(Go here for lead sheets and chord charts.)

Lyrics

1. You summon me up from the death of living
A life bent on itself and unforgiving
Resisting peace and truth, Your law defying
Exhausted by my own self-justifying

In my rebellion, You call
To raise me up from the fall
As You gather me
With Your chosen people to
Lift up my eyes to see the Lord

Wake up, sleeper
Rise from the dead
And Christ will shine on you 

2. I stand condemned, a sinner poor and needy
I come with empty hands, my heart is bleeding
My soul recounts the sins that ever plague me
The enemy reminds me of them daily

But when he shows me my sin
It’s a blessing within
For I flee to my
Lord and see, the wounded hands,
In risen power he says to me

The glory of the cross inspires my highest praise
His rising from the tomb ignites a holy blaze
Now summoned from the dead, I join the Church to raise
A shout to make the earth give way as heaven shines its holy rays
 

Words & Music: Zac Hicks, 2013, based on Ephesians 5:14
©2014 Unbudding Fig Music (ASCAP)

About

Behind the Words

“Wake Up Sleeper” is the only song whose words are 100% original. My readership knows that I’m a big fan of re-setting old hymns to new music, so writing my own material is something I’m starting to do with a bit of fear and trepidation. I was one day last year impressed by the resurrecting, life-giving power of the gospel, contained in Ephesians 5:14, which seems to be Paul’s conflation of several passages/ideas from Isaiah and Malachi.

I wanted to take Paul’s idea and expand on it in a Call to Worship song that preached the gospel’s death-to-life message. Its opening lines explain how living in the struggle of sin is a kind of “living death.” I incorporated the Augustinian idea of the human being as incurvatus in se (“curved in on itself”), which I have written about here. A double-meaning is intended in “unforgiving”–it is true that I am an unforgiving person to others and that life is unforgiving to me. And, I wanted to highlight our inability to keep the law while simultaneously exhausting ourselves at our own attempts at self-justification. Here’s verse 1:

You summon me up from the death of living
A life bent on itself and unforgiving
Resisting peace and truth, Your law defying
Exhausted by my own self-justifying

The first pre-chorus highlights the “while we were yet sinners” (Rom 5:8) aspect of salvation and God’s call to worship. It also states what I believe is one of the principle purposes of worship–to call the human race to look on Christ:

In my rebellion, You call
To raise me up from the fall
As You gather me
With Your chosen people to
Lift up my eyes to see the Lord

The second verse and its pre-chorus are my favorite lines, personally. I actually wrote it first…not sure why. The second set of lines are really potent and have personally affected me. A pastor-friend once imparted the idea to me that God even turns our sin into something good, right then and there. When we sin, it becomes a gracious gift of God to show us our need for Jesus. When we sin, we’re forced to reckon with our inability to keep God’s law, causing us to flee to Christ for mercy. In this sense, God even uses the accusations of the enemy for our good, because it drives us to our Savior. Wow.

I stand condemned, a sinner poor and needy
I come with empty hands, my heart is bleeding
My soul recounts the sins that ever plague me
The enemy reminds me of them daily

But when he shows me my sin
It’s a blessing within
For I flee to my
Lord and see, the wounded hands,
In risen power he says to me

Behind the Music

I’d describe “Wake Up Sleeper,” with a bit of a wink, as “pipe punk.” (Organ purists will find that incredibly blasphemous. Oh well.) The song is, in some respects, an exposition of what it means to be the “new Coral Ridge,” for us. I wanted this song and the entire album to begin with what has characterized our church for so many years–our 6600-pipe Ruffatti organ. But I wanted our band to quickly join its ranks (pun intended) and fuse this new sound together (check out my post musing about the organ’s future). We’re experiementing with the organ-and-band sound each Sunday, and we’re learning as we go. The two weren’t necessarily designed to go together, but we’re figuring out a path, sensing God’s providential convergence of these two usually distinct textures of church music. It’s not necessarily apparent in the recording, but organist Chelsea Chen and I labored over the stops and mixtures of the organ sound to get what we thought was just the right balance and intensity. We ran through probably twenty takes before we were satisfied.

The song’s intro and pre-chorus progressions push and pull meter and count. It feels like shifting between 3/4 and 5/4. This is meant to jolt, to “wake up.” The chorus is meant to be in the upper vocal range, with repeated tonics, so that it sounds like shout.

There is one fun, covert musical reference that I would now like to draw your attention to…along with a free album to the first two people to figure it out.