David Zimmer: Welcome to Sound Plus Doctrine, the podcast of Sovereign Grace Music where we explore what the Bible has to say about music and worship in the church and encourage those who plan, lead, and participate in their Sunday gatherings each week.
Bob Kauflin: This life is not all there is.
DZ: This is not our home.
BK: And as much as we know that as believers, we just need to be reminded again and again, this is not our home. We have a city built, not built with human hands, that Christ has prepared for us.
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BK: Welcome to Sound Plus Doctrine, the podcast of Sovereign Grace Music, where we explore what the Bible has to say about music and worship in the church, and encourage those who plan, lead, and participate in their Sunday gatherings each week.
DZ: Hello, and welcome to the Sound Plus Doctrine podcast. My name is David Zimmer.
BK: My name is Bob Kauflin.
DZ: And we have two very special guests with us.
BK: Very special.
DZ: Today, we have our good friends, Ryan Fogelsong and Dave Fournier.
BK: Welcome, guys.
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BK: You’re supposed to say, “It’s such an honor to be on the Sound Plus Doctrine podcast.”
Dave Fournier: This has been my dream.
DZ: We didn’t feed them lines.
BK: Sorry, we should have done that.
DZ: We are… It’s so great to have you guys with us, and thank you for listening and tuning in wherever you are. It is so great to have you guys talking about All of Our Tomorrows, a single that we just released, a brand new song for the church, so we get to talk about that today.
BK: So just a little history for the song, and our prayer is that, if you haven’t heard the song, maybe you’ll listen to it afterwards. We know some people, churches are singing it. It had its origins almost two years ago at a songwriter retreat when Dave, you brought this song, and we’ll talk a little bit about the history in just a moment. I want you to tell it. But long story short, we ended up getting the song and we were thinking about it for our album, Heaven Has Come, Christmas album. But it wasn’t quite a Christmas song, it’s more like a New Year’s song, which you made very clear. This is like a New Year’s song, could be sung anytime. But we wanted people to hear it. It’s like when you have a great song and you’re just kinda sitting on it and you just… You want people to hear it. So my daughter, McKenzie and I, we just did a version on YouTube. But that version got a great response.
DZ: Yeah, it really did well, and a lot of comments, people saying, “Wow! This is so encouraging.”
BK: Yeah, and where can I listen to this? And so we didn’t have a version. I kept telling Dave, “Dave, we’re gonna do a version. Really, we’re gonna do a version.” And that was… What’s that?
DF: It’s on the B side of the album.
BK: Yeah. Was that two years ago, or… It was a while ago, and so I always felt this kind of… This burden like, I gotta get this song out, I gotta get this song out. So we finally did record it at the WorshipGod Conference, along with a few other songs, and have put it out as a congregational song. So that’s kinda the history of it. Ryan… Well actually, Dave, Dave has been a part of Covenant Fellowship Church in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, it’s a Sovereign Grace Church. For how long now, Dave?
DF: Probably going over 25 years, early 90s. It’s been a long time.
BK: Wow! And you’re not on staff there. You serve… You were just telling us, is that volunteer… What is it you do?
DF: I’m a volunteer coordinator for our region for hospice. Folks that are at end of life, the patients as well as their families, I basically recruit a team of hundreds of volunteers from the area to go and serve families and patients at end of life.
BK: Which, thank you for doing that. That requires grace and faith and joy, patience, and I’ve watched you in roles like that for years and I had to understand that a volunteer coordinator is not someone who volunteers, you are actually paid for this job.
DF: Yeah, you’re not the first person to have asked that, but it is funny when I say yeah, this is what I do. Oh volunteer. No, no, coordinate those who volunteer. I get paid.
BK: It’s a little clunkier, but it’s clearer. So that’s where you are. And Ryan, tell us where you are.
Ryan Fogelsong: Yes. I’m out here in California in Santa Clarita and I’m the pastor of Corporate Worship at Grace Baptist Church here, and lead corporate worship on a Sunday, oversee and shepherd our volunteers. We have a choir, orchestra, and band members and youth and on Sundays. So I help kind of coordinate that and put together our order of service on Sundays, along with our staff and pastors.
BK: Wow! And so there is a long history between you and David.
RF: Yes, sir.
BK: Talk to us about that. Tell us how hard it’s been to be David’s friend for so many years.
RF: He’s quite a burden. No. David and I met, goodness, probably 16 years ago, back in college and I just, I knew him as a drummer back then, and we’ve been in several different bands together, and we just became quick friends back in college and we went on to play in the group Enfield and we were there for… It’s about seven years, Dave?
