I come believing, Lord,
That You’re the true source of LIFE,
And as I go my way,
Help me to be my best for You.
I come believing, Lord,
That You’re the true source of JOY,
And as I go my way,
May my heart sing praises to You.
I come believing, Lord,
That You’re the true source of LOVE,
And as I go my way,
Help me to love both friend and foe.
I come believing, Lord,
That You’re the true source of GRACE,
And as I go my way,
Help me to give and to forgive.
I come believing, Lord,
That You’re the true source of HOPE,
And as I go my way,
Help me to share Your precious truth.
I come believing, Lord,
That You’re the true source of LIGHT,
And as I go my way,
May Your light shine brightly through me.
And as I go my way,
Help me to be my best for You.
[You may listen to this song here. The free PDF of the lead sheet is here.]
A few years ago I posted the lyrics for a little song called “I Come Believing, Lord.” Honestly, it wasn’t a very memorable song. When I was looking at it later, I marveled that I’d even bothered to post it. It just didn’t seem very complete.
So I started switching the stanzas around and trying to figure out what I might add to make it better. For two or three weeks I struggled to improve the lyrics. I kept “I come believing, Lord, that You’re the” because God is the source of everything He wants us to be and we ought to come to Him with that awareness. “And as I go my way” is about what each of the things God is enabling us to be or to do as the result of our prayers.
Even after completing all of the stanzas I thought it needed, placing them in the most sensible and most meaningful order became a new challenge. This is how I ended up thinking the ideas should flow:
- Jesus promised Believers a more meaningful earthly life as well as an eternal one in Heaven. So praying for that kind of life and asking God to help us live our best for Him makes sense.
- If we’re living the lives He wants us to live, we should be experiencing a true–a special–sense of joy. Not that we’re going to be happy every minute of our lives, but with the Holy Spirit within us, we should be able to enjoy the kind of joy that’s apt to break out in song.
- Because God has given us His love, we should want to obey Jesus’ command to love others, whether they’re friends or enemies.
- And because of everything He’s given us–His grace is beyond our comprehension–we should be willing to be gracious–to give to others in whatever ways we can and to forgive those who wrong us.
- God’s light is brighter than anything we know, but if we’re living our best lives for Him, we want to reflect His love and be salt and light to those about us.
- And that brings us back to the original life stanza.
The change in lyrics resulted in a few minor changes in the melody. Because the stanzas are short and repetitive in their format, I gave parts of the even-numbered stanzas a different melody. If you listen to the recording, you’ll figure out that the alternate melody is actually a harmony of the odd-numbered stanzas’ melody. I hope that keeps the song from sounding too tedious.
To say the least, I never anticipated that God would take a song I wrote long ago (I don’t even have a completion date on the original copy) and inspire me to turn it into something so much more complete. And, I hope, so much better.
I write Christian novels as well as songs. The most recent one is shown below and . The twenty-four book picture below that shows the pictures of all of my books. The QR code will take you to my Amazon Author page.
I’ll be back again next Wednesday. Please join me then. Better still, sign up to receive these weekly posts by email.
Best regards,
Roger
Links you might be interested in:
As I Come Singing. . . 