Right Here Right Now Song Story

I've been attending church, thanks to my great Christian parents and grandparents, since I was born. I’ve been in a lot of church services over all these years. I’ve learned lots of good things and have had some great experiences in those services. But I find so many church services to be lacking in the life and vitality that I read about in the Bible. It seems that we’ve so often settled with church services merely being preaching services with some music where attendees function mostly as passive audiences who come to just listen. It’s been said that if there was no such thing as the Holy Spirit, 99 % of what happens in many churches would still happen. From my experience, I would tend to agree with that. But I’m not content with that. I’m hungry for the powerful presence of the “Great I Am”. I won't settle with the “Great I Was”. I want to see God move in every gathering we have “Right Here, Right Now”. I don’t want to just hear about it or read about it. I want to experience that and I want to see our congregating as churches be more than programs and sermon services, but places where we really encounter the presence and power of God together in a way that truly changes us.

I get the opportunity to speak about and try to impact these realities when I do “Worship Renewal Weekends” at various churches throughout the year. But when we started Heart of the City, this hunger was pressing in on me strongly and I wanted to put this longing in a song. I wanted it to be a song that others could sing, so that together, we could call out to God for renewal and revival through the song and raise a lack of contentment with church services a usual.

We recorded this song on our first Heart of the City Worship Band CD in 1999 and Sandy did a beautiful job singing the lead vocal on it. It still remains one of my favorite songs and we still sing it quite a bit. Word Music made a choral arrangement of it a few years after we recorded it and it’s also been used as a theme song for some radio prayer programs. It’s even been sung at a few weddings.

A.W. Tozer talks about the “Pursuit of God”. John Piper talks about “Desiring God”. A few years ago the idea of “God Chasers” was popular. David talked about being thirsty for God as a deer pants for water (Ps. 42). In the book of Jeremiah, God said that “You will seek me and you will find me when you seek Me with all your heart”. And the Laodicean church was confronted for their luke-warmness and keeping God out because of their contentment with the status quo. To just be critical of things as they are isn’t helpful and just causes more division. But to hunger and seek and pray and do all we can to break out of our church “program mentality” to facilitate the will and work of God in our midst is a Biblical idea that I think we desperately need to pursue.