Bible Verses

My presets on my car radio include KLove, NPR, an oldies station, and a couple country ones as well. It’s always funny to me when a song or program comes on and I assume it’s on a particular station only to find out I’m wrong. Or sometimes my kids will ask me, “Is this KLove?” and I’ll know it’s on country. The reason for the confusion is simple. The divide between “sacred” and “secular” is far more blurred then we often think.

For example, Blake Shelton’s new song “Bible verses” can easily pass for contemporary Christian music. Shelton sings, “Got a King James in the dresser/ And I take it out sometimes /But Lord knows, I ain’t measured/ Up to what’s inside.” He goes on to explain the disappointment he feels when he knows he’s blown it. “I woke up in last night’s clothes, and it’s whiskey on my lips,” he explains and concludes that God is “really looking down on this.”

I love the play on words Shelton uses when he hopes for the day when he can read Bible verses without the haunting sense that it’s the Bible versus him. That’s something anyone who wants to really live for God can connect with, for our lives to move out of sinful ruts and habits and into smooth paths of obedience. The song offers a sort of lament for the dispointments of living life in a fallen world that has just an echo of the Apostle Paul’s words in the seventh chapter of Romans:

“So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”