One of my favorite times with NCC Worship every week is Friday mornings. We meet at 9am and seek God’s face. We pray over the services that weekend, over our city, our church, and pray that God would bring revival to His people. After prayer, we gather round in a circle and share whatever God has laid on our hearts that morning. Sometimes everyone shares, sometimes just one person has something, but every now and then two of us will get the same thing, and that’s when you marvel at the Holy Spirit.
First, a little background on the song. The chorus to “You Alone” actually came out of a powerful moment during a prayer/worship night at NCC. We had just led the song “Alleluia” and were flowing together on the simple chords of the verse - the 1 and 4 (for all you musicians out there). I love moments of space in worship, because it’s so often in those times of flow that Holy Spirit speaks the loudest, and new songs are created. Joel started to sing the lines “You alone deserve my worship, You alone deserve my praise”. The congregation not only latched onto those words, they sang them louder than anything else we did that night! We knew there was a song to be written, with those words as the chorus…
Fast forward a couple weeks, and we’re having our Friday morning prayer. Ben Loper, one of our worship proteges, shared the story of the woman with the alabaster jar, from Matthew 26 and/or Luke 7. The woman pours every ounce of the fragrance on Jesus, and the disciples actually get a little ticked off because of it. They say the perfume could’ve been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus then calls them out, saying what she did was a beautiful thing, and that wherever the Gospel was told, this woman’s act of worship would also be told. She goes down in history!
I wonder how many times we shun the very thing that Jesus would call beautiful? Ben brought up the point that when we worship, we should give every ounce of our hearts to God. Then I sat at the piano, and the verse was born. “Every ounce of worship I will pour at Your feet.” The line paints the picture of the alabaster jar. May we give our everything to God in our times of worship.
The bridge just takes this prayer to the next level, declaring “It all belongs to You.” All our hopes, our dreams, our praise, our worship. Everything. He deserves every part of us. My prayer is that as you hear this song, and as you sing it, that you’d hold nothing back from God. He calls us into intimacy with Him, and vulnerability is one of the most important things with intimacy. There’s nothing about you that would make God love you, or want to be with you, any less. The woman with the alabaster jar was a prostitute, by Luke’s account. And yet this woman with a past finds a place in the history books for her act of love and worship.
He’s passionate for us, and when we give all of ourselves to Him, He gives all of Himself to us. His love, His mercy, His grace, for our filthy rags (in the words of Paul). There’s no one like the King of Glory. He’s the only one who deserves our worship.
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