DZ: Yeah.
RF: And then we’ve continued to play in different iterations and rhythm sections, and I’m so glad that we still get to do it. It’s a privilege. You’re a good friend, Dave.
DZ: Yeah. Ryan’s one of my best friends, and I think through Enfield, we’ve met, I think we’ve said this in previous podcasts, but that’s where we met CJ and that’s where we met you, and Sovereign Grace Music, and your friendship was built through that and having Ryan and I come out and play on albums. It’s wild to just look back and see we’ve been doing this for 10 years with Sovereign Grace Music, and now the joy of writing and continuing to facilitate arranging that can allow churches to sing these songs.
BK: Yeah. And we got David to become a part of Sovereign Grace Church. We’re still working on Ryan. It’s hard, but we’ll keep trying. And Dave Fournier, you have been writing for Sovereign Grace Music for a long time, contributed some great songs. Yes. How many years do you think?
DF: Well, I think I had a couple of songs on album in like ’98, ’99 so I started leading worship at Covenant in the mid-90s and somehow got songs on this album. The process was very different back then. There was no edits to the songs. The two songs got put on. Either I started with the two best songs I’d ever written, or we had a different process in the way the sauce was made.
DZ: Bob… He’s softened his critical spirit.
DF: There was no edit whatsoever. It was just, here’s the song. Okay!
BK: Yeah. We did things a little differently. We’ve realized that you actually do have to work on songs for them to work, and this, All of Our Tomorrows is a great example of that.
DZ: Right. For sure.
BK: So it started with a set of lyrics. Dave, for those of you who don’t know, Dave is just really one of our finest lyricists, and I wanna say this, Dave, you have been faithful through the years to become more open-handed with your lyrics. I think we all have become more open-handed. As a songwriter, we just tend to think well, the way God gave it to me is the way He gave it to me, and we don’t wanna correct God. So why are you trying to correct my lyrics or my tune? But love working with you and this song began as a set of lyrics. Tell us about how it began.
DF: Yeah. We were writing for a Christmas album a few years ago and usually we’ll try to think of different themes that might go along with that, and so I’ve always wanted to write a New Year’s hymn. I think there’s not a lot of them that we use, and so I just started thinking of different themes for that. What I would wanna sing if I was worshiping as going into the New Year, and just trying to incorporate where different people might be coming from, good places and more challenging places. So yeah, I just started to write out some lyrics that might work for that kind of a hymn structure without a melody to begin with.
BK: You know, Amazing Grace was a New Year’s hymn. It was first sung on New Year’s Day by John Newton.
DF: I’ve heard that before, yeah.
BK: Yeah. So may this receive the same kind of reception as Amazing Grace.
DF: Sounds good. Me and John, yeah.
BK: What did you… What were some of the categories you were thinking of as… It’s a four verse hymn. You say you thought about different situations that people might be in. It’s a song about God’s sovereignty over all of our tomorrows.
DF: Yeah. God’s sovereignty over time. He’s put us in these lives that we change over time. This is the setting that he gave us to serve him, and so as the year changes, we’re reflecting on the future, we’re reflecting on the past. So those themes, God’s sovereignty, of course, consecration, committing ourselves to the Lord into the future. But then also, the idea of what do we do with the past? What do we do with our failures? What do we do with the challenges we’ve been through?
DF: There’s verses that say that we should put our hands to the plow and move forward and not look back. There’s also the reality that that’s a story that God has worked in our lives and all those things are working together. So it’s good to contemplate what God has done and that he works together all things for our good. So I think that theme had to be in there. Auld Lang Syne has it even. That old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? I don’t even know what it means and the rest of the…
BK: I was going to say, you’re about to use Auld Lang Syne. I have no idea what that saying means.
DF: That’s it. That’s it. But the melody and the other stuff, It just makes you feel something. I think I’m singing about the past so I’m feeling kind of sad and I don’t know exactly what I’m singing, but it’s part of a New Year’s experience.
BK: Yes. So you tried to bring some clarity to those songs.
DF: Some clarity. More clarity for Auld Lang Syne. Yeah.
BK: And it’s true. As you’re talking, I’m thinking, we can feel at the turn of a new year, regrets about the past and fears about the future. But this song, you really, I think, help us speak… It imparts hope. Hope and trust and faith. I mean, think of the line in the second verse, “come living way our way, make clear, let perfect love drive out our fear. Be thou our vision now and here, and all of our tomorrows.”
