He evidently wanted some vigor, much more than a little bit, injected into this one. That is apparent when one watches Reuben Morgan and others call out to God to “Hear Our Praises”, a feeling that’s really not an isolated episode with this songwriter and his partners when they’re on stage at Hillsong in Sydney, Australia (see the flag of the state of New South Wales here; Sydney is its capital). The video of this song in performance (see its link below) indicates its purpose is high energy/celebration, with lots of jumping up and down, as a team winning the championship might do after the last out has been recorded or the game clock has expired. So, there’s not much guesswork as to the song’s theme or intent, is there? While we don’t know what precisely transpired to hasten Reuben’s exertions here, is there really much reason to agonize over that gap in our knowledge? Other high-energy productions by various songwriters likewise do not dwell on a lot of specifics when it comes to praise lifted upward. ‘It just is’, they might say. Praise for the rejoicing He has inspired needs no further exposition.
What Randy Gill says about ‘Shout Hallelujah’ is probably instructive (see this blog’s entry for Dec. 20, 2008) if we want to really speculate about what a songwriter is after with lots of celebratory words, including ‘hallelujah’ that is the most used word in both Gill’s and Morgan’s songs. Singing this word something like 20 times – in one arrangement of what Gill wrote (in 2003) – or 24 times in Morgan’s song makes the song’s purpose pretty apparent doesn’t it? Randy used words like ‘freely’ and ‘joyful abandon’ to briefly express to this blogger what he wanted in his hallelujahs, so it’s not a stretch to fathom that Reuben was doing a very similar thing a few years earlier (in or about 1998). Reuben may have also borrowed some potent paraphrases from a bible that he’d opened to reveal how the ancients thought of praises and their breadth. These praises tell of a God whose ‘glory fill(s) the whole earth’, a perspective that Solomon expressed in one of his two psalms (72:19). John the beloved apostle also said something about this God being a ‘light shin(ing) in the darkness’ (John 1:5), certainly worthy of an exclamation by people who may feel like they’ve been rescued from gloom. Reuben adds many more phrases to emphasize that these praises are uninhibited emotionally and unbounded geographically. They’re from the ‘mountain to the valley’, from the ‘heavens to the nations’, and ‘as the water o’er seas’. It’s ‘singing (that) fill(s) the air’ and ‘streets’, and inhabits ‘homes…filled with dancing’. There’s also an appeal for ‘injustice to bow to Jesus’, a notable phrase that suggests Reuben acknowledges even people engaged in extolling the Almighty have difficult, even overwhelming, life issues that drive them into His embrace, including during ‘pray(er)’.
Reuben also reminds us that we all can ‘walk before the cross’, where the ground is level for each of us, as someone once said. That’s the ultimate. Reuben isn’t so lost in celebrating with ‘hallelujahs’ that he’s forgotten the why of our praises. This song might seem pretty elementary in its intent, but there’s that meaty, substantive morsel therein for us who need answers to why I can praise. He’s present to bring me into the light. He draws me so I can feel freedom from punishment at the cross, ironically a place where he was imprisoned, at least from the viewpoint of the scoffers who mocked Him. He beat death for you and me, didn’t stay in the tomb, and awaits us in His home, while His Spirit remains here to move us to keep on keepin’ on. That’s what Reuben’s song is all about.
Read information about the songwriter here: Reuben Morgan - Wikipedia
See/hear a video of the song by Hillsong and the songwriter here: Hillsong - Hear our praises - Bing video
See here for information about the image of the New South Wales, Australia flag and its public domain status: File:Flag of New South Wales.svg - Wikimedia Commons -- This image or other work is of Australian origin and is now in the public domain because its term of copyright has expired. According to the Australian Copyright Council (ACC), ACC Information Sheet G023v19 (Duration of copyright) (January 2019).
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