Matt Redman + Chris Tomlin + Hillary Scott + TAYA - How Great Thou Art (Until That Day) Lyrics

Video

How Great Thou Art (Until That Day) - Matt Redman, Chris Tomlin, Hillary Scott, TAYA & Friends

Meaning & Inspiration

The hymn “How Great Thou Art,” revisited here by Matt Redman, Chris Tomlin, Hillary Scott, and TAYA, is the heavy hitter of the church music canon. It’s the song that usually signals the climax of a service, those big, sweeping chords designed to pull a room together. But standing in the back, away from the stage lights, it’s hard not to feel a bit of whiplash when we hit the lines about "this broken warring world."

It feels like a massive leap. We go from staring at stars and considering the works of His hand—which is easy enough to do when you’re standing on a mountain or looking at a sunset—to acknowledging the grit of a place that feels actively hostile.

"And as we walk this broken warring world, Your kingdom come, Deliver us from evil."

That’s the part that needs to carry weight, yet it’s the part that feels most like a greeting card if we aren’t careful. It’s easy to sing about the "warring world" when your fridge is full and your mortgage is paid. But what happens on the Tuesday morning after a layoff? Or when you’re sitting in a silent house where you expect to hear someone else’s footsteps, but they never come?

In those moments, the proclamation "How great Thou art" starts to feel like a demand rather than a natural response. It reminds me of Habakkuk, a man who looked at the violence and the injustice of his own time and didn’t just sing a chorus—he argued. He brought his confusion directly to the throne. There is a kind of cheap grace that assumes if we just ramp up the volume on the chorus, we can drown out the fact that the "deliver us from evil" part hasn't quite arrived yet. It’s an itch that wants to bypass the grieving and jump straight to the doxology.

When I hear these four voices blending, they sound polished and sure. But real faith—the kind that survives the funeral home—doesn't usually sound like a recording studio. It sounds like a question.

We sing "Your kingdom come," but we’re living in a reality where the kingdom feels like it’s being eclipsed by headlines and private failures. If God is that great, why is the world still so broken? Is it enough to just belt it out until the song ends, or are we supposed to sit in that tension until it hurts?

Maybe the "greatness" of God isn't found in the thunder or the stars, but in the fact that He stays present while we scream our frustrations at the wall. The hymn claims He bore our burdens on the cross, but that burden-bearing is a bloody, ugly, slow business. It isn't a clean radio edit. Until we stop treating "How Great Thou Art" as a victory lap and start treating it as a cry from the middle of the mess, it’s just noise. I’m still waiting to see if we can sing this when the sky stays dark.