BK: Like Lord, help us not give into the fears that we have, not give into the unknowns. So that’s really powerful. All right. So you had this set of lyrics. Actually talk about the third verse, because I think that has a meaningful story.
DF: Yeah. The third verse, I’d originally written a different third verse that kind of addressed that general theme of what to do with our past in Christ. But at the same time, as I was writing that, I had a close friend, Chris Radano, who I’ve collaborated with a lot in music over the years, and he’s a drummer and a PhD in chemistry and just a great guy in his 40s with three young girls and his wife. He was struggling… He was dying of brain cancer and so that was happening as we’re heading towards not only the holidays, but also working on these songs.
DF: And so that was obviously heavy on my mind and in our community, it was a very heavy reality that we were dealing with and so, of course, as I’m writing these words, I’m in prayer to the Lord about that and just, he died on Thanksgiving Day, and there was… It’s not often that you can get kind of some personal experiences, your personal experience with the Lord into a congregational song, because it has to be clear enough for people to experience and understand what they’re singing, right? But in this case, I was able to do that.
DF: And there’s a story behind that, but the line where, “cherished saints the sun once kissed whose beauty passed behind the clouds,” there had just been a moment where I was waiting to go over to the house because I knew that… I’d got a text that he was probably dying and people were gathering and so as I was sitting in my living room and praying for him and for the family, I got a text that just said, “he just passed,” and it was one of those days that couldn’t decide if it was going to be really brightly sunny or really darkly rainy, right? And that was the atmosphere out there and it was dark at that moment, but as soon as I saw the text, he just passed the room flooded with light.
DF: And so it affected me in some way, just affected the way I prayed that moment that it can seem dark, but there’s light on the other side of those clouds, and then I went over to my friend Joseph Stigora’s house and I was telling him that story in his living room. And as I told him that story, as I told him that in that moment, that room flooded with light, as soon as I said, “the room flooded with light,” we were both just like, what?
DF: So we were both obviously deeply grieving, but there was the sense that God had given us a picture of hope. And so that was an image that I wanted to get into there without having to explain that story, but in a way that people not even knowing that can grasp the meaning.
DZ: Right. Well, and the hope that’s provided throughout the whole song, just we have hope in the sovereignty of God in all situations and circumstances. That third verse is so personal and intimate, and I know that’s affected so many people when they’ve sung that third verse because they’ve thought about their own mortality or someone close to them. But then the fourth verse just pours into hope that we’re empowered by the love of God and we’re moving forward. We’re moving forward with hope. We’re not stuck in that sadness or that despair. So the song just preaches. It’s so great.
BK: Grace before and grace behind, for lo, what hope before us stands. I didn’t know that… So you were writing that verse in the midst of Chris about to die?
DF: Yeah. In fact, that verse finally got written after he passed because that imagery was put into it.
RF: Wow
DZ: Wow
BK: I think you had said that, but I just forgotten that. Okay. So you have these words and you bring it to the retreat, summer retreat with a tune. So you wrote it without a tune, but then you ask Wendell Kimbrough.
DF: Yes. There’s a brother, Wendell Kimbrough, who I’ve known over the years and he’s a fantastic songwriter who comes from a different stream of, within Christianity here in America and has really committed his life to writing songs from the Psalms and so he really gets on that. But anyway, I’ve wanted to collaborate with him for a long time. So he worked on a melody for this one. It was great. Really nice melody as well. Beautiful melody about that grief.
BK: Yes. Yes. But we did it at the retreat and it didn’t quite settle for people. So at our retreats, we play the songs for each other and just get feedback right there. If the whole group of songwriters isn’t like, yeah, we’re not going to want to send it out, which is very different from the way we used to do songwriter retreats where you’d have four people on a panel giving you the thumbs up or the thumbs down. I think this is much better.
DZ: Well yeah, and they’re worship leaders so if they can’t jump in with the singing, they think, okay well, how would I do this in my congregation or my church? So I think that’s also really helpful too.
BK: Yeah. So it was a beautiful tune, but didn’t feel it was quite the one yet.
DZ: Yeah. Quite matched the lyrics exactly.
BK: Yeah. You wanted these words to have a great tune.
DF: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the consensus was, wonderful as it was to listen to and to be edified by, but maybe not as much to have everyone enter into singing with it. And then also, it was just a practical reality that with Wendell, there wasn’t a chance to really continue to edit the song much. Would have taken a lot of time to go from there. So I think that was kind of what had us start to explore some other options.
BK: Yeah. So you generously said, okay let’s open this up for other contributions, and a number of people wrote melodies.
