12/06/2025
"MIGHTY NAME OF JESUS"—IS IT WORTHY? (PART 1)
There’s a new song called Mighty Name of Jesus that’s come under fire from some people, including one content creator who said that it can’t be sung by Job and is thus not fit for congregational use.
I’m here to tell you that he’s right. And he’s also wrong.
I’ve liked certain songs by the Belonging Co, but someone who writes a good song won’t always only write good songs. The same goes for the opposite. Someone who generally writes songs that fail for one reason or another can write a good song that does not. As the old saying goes, “A broken clock is right twice a day.”
And even people who operate under bad theology can write a song that has good theology. Whether you want to support that person or church is a different question, and I’m not going to open that can of worms in this particular post. I’ll just say for now that if we only used artful content from those without major flaws, no one would be quoting Psalm 23.
So back to “Mighty Name of Jesus.”
To require a song to be singable by every believer throughout history and in every moment isn’t right. Everyone will have moments when they don’t want to or can’t bring themselves to sing certain songs. I had that experience just after my grandmother’s years ago to a silly chain of medical events that began with lifting a bag of bird seed. The song was Our God by Chris Tomlin. I sang most of the song from the seats that Sunday, but when the chorus came, my voice broke and I couldn’t sing the third line: “Our God is healer, awesome in power.”
It’s not that I didn’t believe it. I did. But I’d just gone through a moment when God chose not to heal someone I loved in the way we normally think of “healing,” and His awesome power was not displayed in the way that His healing power is made evident to our tiny brains.
So in that moment, I just couldn’t sing those words.
Was it bad of the worship leader to select that song, to put those words into people’s mouths? No. Not even when some people would have a hard time with those words? No. Did he even know what had happened to me that week? No. Most people in that room didn’t. Does a worship leader need to adjust plans for one person’s story that week? No. There’s only so much you can ask of a worship leader.
The song still teaches truth, and whether you sing its words or not, you’re still absorbing what it says, and it still makes its home in your heart in some fashion—be it in the form of ascent, denial, or otherwise. That song touches you somehow, even just listening.
And that’s the value of worship songs. They touch you. They burrow their way into you. They can inject truth into your heart without you even realizing what’s happening. That’s why it’s so critical to choose good worship songs.
But so can they do the opposite. That’s why it’s so critical to choose good worship songs.
So back to “Mighty Name of Jesus.”
Most people just think songs are songs, and as long as they don’t obviously offend, they’re good enough for church use. That’s sort of true and not true.
“Good enough for church use” is a bit misleading, as you can use songs congregationally or as a presentation (sometimes called “special music”). If people are expected to sing along, the song should be congregationally written. If people are not, there’s more wiggle room in the song’s form and content (side note: not all good songs on Christian radio are congregational songs).
And if you’re going to put those words into the mouths of your sheep, then you’d danged well better have a good reason to choose that song when you have only a few songs per Sunday and only 52 weeks per year.
How many songs are there in the Christian catalog? What if you narrow it down to only “church songs”? What if you narrow it down to only songs written in the past ten years? This year?
There are way too many songs out there to settle for a “meh” song when you’re injecting the words into people’s hearts. You have a narrow field of opportunity with your music, so you shouldn’t settle. Settling is the realm of a hired hand, not a true son. The Bible has an awful lot to say on those subjects.
So back to “Mighty Name of Jesus.”
Requiring a song to be singable by Job is a silly metric. No, not silly—ridiculous.
Job’s story is already written. In Job’s time, Jesus’ story was not yet written (on earth). For Job to sing a song about Jesus is a silly idea. But also, for Job to sing a song about how “I draw a permanent boundary line, the enemy has no rights / To come near my family” is silly, because it already happened, and drawing any such line would be too late.
For those of you who don’t know, Job’s children were killed in a house collapse as part of the Accuser’s attempts to prove he wasn’t fully devoted to God. Even his wife joined in and told him to “curse God and die” because of the grief piled on by that point. Lovely spousal support.
Go read Job’s story. It’s long but has a wonderful ending with wonderful lessons on multiple fronts.
Praying or singing as if something that has happened will not (or cannot) happen denies reality. It denies the things God has allowed to happen or even caused to happen, depending on the context. That’s not showing faith in God, because that makes it all about you and what you think should have happened.
Our job is not to make sure the “right” things happen, whether out of mere preference or even some misguided notion of what we “deserve.”
To be clear, we all deserve to be executed and to remain separated from God for all eternity. This is the consequence of sin. God is the victim in the story of sinful rebellion, and we are the perpetrators. Justice as we know it would have Him freed from our tyranny, not the other way around. The calls are coming from inside our house.
So we don’t “deserve” anything good. That must be understood.
What else must be understood is that our sense of justice is not God’s, because He chose another path for us: the redeeming blood of Jesus. By God’s grace (giving what IS NOT deserved) and mercy (NOT giving what IS deserved), we are freed in Christ from the ultimate (not momentary) consequence of sin.
Job saw pain, loss, pride, humility, and restoration. It’s a common story to us as believers, though I’ll say he handled it a bit better than many of us—and that’s why his story is so helpful, because it points us to the right attitude in the worst moments of our lives.
So it’s silly to require that the song must have been singable by Job in order to be a legit song. That content creator was wrong.
But hold on—that doesn’t mean the song is a good congregational song. That just means he used a ridiculous metric in assessing the song. So don’t do what he did when looking at a song for church use.
