On June 17th, 2011 Emmaus released our first CD of original songs titled, Church Songs. Each of these 8 songs was born in our congregation and for our congregation with a desire to serve other Christians and congregations around the world. You can download the CD and name your own price – even free! – at this link. Pastor Cole Brown co-wrote each of the songs and the following is the story behind one of them.

You First Chose Me
The verses for this song come from a hymn written by Josiah Conder in 1836. I first heard the hymn when Matthew Smith did an acoustic rendering of it on his All I Owe album. As soon as I heard the words I knew I wanted to adapt it for use in our church because it covered a theme that few, if any, modern worship songs address: God’s sovereign election of his people.

The Apostle Paul teaches that the doctrine of election as a reason to erupt into praise and worship. We see this in Romans 11:33, 36 where, after spending several chapters explaining that God saves whom he chooses, Paul writes “Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!… For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory of forever! Amen.” In Ephesians 1 Paul writes, “praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” and then spends the rest of the chapter explaining why – because God chose us when we were unable and unwilling to choose him. Since Paul was so convinced that the doctrine of election was a reason to worship God it has always surprised me that this is something we seem to never sing about in corporate worship. I wanted to do something to change that and Josiah Conder’s hymn seemed to be the perfect lyric to do so.

One of the challenges of old hymns is that they don’t include what we would call a “chorus” or a “hook.” While hooks are not as essential in corporate worship as they are in pop music, they can be a very helpful teaching tool because they capture the theme of the song in a manner that is catchy and easy-to-remember. So my first task in adapting Conder’s lyrics into something that fit in our church was to write a hook. I wanted to write something that would summarize the main point of the song and drive into our heads and hearts both that we do not choose God (“I chose my sin/I chose idolatry”) and that we need him to choose us (“so how could I choose you/unless you first chose me?). After writing these words and the accompanying melody it became clear that I would have to change the melody of Conder’s verses to match the hip-hop feel of the new hook. HR Crump’s appropriately spacious mid-tempo, hip-hop track made that a fairly simple task.

Another element missing from old hymns is what we now refer to as a “bridge.” The purpose of the bridge is to serve as a sort of climax where the lyrical ideas of the verses and chorus are resolved. The bridge is certainly not an essential element to a congregational song but it was something we wanted to include, mainly to anchor the sometimes controversial doctrine of election in even more biblical support. I knew I wanted to sing out the truths of Romans 9 (which led Paul to respond in worship in Romans 11) and my wife, ReShawn, figured out how to make it work melodically.

To complete the transformation from ancient hymn into modern hip-hop song we called on Emmaus church member, and Humble Beast artist, Theory Hazit. His 8-bar verse is my favorite part of the song because it perfectly captures the theme of the song and is delivered in a way that is easy for the non-rappers (like myself) to rap along with. Every Christian can identify with his confession of hopelessness apart from God’s election, “I chose greed, I chose lust, yet you chose me/how could I choose you, I’m not worthy, woe is me.”