Steven Malcolm - Not To Us - Good Love Lyrics

Video

Steven Malcolm - "Not To Us/Good Love" (Official Music Video)

Meaning & Inspiration

There is a specific danger in high-energy music—the danger that the music does the work, and the lyrics just hang on for the ride. When Steven Malcolm drops a track like "Not To Us/Good Love," the energy is kinetic. You can feel the beat in your chest before the first line hits. But as someone who stares at lead sheets and looks for the "landing" where a congregation actually stands before God, I find myself circling back to that opening refrain: "Not to us, not to us, Lord / But to Your name, we give glory, glory Lord."

It is a direct lift from Psalm 115:1. It’s a stripping away of ego. The genius here, if we want to call it that, is the way Malcolm pivots from that ancient, lofty cry of surrender directly into the gritty, dirt-under-the-fingernails reality of his own story—sleeping in a jacket on Lafayette Street because the heat was out, or working twenty-hour weeks.

We often make the mistake of thinking our personal struggle needs to be polished before we bring it into worship. We want to tidy up our "Lafayette Street" moments before we approach the throne. But Malcolm doesn’t. He leaves the lint in his pockets and the struggle in the lyrics. He’s essentially saying, "I am here, broken and redeemed, and the 'good love' that brought me out of the hood is the same 'good love' that deserves the glory."

The singability here isn't found in a complex melody that requires a degree to hit. It’s found in the testimony. When we sing, "You pick me up when I fall down," we aren't just reciting a Sunday school verse; we are forcing the congregation to reckon with their own "down" moments. If the worship leader allows this track to remain just a cool song with a fresh beat, we fail. The "landing" has to be the weight of that mercy. We have to be able to stop the music, look across the room, and realize that the person to our left and the person to our right have both been picked up from a place the world said they’d never escape.

There is a tension here, though. Can we keep our focus on His name when we are also shouting about our own blessings? It’s a tightrope walk. If we get too loud about our success, the "Not to us" gets drowned out. But if we are honest—truly, dangerously honest about our poverty, both material and spiritual—then the glory actually lands where it belongs. It stops being a song about a guy who made it and becomes a song about a God who refuses to let us stay lost.

That is the only way this works. We have to be willing to bring the mess, the cold nights, and the "good love" into the same space, or we’re just making noise.