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News | Nate Talks . . . Dusting off a classic
27 February 2009
Nathan Morgan Locke, Christianity Explored's Youth Evangelist, reveals his findings after setting his iPod to shuffle
There are some songs that you think you must have heard thousands of times. You don’t need to think about the lyrics, since you know them instinctively. It’s hard to imagine a time when you didn’t know it, when you were surprised by its chord progressions and melodies, but now it almost seems to beat along with the very rhythm of your being.
But though they have been so close to us and been almost formative in our personality or character, and though these songs exist in multiple copies in our record collections and playlists, most of the time they sit ignored, passed over again and again for the newest release or week’s favourite.
But just occasionally they sneak in and enthrall us again.
I recognised the cough instantly and then smiled as the bright (though minor) chords of a acoustic guitar rattled off the eight-bar intro before Liam’s voice broke in:
“Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you.
By now you should’ve some how realised what you’ve got to do.
I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now.”
The song is, of course, Wonderwall by Oasis, and since it had caught me by surprise I heard it as though afresh. There was so much I had forgotten: the cute lead guitar, the bass line that bobs from side to side in the chorus and the almost incessant shining cymbals.
Perhaps in terms of over-familiarity the biblical equivalent to Wonderwall could be John 3:16. How about we dust it off…
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Jesus is talking to a Pharisee named Nicodemus, who has come to visit him at night (John 3:1), and after bowling him over with the old “you must be born again” line, Jesus turns to the essence of the good news, the most succinct biblical declaration of the Christian faith.
The spring of the good news is the love of God; the object of this love is the broken rebellious world, which is set to perish; the manifestation of this love is the giving of the one and only Son; and belief in him is the means by which the perishing world can have eternal life.
Nothing is more delightful for you to consider nor anything more important for you to know than the truth contained in this verse.
Let it play in your ears again today.
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