Reckless Love. That's the mega hit worship song and its lyrics have reached millions and it's inspired over a dozen emails our way in just the past month like this one from Tim, a regular listener to the podcast. "Pastor John, hello. Over the past couple of months I've been hearing the song Reckless Love playing over and over in churches and on the radio.

One of the main lines in the chorus celebrates the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. My question is, is this a biblically and theologically correct way to describe God's love? Is the term reckless too reckless? I don't want to sound too judgmental but every time I bring this up I get called a Pharisee for focusing on just one word rather than the message of the whole song.

Just hoping you could shed some light because I truly believe that words matter, especially in songs of worship and praise." My response to this concern needs to be expressed to two different groups of people, pastors and lead worshipers on the one hand, and I'm lumping those together as worship service shapers, and the congregation on the other hand.

The shepherds who feed the flock with songs and the sheep who are asked to savor the truth and the music that they're being fed. I have two words for the pastors and lead worshipers and then something for the rest of us. First, we live in a time of unprecedented wealth of Christian music and there is no shortage whatsoever of older songs and newer songs and fresh renditions of older songs that are rock solid in their biblical content and creative and fresh and powerful both in their lyrics and in their tunes, which means that pastors and lead worshipers are never boxed in to using theologically defective or musically dated songs if you don't want to.

If you want to be theologically and biblically faithful as a lead worshiper and feed your flock with the richest of biblical food and the most engaging of tunes, there is a wealth of old and new to choose from so that you never have to sing something theologically defective or misleading or unhelpful.

The second thing I want to say to pastors and lead worshipers is that it is your primary responsibility to build into the minds and hearts of the people truth that portrays Christ and the Father and the Spirit and the way of salvation in biblically faithful ways so that the people's minds engage with spiritual reality, not just imaginary things, and so that people's hearts are moved toward authentic spiritual affections rooted in that reality.

That's your job. Now, the congregation, a word to the congregation, the concern that Tim is raising for us here in this question that he asked, what does a congregation or an individual in the congregation do if a song is being sung that we think has defective lyrics? Especially if we think the song is theologically or biblically defective, not just poetically defective.

And Tim gives us this specific example of a popular song right now called "Reckless Love." But there are many such problems in many songs, both old and new, not just new. So let me take this one for an example as to how we might respond when this happens. So "Reckless Love" has a refrain which ends like this, "Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God." Now, I don't know enough about the theology of the author to know what aspect, what dimension of the meaning of "reckless" he intended.

But I'm so aware that today there's a kind of theology that sees God as not knowing the future and therefore treating him as though he could take real risks since he doesn't know what might happen, in which case the giving of his son might be described as reckless. You might give your son and salvation not succeed.

I mean, there are a lot of people who believe this, who believe that God doesn't know the future exhaustively and therefore he's taking real risks because he doesn't know what the outcome is going to be, at least not in the short run. So if "reckless" were to fit into that theology, I would regard it as heretical.

Now, I hope the author did not intend it that way. In fact, it seems to me that there's good evidence in the song that he didn't mean it that way. But the reason the word "reckless" raises the question is because in modern English, you have to work really hard to put a positive meaning on the word "reckless" in relation to God.

Because if you just click on a good thesaurus online and look at all the meanings associated with "reckless," here they are—audacious, brash, carefree, careless, daring, foolhardy, hasty, ill-advised, imprudent, negligent, thoughtless, adventurous, any which way, breakneck, daredevil, desperate, devil may care, fast and loose, feckless, harebrained, headlong, heedless, helter-skelter, hopeless, hot-headed, inattentive, incautious, inconsiderate, indiscreet, kooky, madcap, mindless, overventuresome, playing with fire, precipitate, rash, regardless, temerious, uncareful, venturesome, venturous, wild.

Now, that is the general sense that one gets when one hears the word "reckless driver," uncaring about what other people do, or what he might do to other people. But maybe the author used the word "reckless" in the sense that God's love may look to an outsider, foolish and ill-advised, brash, breakneck, but in fact the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men, and the recklessness of God is more assured of success than the most carefully executed plan of man.

Maybe. In other words, maybe he's treating the word "reckless" the way Jesus treated the word "hate" when he said, "You have to hate your mother and father in order to follow me." Well, it looks like hate to a lot of people when you follow Jesus and leave your mother and father behind.

So what should you do sitting in the congregation if you don't like this word "reckless" and you have all these negative connotations in your head? One of the things you do is look at the lyrics of the song to see if there are evidences of how the word might be construed or intended.

