Phil Wickham - This Is Our God Lyrics

Video

Phil Wickham - This Is Our God (Official Music Video)

Meaning & Inspiration

I’m still shaking off the dirt from where I was laying. You know that feeling when you wake up in a place you swore you’d never end up, surrounded by the wreckage of your own bad choices? Phil Wickham sings about "walls that we called sin and shame" and "prisons we couldn't escape," and I don’t hear that as a metaphor. I hear it as a description of a cell I built brick by brick with my own pride and stupidity.

People like to talk about God like He’s a distant architect, but when you’ve been living in the filth, you don’t need an architect. You need a demolition crew.

"Those walls are rubble now."

That line hits me in the gut. Rubble is messy. It’s jagged. It’s what’s left when something sturdy gets knocked down by something stronger. When I think about my own life—the years I spent running, the nights I spent staring at the ceiling wondering if I’d gone too far to be reached—I don’t see a clean, paved path back to the Father. I see a ruin. And the scandal of it is that He didn’t just meet me at the gate; He walked into the rubble.

It reminds me of the story in Mark 5, that guy living among the tombs. He was cut off, breaking chains, screaming at himself. Jesus didn’t send a memo or a set of instructions on how to behave. He just showed up where the dead things were. That’s the only reason I’m standing here.

There’s this bit later on: "Now those altars in the wilderness / Tell the story of His faithfulness."

The wilderness isn’t a place you go to get organized. It’s a place where you’re hungry, where you’re confused, and where you’re probably going to fail. My altars aren't made of gold; they’re marked by every time I tried to turn back and He held the door shut. They’re the scars of where I fought Him and lost—which, let’s be honest, is the greatest victory I’ve ever known.

I’m still not sure I get it all. Sometimes the smell of the pigpen—the resentment, the bitterness, the old habits—still clings to my clothes. I look at these lyrics and I wonder how someone like Wickham writes about "King Jesus" with such certainty. Maybe he’s seen the rubble, too. Maybe he knows that you don't actually earn your way out of the pit. You just wait for the hand that reaches down, knowing you didn't reach up.

It makes me wonder if I’ll ever stop checking over my shoulder, waiting for the past to catch up. But then I hear the song ask, "Who pulled me out of that pit?" and I remember that the answer isn't a theory. It’s a person. And that’s enough to keep me quiet for another day.