Everything At Calvary - The Story Behind The Song

​I wrote the lyrics to this song in 2019. Wanting to find a way to express the relief I experienced after being confronted with the message of God's grace, this song was born. 

For a long time in my Christian experience or perhaps at the time it should have been called more accurately, my “experience of religion”, I had thought what God wanted from my life was to impress Him and prove that I was deserving of His love, that I was worthy to carry His name and be called one of His children. 

But of course, that path could never take me far enough. There was always something more required. It proved to be far more than I was able or willing to give. Little did I know that the only destination of a performance-based relationship with God is failure. I came to a crisis point in my faith where I could only see God as frustrated, fed up, and disappointed in me. I was sick of my relationship with God and just wanted to ignore it. I hated the fact that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep Him happy. It made me angry and I hated Him for what seemed to me to be His incessant demands and obligations.
Were it not for grace, I most certainly would have walked away. And I guess in a sense I did walk away. But I was walking away from dead works and my own religious pride.

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As grace began to change my whole perception of God, I no longer saw Him as a distant, unimpressed taskmaster. It began to warm my calloused heart to see Him as a Father and His gracious heart toward me. My perspective shifted from, "I messed up, Dad's gonna kill me" to "I messed up, I need to call Dad". 

These days, I am more aware than ever of my own weakness and the ways I continually fall short of His glory. Fightings within and fears without.... but instead of that driving me away into despair, I can hear His voice in the silence, in the pain, in my weakness, drawing me close to His heart saying, 

"Come to me all you who are weak and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest".   

A well-known preacher once said in a sermon to his congregation, 

"Those who see God as angry and disappointed do not see Him rightly. To see God in faith is to look upon His friendly heart.” 

To see Christ rightly is to see Him as a Substitute, to see Him as the One who takes my place. Not only in bearing the punishment I deserved but also in living the life I should have lived and carrying out the obedience to God's commands which I failed to carry out. And to know He did this not only up to a certain point but once and for all time. He didn’t simply wipe away my past and give me a new chance to do better in the future. He took my past upon Himself and also became my future. Christ truly is my First and my Last, He is my Future and my Past. He saves completely, as Scripture says….. "to the uttermost". What He wants from us is to receive from His fulness.


This glorious Good News shines down through corridors of history and continues to echo through all generations in every heart that believes. 

To see Jesus as merely my example brought no relief to my troubled soul. But to see God the Father as a fountain of supply giving Christ the Son as the One who would step into my emptiness and fill every gap, every place of coming up short with His perfect record and call it mine. Well, that makes my soul want to sing!

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