Here's a couple of examples. The song says, "Before I spoke a word, you were singing over me." Now in my mouth, those are radically Calvinistic lyrics. God only sings over his own people. He doesn't sing over those who are in rebellion against him. He sings over his own people, Zephaniah 3:17.

So, if you are God's own people before you spoke a word, that's unconditional election. Here's another example. "Before I took a breath, you breathed your life into me." Now in my mouth, that's a radical affirmation of Calvinistic doctrine of sovereign grace, irresistible grace. Since the Bible doesn't teach that God breathed life into us before we were physically born, I take the words, "You breathed life into me," to be a reference to the new birth.

So, the song is saying that the new birth happened to me before I took any breath at all, meaning before I did anything to signify that I had life, which is exactly what happens in the new birth. It is a sovereign gift of God. We don't make new birth happen.

God makes new birth happen. Now, I don't know whether the author is that Calvinistic. I kind of have my doubts, but I don't know. But that's the way I would sing these words if we ever did sing it, because that's their most natural meaning, at least I hear them that way, which then means when I get to the word "reckless," I'm going to put a meaning on it that ascribes to God absolute control over the object and circumstances of His love, because that's what's implied in those previous lyrics.

And I hope that those who love the word "reckless" in this song also love the Calvinistic theology in the rest of the lyrics. So, here's the point. If you're in a church that basically sings sound and helpful lyrics, and along comes a song with questionable words, then either stop singing if your conscience won't let you sing, or put a meaning on the words that you are able to affirm.

Now, lest you think I'm asking you to do something quirky or unusual with new songs that we don't do with old songs, consider one last illustration. Most gospel-loving evangelical churches, including mine, the one I go to, love to sing Charles Wesley's "And Can It Be." Great song, right? Yeah.

But what do you mean when you sing, "He left His Father's throne above, so free, so infinite is grace, emptied Himself of all but love"? Give me a break! He did not empty Himself of all but love. That is absolutely not true. He didn't empty Himself of righteousness and wisdom and justice and holiness and deity.

Well, you can either protest the song to your worship leader and stop singing this Wesleyan song, or you can stop singing, or you do what I do. You can take it as poetic license for overstatement in a poem and construe it to mean, "He emptied Himself of everything He needed to empty Himself of in order to be as loving as He could be." Something like that.

I don't think Charles Wesley was a heretic. Not like that, anyway. But take the next verse. Most Calvinists love to sing the next verse. Whoa, it sounds exactly like what we believe, right? "Sovereign, irresistible grace to the dead imprisoned sinner. Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night," that's original sin, "thine eye diffused, a quickening, a life-giving ray.

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light, my chains fell off, my heart was free. I rose, went forth and followed thee." When I sing that, I'm singing like a full-blooded seven-point Calvinist. "My chains fell off, my heart was free, I'm out of here because of the sovereign grace of God and that only." Charles Wesley didn't mean that.

Charles Wesley, being a good Wesleyan that he was, not a Calvinist, probably did not mean what I mean when I sing that verse. He meant that God's prevenient grace overcame original sin and struck off the chains of helplessness and put me in a position where I, with newly granted autonomous free will, may or may not leave the prison.

My choice is final and decisive. "I rose, went forth and followed thee." That's not what I mean when I sing that song. So back to the pastors and lead worshipers, please do your job and do not ask too much of us sheep as we sit here in this service.

Give us songs whose original meaning we can joyfully affirm because they are fully biblical. Don't give us too many, just one or two, like maybe and can it be. Don't give us too many where we have to change the meaning in order to be faithful. Thank you, Pastor John.

And this discussion reminds me of another popular episode that we recorded where we looked at the the lyrics of a Christian song titled "What a Beautiful Name." That was in an episode we titled "When Worship Lyrics Miss the Mark." That was episode number 1077. Check it out in the archive at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

And there you can explore all of our now 1,200 past episodes. And you can scan through a list of our most popular ones of all time and a list that's updated every day. And you can read full transcripts and you can even send us a question of your own.

You can do all of that at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. And of course, if you want to get new episodes delivered to you three times per week, subscribe to Ask Pastor John and your favorite podcast player. Well, I recently ran a search of the APJ inbox of all the emails that we have for the words "anxiety" or "anxious." And those terms appear in 620 emails.

Incredible. To the struggle with anxiety we turn next when we return on Monday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and on behalf of John Piper and all of us at Desiring God, have a wonderful extended Memorial Day weekend. And we'll see you back here next week. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