Hillsong Worship – More. Beautiful. Worship.

CCM: It’s not a new thing—the name of Jesus being taboo or driven out. Schools here in the States have been trying to drown out Jesus for decades. What about this song brings forth both the person and salvation of Jesus in such a welcoming and inviting way?
Brooke Ligertwood: It’s interesting… I was recently talking with a friend of mine who’s an incredible teacher of the Word of God, and she was telling me about a conference she was invited to speak—what she thought was a Christian conference—and they told her, “We would really prefer if you referred to ‘God’ and didn’t use the name of ‘Jesus.’” She replied, “I’m sorry, you’re asking the wrong person. Jesus is all we have. Jesus is the whole point.”

What really registered to me about this song happened recently when our amazing team pulled together an Arabic version of “What A Beautiful Name.” Obviously there’s a refugee situation right now in some countries where people are walking for their lives out of these places of conflict. We have some friends with an organization who put water stations along the way, and have also put speakers on the stations, and I imagined this song in Arabic being played out of those speakers and people who had never heard about the name of Jesus hearing it for the first time, and kind of realized…I mean, we didn’t intentionally do this, but [in this way] this song is the Gospel in a song. It explains who Jesus is and that he was the Word at the beginning, that He’s been there from the start…that He is God, what it meant for the incarnation… Jesus brought Heaven down, and then He died and rose again.

So, I thought to myself, “If there are people who have never heard of Jesus, who have no idea who He is, or what He did and what He’s done, and they hear the song for the first time…we give glory to God for that because we’re not that clever! Jesus—He’s all we have. When we start watering Him down we lose everything.

L-R: Ben Fielding & Brooke Ligertwood, “What A Beautiful Name” writers

CCM: Why do you think “What A Beautiful Name” has had such an impact?
DW: I was talking to a friend of mine who doesn’t know much about music at all and he said, “I’m just so shocked that a song that’s so blatantly about Jesus would be nominated for a GRAMMY.” I was like, “But you understand it’s in a Christian category, right?” And he said, “Yeah, but still…” I thought to myself, “That’s the kind of the world we live in now.”

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