Jamie Brown
Like millions of other people, I’ve enjoyed Matt Redman’s song “Ten Thousand Reasons” ever since he wrote it in 2011. I’ve sung it a lot, led it a lot, listened to it a lot, and been helped by it a lot.
But one of the lines in the chorus has kind of always bugged me.
“… Sing like never before, O my soul …”
Like, sing louder than I did last time? Or with more feeling? Or more genuinely? How can I – even after having sung this song something around 10,000 times – “sing like never before”? At some point, won’t I have reached the point of having sung like I can sing?
No. I can always sing like before. But … how?
I came across these two quotes recently from commentaries on Psalm 145 (one of the Psalms in which David talks about worshipping God every day, forever and ever, etc.) and they helped answer that question:
The first from Matthew Henry:
God is every day blessing us, doing well for us; there is therefore reason that we should be every day blessing Him, speaking well of Him.
And the second from John Calvin:
Since God is constant in extending mercies, it would be highly improper in us to faint in His praises. As He thus gives His people new ground for praising Him, so He stimulates them to gratitude, and to exercise it throughout the whole course of their life.
So, in other words, God is always blessing us, always extending new mercies to us, always stimulating us to new gratitude, so we can always “sing like never before.”
Because since the last time I sang that song, God has shown me ten thousand new mercies, has blessed me in ways I’m not even aware of, and has been faithful to me with such constancy and love that would absolutely floor me if I knew the reality of it.
So, yes, whenever I sing Matt Redman’s well-known song, or really any song of praise for that matter, I can “sing like never before,” not necessarily louder or prettier or more impressively, but with reasons and causes and mercies that I hadn’t known before, for “ten thousand years and then forevermore.”