Kristian Stanfill - The Lord Our God Lyrics

Video

Passion - The Lord Our God (Live) ft. Kristian Stanfill

Meaning & Inspiration

In Kristian Stanfill’s "Lord Our God," there is a line that sticks in the throat like a dry crumb: “In the silence, in the waiting.”

We treat these words like spiritual furniture, standard-issue decor for a Sunday morning setlist. But stop and actually look at the friction here. When we say "waiting" in a church context, we usually imagine a polite pause, a meditative moment before the breakthrough arrives. It’s a sanitized version of the act. But if you strip away the melody and look at the words as a printed document, "waiting" is actually an act of agitation. It’s an endurance test. It’s the sound of a clock ticking in an empty house when you desperately need an answer.

Scripture doesn't treat waiting as a quiet retreat. It’s frantic. Think of the Psalms—David isn't casually sipping coffee while he waits for God to act; he’s asking if the Lord has forgotten him entirely. He’s wrestling. When Stanfill writes, "In the silence, in the waiting," he’s pointing to the space where the believer is most likely to lose their nerve.

The tension is this: the literal act of waiting is passive, but the spiritual reality is violent. It’s a war against the urge to take control and solve the problem yourself. When you aren't hearing an answer, the "silence" feels like a void, a lack of evidence. Stanfill suggests that even in that vacuum, you can "know You are good."

That’s a massive claim. Is it a cliché? On a surface level, sure. It’s easy to sing about God’s goodness when the mortgage is paid and the biopsy is clear. But if you take the lyric literally—if you are actually standing in the middle of a barren stretch of life where there is no audible feedback from heaven—the claim becomes a radical, near-impossible provocation.

It feels unfinished because it has to be. If the "waiting" were resolved, the song wouldn't need to exist. The song exists specifically to cover the gap where the miracle hasn't happened yet. By pinning his hope to the promise that God "finishes what He begins," Stanfill is essentially screaming into the silence, trying to remind his own brain that his current lack of evidence isn't the same thing as a lack of truth.

I’m left wondering how many of us are actually "waiting" with that kind of resolve, versus how many are just marking time until we find a way to escape the pressure. The poetry here isn't trying to fix the situation; it’s trying to keep the person from walking away before the resolution lands. It’s a desperate anchor, thrown into a very dark ocean, hoping that the rope holds long enough to see the shoreline. I’m not sure the lyrics offer a resolution, and maybe that’s the point—they just hold the spot until the silence finally breaks.