All Things to Me (ENTRY #1)

With the launch of this fundraiser via Kickstarter to help fund my first full length studio album, some have asked about why I landed on the title of “All Things to Me” for the album. Over the course of this recording adventure (Lord willing) I’m going to share some reasons and thoughts as to why I selected this as the title!

First, one of my favorite poems is Jehovah Tsidkenu by RM M’Cheyne. Here are two stanzas, the last of which is where I originally got the phrase:

I ONCE was a stranger to grace and to God,
I knew not my danger, and felt not my load;
Though friends spoke in rapture of Christ on the tree.
Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me.

And excerpt two:

My terrors all vanished before the sweet name;
My guilty fears banished, with boldness I came
To drink at the fountain, life-giving and free—
Jehovah Tsidkenu is all things to me.

This line and the contrast the whole poem draws is so gripping to me. The unregenerate soul looks upon Jesus Christ as foolishness, idiocy, and Jesus is “nothing” to such a soul. They don’t see how great their crime, and therefore how greater far was the price He paid to save such a sinner.

But when free grace awakens a soul, suddenly it cries out for now and eternity: Jesus the Righteous is all things to me!! Our propensity as humans is to look to our own righteousness and goodness to save us. However, the Gospel tells us that it is “naught of good that [we] have done, it’s nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

Thus, I eventually found a way to fit this line into one of my songs, The Gospel Hymn, and the final stanza is:

After ten thousand years in eternity’s light
I’ll still weep for joy at the glorious might
of his living, and dying, and rising again
to His heavenly kingdom that will never end
forever and ever this will still be my plea
that Jesus the Righteous is all things to me!

I want this album to burst with Gospel truth, that it is not by my goodness, my morality, my hand which can save me, but in Christ alone is my glory, my boast. Thus, the world can have all its fleeting pleasures, as for me Christ Jesus is “all things to me.”