Hillsong UNITED - I Will Rise Lyrics

Video

Beneath The Waters (I Will Rise) - Hillsong Worship

Meaning & Inspiration

My hands don't move as quick as they used to, and the joints ache when the rain rolls in off the valley. I spent the morning sitting by the window, thumbing through a hymnal where the spine is held together by nothing but habit and prayer. Then I put on this Hillsong Worship record—"Beneath the Waters"—and found myself looking at my own reflection in the darkened glass.

The line that caught me, right in the chest, was: “Purify my heart in Your presence.”

When you’re young, that sounds like a bright, clean promise. You imagine it like a morning scrub, a quick dip in a clear stream. But at my age? I know what purification looks like. It looks like the fire. It looks like the loss of things I thought I needed, the thinning of friends, the quiet that settles in when the ambition finally burns out. It isn't a gentle rinse; it’s the refining of silver, where the heat only serves to pull the dross to the top so it can be skimmed away. When I sing that now, I’m not asking for a boost. I’m asking for the patience to sit in the kiln until whatever is left is actually worth keeping.

Then there’s this: “In You what was lost is restored.”

I’ve buried people. I’ve watched dreams turn to ash and watched my own capacity for work wither. You wonder, after the years stack up, if “restoration” is just a fairy tale we tell ourselves to keep from despairing. But then I remember the Apostle Paul—a man who knew a thing or two about losing everything worth having—writing in 2 Corinthians about how we are “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”

It’s a strange thing to reconcile. Can a heart truly be restored if it still bears the scars of everything it lost? Maybe restoration doesn't mean getting back the things that were taken. Maybe it just means that the space where those things used to be is now filled with enough of Him that the void doesn't ache quite so sharp.

There’s a tension there, I think. A wobble in the knees. We sing these words with such certainty, but the reality is often messier. We are people who wake up tired and go to bed questioning if we heard God right at all. Yet, there’s something about the way these voices climb on this track—that defiant lift of the head—that feels honest. It’s not the noise of a man who hasn't been tested. It’s the sound of someone who has been under the water and realized, quite suddenly, that they are still breathing.

I don't know if I’ll ever fully grasp the mystery of why some parts of us are mended and others are left to limp. But I suppose that’s the point. We keep rising, not because we’ve figured it all out, but because the mercy mentioned in the chorus is the only floor sturdy enough to hold us up when the lights go out. And for tonight, that’s enough.