DZ: Me being one of them.
BK: You being… Tell us about your tune that didn’t make the cut. I thought it was a beautiful tune but…
DZ: Thank you.
BK: Didn’t make the cut.
DZ: I mean, I was immediately struck by the lyrics.
BK: You and Lacey, right?
DZ: Yeah. I initially came up with a melody for all four verses, but there were moments where I felt like the lyrics were saying too much so I was paring down some of the lyrics as I went through the process. And I remember when I brought Lacey in, which is not always a bad…
DF: It’s a great thing to do.
DZ: You know, not always a bad thing. But when I brought Lacey into the project too, she also thought, well this could be shorter too. So we were doing more editing than… And I loved where it sat. But as I look back, I do think it took maybe too much out of it, and then when you brought that third verse, because I think we only had three verses at the time, was that right?
DF: No, we had the four verses, and that was what I struggled with, was that I figured out how to re-craft the other three…
DZ: That was it.
DF: With that one, because I wanted to have that imagery in it and I felt like it was… I’ve become very comfortable with being willing to chop up lyrics and find new ways and Bob’s been really helpful with that over the years, to really just re-craft the song. There’s good things you can come up with.
BK: Lyricists, take note.
DF: But for that one, no matter how much I tried to re-write, I couldn’t get what I wanted in there.
DZ: Yeah, well, now when I sing the third verse, I think I wouldn’t touch that. And it’s one of those things that is hindsight. But yeah, so that’s kind of where we stood, and then… But as a songwriter or a collaborator, you just really go hey, best idea wins. So give this back to you. If it’s not settling, let’s move on. Let’s find something else.
BK: So then Ryan put a melody, I think that you adjusted slightly. But Ryan, tell us what you were thinking and how you came up with it.
RF: Sure. Yeah I mean, I remember being struck hearing those lyrics at that retreat as well, and just kind of kept replaying them and thinking about them for a couple of weeks, and there was this melody that I had been working on for a couple months, kind of self-contained it on its own, and I sort of mapped it on to that lyric, and some of it worked, some of it didn’t, but I just kind of adjusted it. I remember sending it to Dave and going hey, I took a crack at this, what do you think? And Dave, I think you were saying the latter half of the melody you really liked, but the first one just didn’t resonate with the tone of the lyric.
RF: I know as a songwriter, one of my weaknesses is I can tend to get bored with my melody really quickly, and so I don’t immediately go to repetition. But the first part of the melody, we ended up putting in more repetition, kind of landing on the same note, and it really made the latter half of the melody kind of bloom and fresh and so looking back, I’m going, what a great idea, Dave, that you had to do that.
RF: So the beginning of the melody, not a lot of intervals, pretty simple, and then it grows into kind of this middle section where you get up in the range and then it climbs and it climbs and so I think the melody has a story to tell too, and I think it works well with your lyric, Dave.
BK: That’s great. Yeah. That penultimate line melody.
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BK: Oh, it’s so good.
DZ: Right before the last line you’re saying.
BK: That’s what penultimate means.
DZ: Thank you. Just for people that didn’t know that.
DF: We know penultimate, David.
BK: So we’ve sung this song many times, and it’s not just a New Year’s song.
DF: No.
RF: Bob, in fact, there’s people who reach out to me who’ve said that they play this at memorials and funerals, and so in 2020, our church in particular, we had up to 90 memorials and funerals. We’ve just had a lot of folks pass away, and even this past year, my wife and I, we lost two grandparents within 10 days of each other. So for our church and to our family in particular, this song has meant so much to me, and just to go back to that lyric, Dave, that you wrote, verse three, I’m so grateful that you spent time, the idea of grief and missing loved ones. It wasn’t just a line in a song, you gave a full verse to it, which I think makes that fourth verse so full of hope because we took time to kind of sit in that moment to grieve well.
BK: I think of Psalm 90 where the psalmist says, verse 12, so teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom, and recently I had a dear friend, die suddenly of a heart attack, Larry Malament, he’s one day older than I am. Every year we would exchange emails. I’d always tell him I looked up to him as my elder. But he served with my son, Devon, as the senior pastor, and he just died one Saturday getting ready for a wedding, of a heart attack, and one of the things that songs do, they give us words to speak to God in different situations. Of course, that’s what the Psalms do perfectly, they give us words to take to God in our sorrows and our joys and our celebrations and our losses and all that, and good hymns do that as well.
