Danny Gokey - Mary, Did You Know? Lyrics
Lyrics
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child that you've delivered, will soon deliver you.
Mary, did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy will calm the storm with his hand?
Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?
When you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God.
Mary, did you know? Mary, did you know?
The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again.
The lame will leap, the dumb will speak, the praises of the lamb!
Mary, did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day rule the nations?
Did you know that your baby boy is heaven's perfect Lamb?
That sleeping child you're holding is the great I am.
The great I am...
Video
Danny Gokey - Mary, Did You Know? (Live Acoustic Sessions)
Meaning & Inspiration
Danny Gokey’s take on this familiar classic feels different when you stop hearing it as a carol and start reading it as a series of intrusive, almost aggressive, questions. It’s a song that shouldn't work—it’s essentially a lecture delivered to a teenager in a stable—yet it persists.
I keep getting snagged on a single line: "This child that you've delivered, will soon deliver you."
Let’s look at the verb. "Delivered." In the first half, it’s a biological, messy, human event. It’s blood, sweat, and the disorientation of a first-time mother in a foreign town. She is doing the delivering—she is the vessel, the agent of birth. But the shift in the second half is sharp. Suddenly, the infant is the one doing the delivering.
The tension here is uncomfortable. We like to keep our Nativity scenes static—Mary is the calm, serene observer, and Jesus is the passive object of our adoration. But this lyric yanks us into the theological reality of Romans 8:21, the idea of creation groaning in labor pains. Mary isn't just a mother; she is a participant in a cosmic rescue mission that she is only beginning to understand. The writer is asking if she realizes that the baby she just pushed into the world is going to eventually drag her out of her own.
Is it a cliché? On paper, perhaps. It’s a clever wordplay that feels a bit too tidy for the chaos of the Incarnation. Yet, there’s a strange, haunting revelation hidden in that repetition. It forces us to confront the fact that God’s arrival is never just about him showing up; it’s about him arriving to undo us.
When I hold that thought against the reality of a nursing infant—the helplessness, the sheer dependency—the lyric feels less like a song and more like a warning. If you’re the mother, are you expecting the baby to save you? Or are you just trying to get through the night?
There is an inherent cruelty in the question "Mary, did you know?" because the answer is almost certainly no. She was a girl in a barn, not a theologian with a grasp on the Trinity. But maybe that’s the point. The faith required isn't in understanding the "Great I Am" while he’s still learning to hold his head up; it’s in kissing the forehead of a human child and choosing to believe, despite all the biological evidence to the contrary, that he is the one who will eventually deliver you from yourself.
It leaves me wondering: if we actually recognized who we were dealing with in the quiet moments of our own lives—the "un-theological" moments—would we be able to handle it? Or would we, like the song implies, be too busy trying to keep the baby warm to realize that he’s actually the one keeping the universe from coming apart?