By Faith
Abel offered up the firstborn of his flock,
A gift God was pleased he gave.
Enoch walked with God and he was taken up
Avoiding death by faith.
By faith, we believe what we cannot see.
By faith, we receive all you have to give.
By faith, we see your face.
All this comes by faith.
Abraham obeyed and went out to a place
We know as the promised land.
Sarah then conceived, and just as she believed,
Had children like grains of sand.
Chorus
All these died in faith trusting in Your grace
And promises You gave.
We now follow on, in the footsteps of your Son
And heroes of our faith.
© 2021 JG Songs
This was written as an encouragement to keep pressing into faith by following the examples of those who’ve gone before us as detailed in Hebrews 11.
At the Resound Worship 2021 Songwriting Retreat at Wydale Hall in Yorkshire, UK, we had an input session from one of the leaders. He encouraged us with various ideas to get us started, and one of those ideas was to tell a story
The Bible is of course a book of stories within stories tell the one Great Story so that felt a bit overwhelming at first. However, I soon remembered that the great summary of all these stories was Hebrews 11. I turned there and found my inspiration.
In the first recording, you can hear that I had some of the second verse (which was the first I worked on) but the melody and lyrics for the chorus took me a long while to figure out, simply by continuing to play and push the melody and chord progression over and over again.
The verses came pretty easily as I sifted through the chapter and pulled out images of particular characters that stood out. Initially, I had thought I’d include more verses which is why the first verse starts with relatively ‘minor’ characters before the second verse introduces the heavy-hitters Abraham and Sarah.
Draft 1
Abel offered up the firstborn from his flock
A gift God was pleased he gave
Enoch walked with God and he was taken up
He avoided death by faith
Faith is assurance of things unseen
Faith is the way that we receive
blah
blah
Abraham obeyed and went to a place
We know as the promised land
Sarah then conceived and just as she believed
Had children like grains of sand
Draft 2
Abel offered up the firstborn of his flock
A gift God was pleased he gave
Enoch walked with God and he was taken up
Avoiding death by faith
By faith, we believe what we cannot see
By faith, we receive what you choose to give
By faith, we see your face
All this comes by faith
Abraham obeyed and went out to a place
We know as the promised land
Sarah then conceived and just as she believed
Had children like grains of sand
All these died in faith trusting in your grace
…
We will follow on, trusting in your Son
…
But by that point, I realised that was probably about as many characters as the song could hold without tearing and wanted a final verse to round things off. I knew it had to be something about how these heroes were inspired by the Ultimate Hero of Christ and that all of them were our inspiration. You can see me sketching out those ideas in Draft 2 above while also making small tweaks to words here and there to standardise the meter of the verses with each other.
Another big change between Drafts 1 and 2 was the chorus. I had initially wanted to keep it more in line with what the Bible text actually says but this didn’t really generate anything until I realised that the phrase “By faith” is repeated in Hebrews 11 no fewer than 22 times. This then provided the hook for the song that I’d been searching for.
Musically, I had some input from Andy Clark of Resound Worship who suggested I use more bass notes on the fingerpicking in the chorus. There was some other good stuff too, but it was a long time ago now, and I can’t remember the details.
