Lord and friend.
Revised Version
Just let me say
How much you love me
Geoff Bullock Music ©: 1993 Word Music Words ©: 2004 Geoff Bullock
Verse One:
Just let me say how much you love me
Let me speak of your mercy and grace,
That lets me live in the shadow of your beauty
So I may see you “face to face”.
For the earth should shake
As your word goes forth,
And the heavens should tremble and fall
Yet these words just say: you love me
Oh my saviour, my Lord and friend.
Verse Two:
Just let me hear your finest whispers
As you gently call my name
And let me see your power and your glory
Let me feel your spirit’s flame.
For you have found me in my desert
And this sand is holy ground,
And my brokenness is mended
By you my Lord and friend
Verse Three:
So let me say how much you love me,
As all my hope is found in you
And I am caught in this passion of knowing
This endless love I have in you.
For the depths of grace, the forgiveness found to be called a child of God,
Just makes me say how much I love you
Oh my saviour, my Lord and friend.
August 30th, 2005 at 6:14 pm
This has always been one of my favourites - and you have just fine tuned it - love it. Of all the love I may feel for God, it is NOTHING compared with the love He shows me - in fact my love only exists in response to the fact that by His very nature - God IS love.
What a difference in meaning it is from “This endless love I’ve found in you” to “This endless love I have in you”
Thank you
August 30th, 2005 at 7:31 pm
Bless you Janet.. the miracle is His love for us, so simple isn’t it. It’s amazing how we obscure this, the greatest miracle of the universe, with all the stuff that we think is important
August 30th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
The original version is a good exmple of a type of song I often call a “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” song. I am being a bit pajorative.
Although I enjoy expressing love for God, and feeling caught up in Gods arms, and knowing his touch, and reaching out to God, and hearing him whisper to me…etc… too much of this kind of song turns me off.
At worst it reduces worship to purely my personal (private) relationship with God, how much I love him and how good I feel while I’m experiencing this kind of infatuation or intimacy.
I will quite happily sing some of these songs - but if the church’s worship is devoid of praising God for his saving acts in history, or invoking the Spirit of reconcilation, or a call to follow Christ or a concern for our neighbor etc then I don’t think there is a lack of integrating all the aspects of Christian worship.
So with that qualification, once again, Geoff I love the changes to the song. Like “Have faith in God” I love how you have tweaked the images of the wilderness.
What was Let me find you in the desert/ ‘Till this sand is holy ground has become For you have found me in my desert / And this sand is holy ground shifting the focus to God’s action to find us and the fact that the desert is already sacred because God met us there - rather than the desert is bad and will only become sacred once God changes it.
Saving Just makes me say how much I love you for the last line is good too since it puts that “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” aspect in perspective of how much and how God has first loved us.
August 31st, 2005 at 9:04 am
Hi Nigel, thanks mate. I am hoping that these rewrites may be able to undo much of the teenage fairy floss sensual concepts of spirituality that has created a generation of emotional junkies who have been taught to equate the presence of God in terms of feelings, and their responsibilty of outworking forgivenes, grace and love in “doing stuff for God”. Behind these jumping and jiving, giving for recieving, working for the blessing congregations are those who equate their lack of emotions, lack of prosperity and lack of ‘blessing’ as a sign of God’s rejection. More than that, this addiction obscures the only reality that we see in Jesus; a ‘blessing” that humiliates our desires for prosperity, power and prominence. in ’seeking’ we miss the beauty of ‘having already been found” The songs that ask God to do what he has already done drive me mad. There is no point in singing “Davidic psalmody based lyrics”. David had to plead with God to be merciful.. do we need to plead for God’s mercy.. no, we thank him for a mercy that is so extravagant that it humbles Davids’ Psalms. Do we need to ask for God to come, fall, manifest his presence do this or do that? No! How much more could he possibly do for mankind. Why on earth are we still asking God to do what he has already overwhelmingly and unconditionally done? Because we just don’t understand what the cross says about us and what it says about God. We have missed the point entirely. When the first Roman Centurion raised his fist, demanding, on behalf of mankind, that God submit to mankinds expectations, there was simply one choice. Does God forgive or does God judge. Who is God from this point on? He is the giver of life. Every breath from that moment forward is a gift of grace. How do we worship in the light of this portrayal of the enormity of God’s love for mankind. Do we turn around, look heavenward, raise our hands and sing and then walk away with the smug satisfaction that we have fullfilled our responsibilty to grace? Do we greedily count our tithes and offerings, our works and sacrifices and then demand the “blessing”? This is such a tragic self-centred blindness that leads to spiritual barreness. What does is say to broken humanity? Sing our songs, build our church with your blood, sweat, tears and your 10% before tax and then your offering and then and only then will you “prosper” by the hand and heart of God. It seems to me that we have bought the land in front of Golgotha and built an upper middle class, right wing, yuppie culture that simply obscures all that Jesus became for us. We sing “join us”, like a football team spruiking for members. We ignore the… what adjective do I have left?.. the magnificance of “God joining himself to us”.
