New songs for modern missional worship, rich in Christian teaching and contextualized in modern culture. Contemporary hymns, psalms, songs of lament and praise written by members of the Louisville, KY-based Sojourn Community.
“All I Have Is Yours” is the “offering” song on Before the Throne; it teaches the truth that all we have belongs to God. In practice, we have used this song most often during the communion portion of our church services, during which believers are also invited to contribute their financial offerings by dropping them into baskets before or after taking the Lord’s Supper. We’ve also used it within the Sojourn community for a baby dedication service and a wedding.
I wrote the lyrics as a modern hymn text, then Rebecca Bales (who has since married and changed her last name to “Elliott”) composed the melody. She also sings this song on the CD. This is the first song we worked together on, and the beginning of it dates back to the day we met.
In November, 2006 Brooks Ritter and I brought a new hymn that we’d written together (me as the text writer and Brooks as the composer) to a Sojourn songwriting workshop. We called that contemporary hymn “Lead us Back” and it would also go on to become a track on the Before the Throne CD. Brooks sang and played the song for the group as I looked on (and if you heard the difference between my singing and playing, and Brooks’ singing and playing, you’d know why he was the one performing for the group and I was the one looking on).
Everyone loved it but there was one rough edge — the melody repeated every two lines with little variation. The obvious solution was to do what is almost always done in hymns with verses of eight lines each — to create a melodic variation in lines five and six. We just didn’t know what variation.
“You could go to F#m there,” Rebecca said. It was her first time to visit our group. “Then take it to Bm.” Then she showed us what she had in mind. And just like that, “Lead us Back” was finished.
Rebecca played a song of her own for the group later on, leading me to tell fellow group member and worship leader Lorie King, and then later, Worship Arts Pastor Mike Cosper, that I’d “nearly wet my pants” when I heard that voice. Her sense of melody impressed me as well.
So after our group had ended I did what any sensible hymn text writer would have done. I said, “Hey Rebecca. I’ve got some lyrics lying around but I haven’t been able to come up with a melody. Would you take a crack at it?”
“Sure,” she said. The next day I emailed the text to a song I’d been working on, which I was either going to call, “Creator, giver of all things,” (because it is a general practice among hymn writers to name their compositions after the first line of the first verse) or “All I Have Is Yours.”
A couple days later, she’d written the melody and recorded the demo. And I nearly wet my pants again.
Creator, giver of all things
All I have is Yours.
Accept my humble offering —
All I have is Yours.
When I was chained to greed and pride,
Tight-fisted, destined just to die,
You paid my debt and bought my life —
All I have is Yours.
All I Have, All I Have, All I Have is Yours.
This offering is a means of grace
All I have is Yours
You show me this to grow my faith:
All I have is Yours
The more I give, the less I need
I learn that You’ll provide for me
‘twas blind to this, but now I see:
All I have is Yours.
All I have. All I have. All I have is Yours.
When I’m writing a hymn, the most important thing is to root it in the Bible. Poetry is the servant of theology, not the other way around. So if I’m going to write a hymn about giving to God, then my first step is to study what the Bible says about it. And this is what led me to the title: What, of the things I possess, is God’s portion? All of it. Not a tenth, not half, not the “spiritual” things. All of it. So that was easy enough: I’d call the song “All I Have Is Yours.”
The first verse lays a theological basis for why all I have belongs to God: because He “paid my debt and bought my life.” Christ died on the cross, providing payment in full for my sins. And paradoxically, as I become a slave to Christ, I am finally free.
The second verse teaches another biblical aspect to our giving: God doesn’t need us to help Him, so much as we need to bask in the privilege of God letting us help him. And in doing so, we are blessed. “The more I give the less I need — I learn that You’ll provide for me” goes back to the biblical “cast your bread upon the waters” and similar passages. And so our giving becomes a means by which God shows His grace towards us.
On a side note, I was thrilled to be able to pay a little homage to one of my favorite hymns, “Amazing Grace,” by throwing in the line ” ‘twas blind to this but now I see.”
To get technical for the students of hymnody and all those interested in the writing of metrical hymn songs: “All I Have Is Yours” is written in a non-standard (but not unheard of) hymn meter: 85.85.888.5
In normal language, this means that lines 1,3,5,6,7 are eight syllables long and the others (the lines that repeat the refrain “all I have is Yours”) are five syllables long. Of course, an in-depth discussion of poetic meter would go beyond mere syllable counts, into the stresses of each syllable, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
Suffice it to say that I wanted those three eight-syllable lines in a row, lines 5-7, to rhyme with each other and slowly build to a crescendo that would climax in the ultimate revelation of the song, echoing in line 8: “all I have is Yours.”
Check out the mp3 of this song on our myspace page. It’s also playing, along with the Before the Throne song “We are Listening,” on the Pilgrim Radio network in the western United States as well as worldwide on their internet radio site.