A far better metric is the universal believer, not a specific person whose story is written. You can easily disqualify many songs by requiring a historical person be able to sing it because of your knowledge of their story.
But we’ve been through that already.
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This post has been split into two parts for easier reading. To finish reading this commentary in part 2, go to the post from August 1st, 2025 or follow this link:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16YnTSSTzJ/
"MIGHTY NAME OF JESUS"—IS IT WORTHY? (PART 2)
So for the universal believer, separate from a story which has already been written, is this a good congregational song?
Well, what does it teach?
It teaches some good things, to be sure. It teaches that Jesus is the key to every victory. It teaches that God’s Spirit is present and that He (not “It”) has all authority. It teaches that God’s plan cannot be thwarted by human designs. It teaches that “In the mighty name of Jesus…all the power of fear and darkness must go.”
It teaches a lot of good things.
But the adds some things that are unhelpful to the believer—nay, harmful to the believer—to absorb into their hearts. This is especially so when that believer is new(er) and unable to suss out biblical truth from fiction and spiritual health from sickness.
The song is a statement that bad things will not happen to the singer or their family, specifically because God’s got their proverbial back.
It’s not a bad thing to say that God has your back, because that’s true. But it’s a fallacy to take that a step further and say that no bad things will happen to you or to your family because you have Jesus in your life.
That's not confidence in God but confidence in your idea of God and what He “should do” because you somehow know His purposes are to your earthly benefit.
As an (unbelieving) artist once wrote, “Who do you love? Me or the thought of me?”
We must be on our guard against loving the thought of God rather than God Himself. The world already tries to trick us into that mistake (too often successfully) and judges us from that very same position. That’s not the way we are called to love God, and it’s definitely not a responsible idea for church leaders to inject into the hearts of their sheep.
So what’s the alternative? How do we sing of our confidence in God without straying into dangerous territory?
I’m glad you asked.
We ought not sing of the things that God will protect us from in this life but of the ways God is faithful, and rejoice WHEN He protects us from various things in this life.
“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”
These famous words are a good pattern to follow.
They acknowledge the reality of the evil that has, does, and will press in on us from all sides. It doesn’t say that God will keep us and our family out of danger.
They speak of the attitudes of the heart when things are hard. It doesn’t say the heart need not worry for it won’t be tested.
They point to the value of God’s presence amidst suffering. It doesn’t say that God prevents suffering.
The Psalmist flips to rejoicing at God’s provision as well:
“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You have anointed my head with oil; My cup overflows.”
Now there’s some rejoicing at God’s provision and covering in this life (once written into the story).
This is the pattern to follow. Our confidence in God isn’t that He will keep us and our loved ones from bad things because that’s the way it is. That leaves no space for faith in a God who allows bad things to happen to us. And that leaves no space for the heart of Romans 8:28.
If your expectation is that becoming a Christian will make your life easy or shelter you from the worst slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in this world, you’ve been lied to. And I’m sorry someone put you on that path. They did you a spiritual disservice.
“These things I have spoken to you so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33 (NASB)
Does that sound like God’s priority is to prevent troubles from entering our earthly doors, or does it sound like God’s priority is presence and confidence in the long arc of His provision rather than our comfort in the now?
I urge you to not use “Mighty Name of Jesus“ in your churches. It’s not biblically consistent as a congregational song. It injects biblical truth, yes, but disease also. It turns you away from the story of Job, where his confidence was in God despite the pain he went through. It trains you to skip spiritual growth in confidence of God’s faithfulness IN THE FACE of difficulty.
We cannot teach people to expect God’s provision yet fail to teach them true confidence in God through every season. The result of that is a people who lose courage or even faith because God didn’t do what we told them He would. Spiritual immune systems are weakened by this sort of negligence and abuse. That already happens too much in the modern Church, and we cannot perpetuate the sins of past leaders and further deform the Bride of Christ.
There are diseases that inhabit the Bride as it is. This is one of them, and self-inflicted, no less. It’s seen in forms such as the Health and Wealth Gospel and Name It and Claim It preachers. But those churches and those leaders do God a disservice, and they lead people astray. If your pastor is known for his hopeful smile and yet closes the doors to hope for victims of catastrophic flooding, run. You need to find a new pastor because this one preaches such false gospel.
Jesus decried the scribes and Pharisees for preventing the people from entering Heaven by their teachings, making the listener “twice as much a son of hell as [they were themselves]” (Matthew 23). They did so by twisting the heart of God in their teachings so the people would lose focus on why He was worthy of their worship and focus instead on created things. Twisting the listener’s understanding of God’s heart with bad songs in this way equally roadblocks and discourages those you ought to be helping see God more clearly.
Cursed is the pastor who does such a thing and drives people to be ill-prepared for the storms of life and even drives some to faithlessness for his carelessness and trend-following.
When pastors care more for their own ideals than for the people under their supposed care, lives are ruined. God is still faithful, but such “pastors” will be judged for their conduct one day.
I urge you to not count yourself among them.
Instead, turn to songs like Another In the Fire, Praise You In This Storm, or It Is Well With My Soul.
These songs faithfully point people to hope and trust in God without denying painful reality. They speak of attitudes of the heart which honor God. They urge us to know God’s presence and love even in the worst of times (see the backstory to It Is Well). These songs very well support a concept called “theology of suffering.” That’s something worth looking up and integrating into your life, if you’ve never heard of or studied it before.
The Belonging Co has written some wonderful songs, and those songs have been a great benefit to the Church. But when it comes to the song “Mighty Name of Jesus,” we can do better.
Let’s do better.