BK: So I thought of these lines, Dave, “let all our fond and longing tears.” I knew Larry for 40 years and many memories, and then I served with him in the late ’80s as a co-pastor at a church, and my son, Devon, served with him for the last seven years in a church. So lots of fond and longing tears. It then says, “remind us, we are pilgrims here. We trust you, sovereign of our years with all of our tomorrows,” and it just reminded me that, yeah, we are pilgrims, this life is not all there is.
DZ: This is not our home.
BK: And as much as we know that as believers, we just need to be reminded again and again, this is not our home. We have a city not built with human hands, that Christ has prepared for us, and that softened the pain of losing a dear friend suddenly, just knowing that yeah, this is what our life is on this earth, and we’re gonna press on, hands to the plow, empowered by the love of God with grace before and grace behind for lo, what hope before us stands. You finish all that you began.
BK: So it was a real… The song has been a real means of encouragement and grace and comfort during a time of sorrow. So I personally just wanna thank you guys for working on this and writing this. What have been your stories or your hopes for the song as it’s sung? What would you want people to get from it?
DF: Well, it’s really encouraging to hear stories like what you just shared, Bob. And I’ve gotten some sent to me just personally, as well as some that you’ve been sent at Sovereign Grace. But yeah, as I said before, that third verse to me was the heart of the song and everything else was designed to kind of bring us to that. So I think you’re right. It is a song about mourning. It is a song about loss, and I think there’s a reality as I work with folks that are at end of life or who are caring for people, there’s a reality where even those whose faith is strong, and even though the Scriptures are what they need to hear, those truths are true and they need to hear that. There’s a way for that truth to be brought that’s helpful and appropriate and there’s ways for that truth to be brought that aren’t.
DF: And so I’ve seen many occasions of people meaning well, but at the wrong time in the wrong way, saying, you know, God sovereign over this, you know, almost in a way that dismisses the pain that people struggle with, and so I see the song songs like this, and something that I want to do in general is find ways to creatively bring God’s word to people in a way that ministers to the real need.
DF: I think there’s nothing like music and song to put someone at ease. People will welcome a song, you know, into sorrow, and hear from God in the midst of that in ways that they might not welcome even a friend to come into that space. It’s really a blessing to be able to even take the struggle that I was going through there, and just just bring some measure of healing or hope into… For others.
BK: Wow! Ryan, do you have any thoughts on that?
DZ: Dave, that’s wonderful.
RF: Yeah, I think this song has a great balance of theology and doxology. Explaining who God is, and then letting people know what the response should be. We’ve talked a lot about verse three, but verse one, we’re giving the scope of God’s sovereignty over the cosmos, the spinning world by your own hand, hurls ever on around the sun. He’s in control of time and season and the cosmos, and yet, he knows us and he cares for us so intimately. He knows all the sins we would ever commit, and yet out of his love and mercy chose to adopt us as his sons and daughters, and so we need songs that rest in that, and have that sense of this is who God is, and then this is now my response.
RF: And so I think the song, Dave again, just has a great balance of that and it was a pleasure to collaborate you with you brother.
DF: Absolutely.
BK: It very much mirrors the Psalms where we have statements of confidence and trust mixed with, Lord, please guide us. Please help us. Please deliver us. And Dave, I love the way you expressed it earlier, how, you know, it’s the word of God that we’re pointing people to. That’s what our songs are meant to do. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, and the word of God as it points to Christ and all he is and all he’s done, and this verse stands out to me as the verse that this song kind of fleshes out, and it’s Psalm 139:16. “Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book, were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”
BK: It’s just a mind-mockingly thought. But All of Our Tomorrows help us flesh that out, comforts us with that truth, encourages and emboldens us with that truth. So we, David and I, and many, many, many others are so grateful to you two for the time, the labor, the thought, the prayer, the heart that went into writing this song, and again, if you haven’t heard it, I encourage you to listen to it. Pray that your congregation is able to sing it, because that’s another dynamic, just where you’re gathered with people who are singing this song, and really any time to remind us of God’s, that He searches and cares for all our ways.
DZ: Amen.
BK: And so we offer up this day and all of our tomorrows to Him. So thank you guys. Grateful for your writing the song, grateful for your joining us for the podcast.
DF: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
RF: Yeah, thanks for having us.
BK: And grateful for you who are listening, watching. Thanks for joining us.
BK: Thank you for listening to Sound Plus Doctrine, the podcast of Sovereign Grace Music. Sovereign Grace Music exists to produce Christ-exalting songs and training for local churches from local churches. For more information, free sheet music, translations, and training resources, you can visit us at www.SovereignGraceMusic.org.
