Elevation Worship - Great Is the Lord Lyrics

Video

Great Is (Jenna Barrientes) | Elevation Worship

Meaning & Inspiration

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles into the bones when you’ve spent a week trying to curate your own significance. You build your day like a bricklayer—this task, that appointment, this social interaction—all meant to fortify the idea that you are doing something important.

Then you encounter a line like this from Elevation Worship’s Great Is: "We cry with everything that's in us."

It is a simple, standard phrase. On the surface, it’s a cliché—one of those lines that slides off the tongue during a Sunday service without leaving a scratch. But stop and look at the anatomy of it. "Everything that’s in us."

When you sing that in a room full of people, it feels like a posture of absolute surrender. But when you are alone in your car on a Tuesday, the literal implication is terrifying. To give "everything" implies a vacancy. It suggests that if I am truly pouring out the entirety of my internal capacity—my anxieties, my secret prides, my fragmented focus—there is nothing left to hold onto for myself.

Is this a revelation or just a high-stakes request?

There is a distinct friction here. We treat "everything" as a poetic flourish, yet Scripture is notoriously brutal about the definition of the word. In Mark 12:30, the instruction isn't to give a portion or a mood; it’s to love with all heart, soul, mind, and strength. The literal demand is total dispossession. If I have nothing left in me because I have externalized it all toward the "glorious," then who am I in the silence that follows the song?

I think that’s where the tension lives. We sing these lyrics to feel full, but the words themselves are actually asking us to be emptied.

We often approach praise as an additive process—we add music, add emotion, add volume to make ourselves feel closer to God. But "crying with everything" acts as a subtractive force. It’s the act of clearing out the internal clutter until the only thing left to occupy the space is the object of the praise itself.

It feels unfinished. It’s an uncomfortable thought, really—that the most "worshipful" moment might not be the swelling crescendo of the chorus, but the moment you realize you’ve run out of words and run out of yourself, and you’re still standing there, waiting for something to fill the void. We want the song to be a sturdy roof over our heads, but lyrics like these operate more like a window that has been smashed open, letting in a draft that we weren’t quite prepared to feel.

I’m not sure I ever actually give "everything." I give what is comfortable. I give what I’ve set aside. But there’s something unsettling about acknowledging the gap between the magnitude of the "glorious" mentioned in the chorus and the meager, curated pieces of myself I usually bring to the table. Maybe the point of the song isn't that we arrive there, but that we keep singing until we’re forced to confront how much we’re holding back.