Behind the Songs

Forty Years Before I Arrived

Song: There’s Something About That Name

Scripture: Philippians 2:1-11
"Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name."

Bill and Gloria Gaither have written approximately 700 songs that have been translated into most of the languages on the face of the earth. Wherever they have traveled their songs have preceded them. Gloria told me of an experience in South Africa, where they had gone in December of 2005.

“We were in Johannesburg, producing a homecoming video, and while there a young lady came up to me and said, ‘I want to tell you something.’ I said, ‘Sure, go right ahead.’ She said, ‘I watched that video where Mark Lowry makes fun of you, telling you that nobody knows that song you wrote. You tell Mark Lowry that I know that song. We know all of your songs in Africa. They have been here for forty years.’”

“I myself, who had thought in earlier years that God might be calling me to go to Africa as a missionary, had never gotten there. Did I hear God wrong? It seems as if I heard, ‘You might not have gotten there, but your songs did.’ I did what I knew to do in the best way I knew to do it.”

“As Bill and I write songs the idea comes first. Often after breakfast, Bill will take his coffee and go in and begin to fiddle around at the piano. We have a book where we write down ideas for songs. He will have a melody in his mind and then think, ‘This will be a good melody for that idea.’ He sings the melody he’s created that goes with the idea after he has most of the chorus -- or at least the ‘hook’ -- as writers call the theme line. Then it is my job to put the words around it. Usually the lyrics come very quickly.”

“After There’s Something About That Name was written, I wrote a reading that goes with the song. People often ask us if the lines of the reading relate to something that really happened to us. The answer is ‘yes!’”

“Prior to the writing of it, our daughter Suzzane had chronic tonsillitis for a long time. We were very frustrated with that problem. Her fever would peak and I often thought, ‘She is going to go into convulsions with this fever.’ We just couldn’t get it straightened out. At her age doctors were hesitant to remover her tonsils. At such a time you fear for the lives of your children. When we had done all of the things we know to do, I would sit there and breathe the name of Jesus, and then see the fever break.”

“Bill’s grandmother Hartwell was a very tenderhearted lady and loved the Lord. We were sitting beside Mom Hartwell when she was in the dying process. She was coherent and then delirious. Out of her delirium when she reached down into her subconsciousness, she kept saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus, oh He is so precious to me! He is so precious!’”

“We thought, ‘What a gift!’ When she reached down into the depths of her consciousness there was JESUS. He went clear to her core. What a comfort! Mom Hartwell just didn’t make this up. Her relationship with the Lord was what was really down there -- in the core of her character.”

“Some of the images in the reading came from our own family experiences. The images of the tyrants in the reading came from history -- cruel leaders persecuted Chrisitians hoping to wipe them from the face of the earth. We are heading in that direction again.”

Following is the reading that goes with There’s Something About That Name.

Jesus. The mere mention of His name can calm the storm, heal the broken, raise the dead. At the name of Jesus, I’ve seen sin-hardened men melt, derelicts transformed, the lights of hope put back in the eyes of a hopeless child.

At the name of Jesus, hatred and bitterness turn to love and forgiveness; arguments cease.

I’ve heard a mother softly breathe His name at the bedside of a child delirious from fever, and I’ve watched as that little body grew quiet and the fevered brow became cool.

I’ve sat beside a dying saint, her body racked with pain, who in those final fleeting seconds summoned her last ounce of ebbing strength to whisper earth’s sweetest name -- “Jesus, Jesus...”

Emperors have tried to destroy it; philosophies have tried to stamp it out. Tyrants have tried to wash it from the face of the earth with the very blood of those who claimed it. Yet still it stands.

And there shall be the final day when every voice that has ever uttered a sound -- every voice of Adam’s race -- shall rise in one mighty chorus to proclaim the name of Jesus, for in that day “every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord!!!”

So, you see, it was not mere chance that caused the angel, one night long ago, to say to a virgin maiden, “His name shall be called Jesus.” Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. There is something -- something about that name...