It was a prayer in the middle of a sleepless night, and the result of this episode was one that Keith Green wasn’t afraid to share. (This most likely took place in Garden Valley TX [Smith County], where the Greens’ [Keith and Melody] Last Days Ministries was located in 1980.) He’d said “Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful”, and yet that compliment to God was not the entirety of what he had to say in this prayer. Keith also confessed some things, admitting that there were gaps in his devotion to the One who created and saved him. Adoration, and confession, and finally supplication were also present in Keith’s approach, so apparently he had three of the four letters in the ACTS acronym that so many believers have used to help organize and guide their thoughts to Him. What about thanksgiving, the ‘T’ part? Did Keith fail at prayer because this part seems to be absent from what he wrote, or are we just overlooking that part, somehow? Perhaps the ‘T’ part is the music-making with which Keith responded, taking a page from the psalmists: I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving (Psalm 69:30); Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song (Psalm 95:2). Giving back a song to Him who gave it – thanksgiving can indeed be reciprocal with this One we worship.
So, what exactly was keeping 27-year-old Keith Green up on a Monday night, a struggle that he had with something that would not allow him to rest? You can listen for yourself, by clicking on the youtube link below, or alternately read here a brief transcription (more or less) of what he says in the first minute of a performance of ‘Oh Lord…’. He says his prayer, beginning about midnight, was like a letter to the Lord. He didn’t know where to mail it, so he put it in his bible instead. And what was in this letter? He asked God to do something about his heart, because a lot of time had passed since he had met the Lord, and his heart was beginning to harden. This condition was becoming too natural, and Keith wanted to have ‘baby skin’ again, on his heart. He could already feel the inevitable advance of age, that he was getting old and wrinkled, with a callousness that had formed. He wasn’t really doing anything wrong, but he was more distressed because of the things he wasn’t doing. So, he stayed up until about 2:00 AM writing the song. The words he wrote in that two-hour span show he felt ‘tired’ (v.2); that his ‘faith (was) small’ (v.3), and that he’d ignored God’s ‘book of books’, and ‘prayer’ (v.3); and that he needed his ‘fire’ to be re-lit (v.4). He repeats in a chorus that he aspired to sharing God’s word, but that he needed ‘first…to just live it’.
We could gather from what Keith wrote, as the title words for this song-prayer indicate, that he had discovered God was with him. Keith might have sounded like a faith-struggler, but that did not seem to have diminished his view or desire to reacquaint himself with the God he knew was listening to him. Perhaps Keith had, during the first few moments when he first knew Him, saved this sensation, like keeping a special secret in a bottle. In 1980, it sounds as if Keith remembered this and had called from inside his own spirit for a renewal – like uncorking the bottle and letting the genie-God out to reform his spirit again. Keith’s life journey had not been smooth – from belief and musical success in his early youth, then to drugs and eastern mysticism as a teenager, and finally returning to Christ in the early 1970s – so one can really appreciate Keith’s expression of what he saw. He’d lived on the ‘other side’, one might say, so could that have magnified his gratitude for the God he could re-envision in 1980? Keith tragically died in 1982 in a plane crash with 11 others, two years after he wrote ‘O Lord…’. What might he say to you and me today? He might not recommend for you and me this circuitous route to God that he traveled, but Keith might respond that he was just a little bit like Jacob – a wrestler with God (Genesis 32:22-32). How about you…are you wrestling with Him?
Hear the author-composer tell the song’s story here, in the first minute of the song’s performance: Keith Green - Oh, Lord You're Beautiful (Live) (youtube.com)
Read about the author-composer here: Keith Green - Wikipedia
See information here about the map of Texas highlighting Smith County: File:Map of Texas highlighting Smith County.svg - Wikimedia Commons…the copyright holder of the image has stated the following: I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so:I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
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