CityAlight - His Glory And My Good Lyrics

Video

CityAlight - His Glory and My Good (Live)

Meaning & Inspiration

My hands have grown stiff, the knuckles swollen like old tree roots. I’ve spent enough time leafing through hymnals—the kind where the paper is thin as onionskin—to know when a song is built on shifting sand and when it’s anchored to the bedrock. CityAlight has given us something here that feels like it might actually survive a long, dark night.

There’s a line in this piece that kept me sitting in my chair long after the music faded: "He will turn my heart towards Him / And help me bear the thorn."

When you’re young, you talk about thorns as if they’re just momentary inconveniences—a stubbed toe on the path to greatness. But after forty years, you know the thorn is a companion. It’s the grief that doesn't vacate the guest room. It’s the way the body forgets how to move the way it used to. Paul begged three times for his to be removed, and the silence he got from Heaven was more formative than any miracle. To sing that God helps me bear the thorn, rather than just snapping it off at the stem, feels honest. It’s the difference between a fairy tale and the hard, quiet truth of Romans 8:28. He isn’t just fixing my circumstances; He is working the very anatomy of my soul, using the pain to turn my chin upward when I’d rather stare at the dirt.

Then, they ask, "Would I gladly be made nothing / That Christ would be made more?"

That’s a heavy question to ask a man whose life has been built on titles, work, and the accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of small identities. It’s easy to sing that in a room full of people when the blood is still pumping hard. But when the lights go out, and the house is quiet, and the world has largely forgotten you? Being "made nothing" feels less like a noble sentiment and more like an impending reality.

I’m left wondering if I’m truly ready for that reduction. I want to say yes. I look at the cross—where He was made nothing, exposed and stripped—and I realize that if He is truly the focus, then my own diminishment isn't a tragedy. It’s a space clearing.

It’s not a catchy, shallow melody. It’s the sort of song you need when you’ve lost the strength to pretend. I don't know if I have the full measure of grace required to say "yes" to everything this song invites, but I know the One who does. And for today, that feels like enough.