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One of the things I love about you is it seems to me the
more success you have, the more you want to be soft, and the
more you want to be like clay so The Lord can mold you.
That’s my goal. That’s literally my number one goal every
day, because I think it’s so needed. It’s easy to get
caught up in being out there on the road doing this for a
number of years and to just get a little jaded and a little
hard toward it. It can excel and become sarcastic and
jaded.
My prayer has always been that I will stay soft and just sit
in wonder as God moves songs through me, and as people send
me emails saying something was triggered after they heard a
song, that they said a prayer and got their life right again
with God.
That’s it for me, man, when that stops moving me is when
I’ll stop doin’ it.
You wrote two powerful prayers at the beginning and the end
of
Lose My Soul. Did that song start out as a
prayer?
The first verse is a prayer, yeah, that’s how the verse
started.
You know I had this chorus; I don’t want to gain the
whole world and lose my soul. That was a verse
that was on the back of my dad’s real estate business card
when I was a kid. I remember reading it and it was
confusing to me as a young boy. As I became an adult, I
revisited that thought, I ran across that verse in the Bible
and I was like man, that is powerful.
It’s powerful because it’s so simple and such a declaration,
such a proclamation for your life. Especially how fast the
world is coming at us and throwing things at us these days.
I thought, man, if I could stand on a thought like that, it
would be amazing, so I just started asking God for that this
would be true in my life, and that resulted in the song.
I think one of the parts of the song that I love is the
prayer at the very end, when you end the song saying, May
your Kingdom be what wakes us up, and what lays us down.
I just felt like I needed to talk directly to God in that
song. I don’t do that a lot. My songs are usually about
human relationships, ultimately resolving to God, but not
direct, you know, not direct to the Lord. It felt good. It
felt right.
It came right from your heart.
It was a one-take thing. I walked in the booth and I said,
‘I just want to say something,’ and my producer Chris
Stevens
said, ‘go ahead,’ and the track started and I prayed. It
felt right.
Wow, I didn’t know it was one take, something that you
hadn’t prepared in advance.
Yeah, it was truly a prayer.
You’ve had a lot of your prayers answered, Toby. There have
to be times when you reflect on how awesome our God has been
to you over the years.
Oh yeah, man, all the time. I just would never have
imagined when I told my dad in college that I was going to
sign a record deal and go to Nashville. I told him, ‘Dad,
in two years I’ll be back doing real estate with you, then
I’ll have my business degree.’
But I just haven’t looked back for one second, and I try to
be obedient when God open’s doors. I’ve always said I never
had to kick any doors down, I’ve never had to force
anything, I’ve just waited on God to open doors and have
been willing to step through them when God’s opened them and
been willing to give it my all.
There’s something we talked about last time that has had
great meaning to me and I want to thank you for that.
You had mentioned when you wake up every morning you read a
devotional by Oswald Chambers and I went out and bought it.
Oh you did?
I read it every morning.
Oh Man.
You know, I picture you whether you’re on the road with the
band and the entire crew or whether your at home with your
wife and five kids, you wake up every day, and the first
thing you do is you make quiet time for the Lord.
Oswald is a great way to do that. I bought the books for
everyone in my band on this tour so we could do it
together. We read them in the morning by ourselves and
before we go onstage, we read it again and pray.
Oswald’s been a little tough on us lately with his
devotions.
Man he has, he speaks the truth.
Yeah, he does. He’s right in God’s Word.
One of the things that gets to me about a lot of Christians
is our complacency. We have the greatest gift given to all
of mankind and you wrote a song with Trev from Thousand Foot
Krutch called Ignition, and I love the line at the very end
where you proclaim,
"Jump
start my heart and wake the sleeper inside."
We do need that jump start to go out there and proclaim the
words of Christ with excitement.
Absolutely. And it’s so easy to fall into the trap of
complacency. If you listen to my songs from Made to
Love to Ignition, I mean, I struggle with
that. I struggle with sort of just walking through life
and letting it come at me rather than grabbing a hold of
it and saying, ‘Alright God, what’s next? You show me the
door and I’m going to roll through it.’
It’s just easy to fall into that trap of just letting life
come at you, and life ruling you rather than you and the
Holy Spirit ruling life, you know what I mean? |