And so the world simply says, “No thanks… irrelvant, not effective for my pain, shame and brokeness.” Beyond these thoughts I have no answers, just more questions. But, recieving grace freely is only half of the journey. “Worship” begins with giving grace freely, and this act, requires everything. It exposes our true colours. We can’t take the high moral ground. We cannot ask humanity to join us. We have to join them. I think this is closer to the message of Jesus. The wonderful part is that we will never arrive at any point of perfection. Giving grace will reveal us as being “ungracious to the core”. The only way to give grace is to admit why we need it in the first place. We embrace the broken with our brokeness and celebrate grace together.
August 31st, 2005 at 10:12 am
Geoff says:
“There is no point in singing Davidic psalmody based lyrics. David had to plead with God to be merciful. Do we need to plead for God’s mercy? No”
I agree we don’t need to plead for God’s mercy for God to be merciful - since God already is merciful.
But maybe there is a need within us to plead for mercy - I know I have felt that. At such a time I loved the Davidic psalm ‘Create in me a clean heart’. Crying out to God for salvation reinforces that it is God who saves and not the other things we may try to fill our lives with. And if we are sad who better to cry out to?
For all the times we have been told to shout to the Lord, it is probably time for us to cry to the Lord or shut up and listen to the Lord a bit more now.
I think we need to broaden the expressions of worship to include more human experiences, and the Psalms (or all the scriptures really) are a terrific example for this. I wasn’t trying to argue for NO “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” songs or “teenage-fairy-floss-sensuality” just LESS of that and for it to be ballanced by a lot more mature and more nutritious stuff.
Geoff, We could call your rewrites “fiber-enriched”
August 31st, 2005 at 10:15 am
I’m wondering if the emergence and popularity of the ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ songs has anything to do with our society’s association of love with the sexual?
August 31st, 2005 at 10:55 am
I don’t see a problem with society linking love and sexuality - there should be a link. I don’t see a problem with Christians associating love of God with the sexual.
I do see two different threats to society:
1) dissociating sexuality from love
2) reducing love to just sexuality
Christop, I agree the “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” school has grown out of a culture at risk of the second threat, where love of Jesus is only about how you feel and an implied need to be attractive enough to get it etc.
August 31st, 2005 at 11:51 am
I am really enjoying reading some of the re-writes; thanks Geoff.
Your story of grace and discovering hope and love in the wilderness has been challenging for me - in a good sense. I also like the wording of finding that the desert is sacred space, because God is already there - much like the story of Moses and the Israelites. Crying out for God to be present and God’s response is always quite simple
Take off your sandals for you are standing on holy ground.
I will be standing there in front of you
images of fire and cloud
I begin to wonder, do I know God is present. Thought I did; your words have . . . I don’t know, can’t seem to express right now . . .
September 1st, 2005 at 10:55 pm
Hi Anthony..it’s the simplicity of The Christas story. We spend so much time “trying to get to God”.. the truth is far more miraculous. He chooses to come to us, to you and to me. It doesn’t matter whether we “know” it or not.. God’s precence is not dependant on our “knowing”, he is present because he has chosen to be. Yet, God has chosen to do much more than come to us, he has chosen to come “into” us. How much more wondrous can he get?
September 8th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
Love the rewrites Geoff, and your reflections have both challenged and inspired my thinking about worship - in my own life, and in church. It seems so simple, focussing on what God has done and continues to do as we worship, rather than ourselves and our actions to him. It is amazing how this can be subtly shifted, with the church barely noticing. Your reflection on the presence of God being equated with feelings is interesting. I think that it is easy to be guilty of equating God’s presence with how we are feeling. How often have I heard (or even said) that “I didn’t feel anything in worship”. For me, I most often sense God with or within me when I am pounding a trail in the bush, watching a sunset, flailing about in the surf. Sometimes words are not required.
September 9th, 2005 at 10:41 am
I’m with you Christina… lovely name.. Christ in a .. girl! I know the presence of God, beyond feelings or even knowing. He is so everywhere.. why is he represented as being purely the property of the club, living in the clubhouse purely for the benefits of the members… how purile.. mmmm.. very cynical today, and a touch angry.. how dare we demand God to be who we say he is and damn any other revelation… surely the Christmas story shoes God in disguise coming to us!!! No wonder the carols are still a focus of the nation!
September 26th, 2005 at 9:41 pm
[…] d/”> Have faith in God You rescued me The power of your love The heavens shall declare Just let me say […]
October 7th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
Only of late have I fully started praise God for all he’s done for us… not all the good we do. I was always so focused on how much I have done for my family and church… and i felt empty and unsatisfied because i know how blemished with sin i am. I’m just a sinner.. how is it possible for a sinner to boast of themselves… but i did.
it’s refreshing to know when we praise God instead of man, His blessings fall on us… it’s awesome to feel his love and grace for us… inspite of the wretched souls we are… praise God for His loving kindness, mercy and grace!
January 17th, 2006 at 12:03 am
Heard the re-writes only yesterday at church. It’s really beautiful and reminded me to focus on God’s love for us, more than mine/ours for Him, for it is indeed all about God’s love. Thanks Geoff!