The worship teams needed prayer. Fearless, and forward thinking, Brenton Brown led them out of Oxford on a cold and rainy afternoon. It was about six years ago when he was the worship pastor at his church in England. And like any good leader, he planned a worship weekend getaway. In Whales. Brenton, however, isn’t from England. Looking at the distance on the map and allowing for what he felt was a reasonable estimation of the time/distance ratio, the South African native overshot his allotted travel time by about five hours. It rained. They were hungry. They were disparaged by some Welsh locals who weren’t too excited to share their pub with a bunch of musicians from their neighboring country. Pulling into the campsite, well past midnight, having to let go of the plans he had for the first evening, Brown decided to do the safe thing.
“I said to my team, ‘Why don’t we just pray before bedtime and we can all go to sleep.’ I was hoping everyone would wake up in a better mood in the morning,” says Brown. “I brought along a lot of percussion instruments because I have a very short attention span. Most of the people I work with are the same way. So I handed out the instruments and asked everyone to pray for the weekend, and while we were praying we played the drums. “Pretty soon we really got into it—we felt the presence of the Lord. Some of the people started playing the guitar, just one chord with the rhythm. Because we were all tired and it was the end of a long week, the words ‘Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord’ just came out of my mouth. That’s where it started. We sang it for like 20 minutes, there was nothing else to the song.”
Phase Two
Most of us came into contact with Brenton Brown through the Vineyard releases in England that took a big role in the worship movement in that country. His songs include “Lord Reign in Me,” “All Who Are Thirsty,” “Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing).” And it was during that time in the UK that he led the weekend retreat where the chorus to “Everlasting God” was birthed. But the song came to full fruition through the experiences of daily living. A couple of years after writing the chorus, both Brenton and his wife were diagnosed with a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Among the many features of CFS, one of them is severe mental and physical exhaustion from even small amounts of exertion, and sleep does little to alleviate it.
“Some songs for me come out of tears and strong emotion and those songs come out very quick,” says Brown. “And some songs come through study and, I guess the Pentecostal in me would say, the revelation of the character of God. It’s the truth about God, knowing and studying who He is and what He reveals to us through Scripture. ‘Everlasting God’ was a bit of both. It wasn’t like I got a word in the night and woke up and I heard God say, ‘Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord.’ It wasn’t one of those special moments. I mean I do remember people praying that over me. Of course, the danger with suffering from a chronic illness without being healed is you grow cold to some words. But I was pretty intentional about it. This is God’s promise to us. However it works out, however he chooses to bring His strength. He hasn’t chosen the way I would have chosen, so to sing those words, for me, it’s almost a redeeming action. This is where I am at, this is the truth of God, and this is His promise. He will look after my wife and me, and he will carry us through this time.”
Life Lessons
The chorus of the song comes from Isaiah 40:28, “Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and His understanding no one can fathom” (NIV). As a chapter in the Bible that is significant in Brown’s life, it makes sense that it would come out in his lyrics. He worked on the song with a friend who led the Youth For Christ band in England, and they basically filled the guitar parts with the verse and pre-chorus. After that it got shelfed again until Brown started working on his first solo record.
“I wanted to have that song on there,” he says. “It was a prayer that I was praying daily: ‘God you’ve got to help us. You may not be tired, but we really are tired, we need your help.’”
In a bit of a cryptic way, God’s answer to Brown’s plea for strength was, “I am the everlasting God.” “Most of my songs are basically an exploration of our two basic prayers: thank you and please,” explains Brown. “So my please in this song is give me strength, and God’s response is I’m the everlasting God. So before we got the final melody I kind worked up lyrically where I wanted it go. The second half of the pre-chorus we had the sense that God can help us. And then the chorus is ‘You are the everlasting God.’ That’s the punch line to the chapter in Isaiah; it explains God’s qualities as a deliverer. And then, ‘You’re the defender of the weak, you comfort those in need’ are thoughts taken from the Psalms and from the same chapter in Isaiah: ‘speak comfort to my people.’ ‘He lifts us up on wings like eagles,’ again from Isaiah 40.”
Writing Chops
The process that powered the writing of “Everlasting God” was an intentional fusion of head and heart. The rhythm and feel draws you in, but to get the true punch of the song, you have to be tracking with it. Learning valuable lessons as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, that simply became a way for Brown to approach his songs. “When I’m writing a song I kind of need to know what the point is,” he says. “In my second year of university one of my professors would give us one or two paragraphs and he’d ask us to work up the arguments. He wanted us to identify the steps in the argument and there’s a language and vocabulary used for this. Basically in an argument there are pre-clauses or clauses—a statement that backs up the argument—and at a certain point in the argument there is a completion. So it’s A and B, maybe C and D, therefore E. Those are the points of the argument. So when I write a song a like this, I need to know the point of it. What do we want to sing about? What truths of our God do we need to affirm? What truths of our life do we need to affirm? And then why is that true?
“I mean it’s not a complicated song. Lyrically it’s quite short. But in the end, I felt like we made this one strong point, why don’t we just stick to that? And hopefully it’s enough. That’s the cool thing about congregational songs. The temptation is so go, well I can’t find a really good, simple melody or lyric, so I’m just going to make a very complicated one. At least I’ve got my complexity if it doesn’t work out. The challenge is to risk going as simple as you can for the sake of the song.”
No need
This simple, single-verse song is profound in its proclamation of God’s attributes and it is a promise that strength will come. Possibly even more so knowing that it comes from the pen of an artist who will always struggle with feeling a lack of strength. It’s a proclamation that requires our faith and also renews our hope. “Our hope is that He is near, and that not only is He strong, but He cares,” says Brown. “The Scripture says our God is powerful and compassionate. This is God that we serve. This is what He’s like. For me that’s where the joy comes from.”
Republished by permission from Worship Leader Magazine.