Rev. Brent L. White

I’m back with a new podcast episode, my first in many months! It’s one that’s been “brewing” for a while, though. It’s about the classic Reformation doctrine of imputation, which has often been underemphasized or neglected in contemporary Methodism. But it is life-giving for me. It makes my heart sing. Maybe it will help you, too.

This podcast features the Keith Green song, “When I Hear the Praises Start,” from the album For Him Who Has Ears to Hear. Here he is performing it live in 1982. Listen to his introduction: He speaks to some of the same concerns I raise in this episode!

Speaking of Green, I mention in the podcast that the 12-year-old appeared in 1965 on the game show I’ve Got a Secret. Thanks to YouTube, you can watch it here.

You can listen to my podcast on your phone or tablet by subscribing in iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher.

Here is the transcript:

Hi, this is Brent White, and podcast episode number 32. And you are listening to the late-great Keith Green and his brilliant, beautiful, theologically rich song “When I Hear the Praises Start.” 

I was born in 1970, and I had two older sisters who listened to a Top 40 radio station in Atlanta called WZGC, Z-93. It’s now a sports-talk station. But back in the ’70s and early ’80s it was Top 40 all the way, which meant, for example, every Sunday morning at 10:00 and running until 1:00 or so, Casey Kasem counted down the hits on American Top 40. 

We went to church on most Sundays; we were not the most faithful churchgoers growing up; but when we did go to church, if we timed it right, we would be driving home from the Morrison’s Cafeteria at just around time Casey was nearing the number one song in the nation. What fun! This was a magical part of my childhood.

Anyway, what does all that have to do with Keith Green? Only this: Keith Green was so talented, and such a good singer and songwriter, there’s no reason he wouldn’t have blended right in on the radio with so many other singer-songwriters of the ’70s… especially the piano-based guys that were popular at the time, certainly Elton John and Billy Joel. But back then there were plenty of other singer-songwriters of that mold… Leo Sayer! “When I Need You.” What a perfect ballad! Or how about Rupert Holmes: “Escape (Piña Colada Song).” Or… Andrew Gold, whose song “Thank You for Being a Friend” later became the theme song of the TV show Golden Girls. He also had that depressing hit song, “Lonely Boy,” with an unforgettable piano riff that reminds me of Keith Green.

My point is, by rights, the world shoulda-woulda-coulda heard Keith Green on the radio back in the ’70s. He was more than good enough! And the world probably would have… if Jesus hadn’t intervened first.

The late, great Keith Green

See, Green actually got a head start in the music industry long before he became the pioneering Christian rock performer we know him as today. He got a record deal with Decca Records when he was—I’m not making this up—twelve years old. They were trying to fashion him into a teen idol. In fact, I’ll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video of 12-year-old Keith Green on the game show I’ve Got a Secret in 1965. It’s unbelievable. He performs one of his teenybopper songs.

During the late-’60s/early-’70s revival known as the Jesus Movement, which started on the West Coast with the Vineyard Church and Calvary Chapel, Keith Green, like many other hippies at the time, found Jesus. He got a record deal around 1977 with a Christian label called Sparrow. And this song, “When I Hear the Praises Start,” comes from his debut album, For Him Who Has Ears to Hear.

This album is so good. In 1979, no less a luminary than future Nobel laureate Bob Dylan named it as his favorite album. And during Dylan’s own gospel period, he befriended Green and played harmonica on the song “I Pledge My Head to Heaven.” Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, during my quiet time, I saw a connection between Genesis 22, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and God’s words to Israel in Psalm 50. Most of what follows comes from handwritten notes in my ESV Journaling Bible, Interleaved Edition.

22:1: “God tested Abraham”: After all that Abraham has been through, what more—one might wonder—does God need to learn? Hadn’t Abraham done everything he needed to do to ensure that God’s plan of salvation through Christ was set in motion? Hadn’t he accomplished his mission? One warning for me here is that God’s testing of us will not necessarily cease, even after we’ve reached what we believe is a sufficient level of Christian maturity. As if!

Besides, this test demonstrates that there’s something that God wants far more than any service we render to him: he wants us! He wants our love. He wants to possess us entirely. “I will not accept a bull from your house or goats from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills… If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine” (Psalm 50:9-10, 12).

In other words, if God can’t have our hearts—our wholehearted devotion, our love (as expressed in the psalm through the thanksgiving offering)—God doesn’t want anything else!

This test proves it. It’s as if God were saying, “I know you’ve served and sacrificed for 25-plus years to serve me, but I want your love more than I want your service! Because if I don’t have you, Abraham—if I don’t have your love, your whole heart—I don’t want anything that you can do for me. I want you more than I want my mission. In fact, I’m willing to set my mission aside—even at the risk of jettisoning it altogether—in order to have you.”

As in Psalm 50, if God can’t have Abraham’s heart, he doesn’t want anything Abraham can do for him.

As astonishing as it is to say, God values his relationship with Abraham more than he values the most important task that Abraham, or any person in history up to this point, has ever accomplished for him. Does Abraham value God in the same way? That’s what this test will determine.

But I know what you’re thinking: “Sure, God may value his relationship with Abraham like that, but who am I in relation to him? I’m a nobody compared to him!”

But that’s where you’re wrong! First, the gospel proves that your value isn’t determined by anything that you do. (Even Abraham, as Paul labors to point out in his two most theologically rich letters, was justified by faith, not by works.) And the doctrine of imputation says that you’re infinitely valuable to God! If you’re in Christ, you’re a beloved “son” of God;^[1] you’re highly favored by God. You stand before God perfectly righteous—not through your own efforts, but through Christ’s; he has made you righteous with his righteousness.

When you read about saints in the Old Testament like Abraham, and the favor that God showed them, resist the temptation to think that they possess or enjoy something you don’t have! If anything, on this side of the cross and resurrection, you have infinitely more! Tell yourself something like this: “If this is true for Abraham, then it’s at least as true for me! Because I have Jesus!”

By all means, we must decrease in relation to Christ, and Christ must increase (John 3:30), but we never cease to loom large in God’s love, God’s esteem, God’s affection. Do I dare believe that God loves me this much?

If so, then the ways I poor-mouth myself, denigrate myself, put myself down are completely incompatible with God’s view of me!

Another implication for me (and us Christians): In my haste to “get things done,” I must never forget why I do them in the first place: to love God! Before I do anything else, I must foster my love for God.

Also, Brent, God wants you to love him more than he wants you to succeed as a pastor.

Let me repeat that: God wants you to love him more than he wants you to succeed as a pastor.

Do you believe that? Because nothing you accomplish for him is more important than that.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

1. I’m not being sexist. All Christian believers, male or female, are “sons” of God, because sonship in that first-century world (unlike “daughtership”) implies full inheritance from our heavenly Father. Being called a “son of God” should bother women as much as men are bothered to be counted among the “bride” of Christ!