Word of God Speak

A MercyMe favorite, this song is regular at many church services. In our interview with lead singer Bart Millard, he told us the story behind the song: "We were doing church camps at the time. We'd just wrapped up our first album and we were working on the second album, which 'Word of God Speak' is on. But we had a lot of prior commitments we had to fulfill of doing church camps. It's a real busy, incredibly busy summer of stuff we had booked before we ever signed a record deal. So we would find ourselves living in host homes and doing all the kind of stuff we'd done for years to make ends meet. We were doing a church camp in Jekyll Island, Georgia. And we're trying to finish the record at the same time. Our producer came out and we were trying to get work done during the day when we were off the stage, because we were in a time crunch. I was getting real frustrated, because the timeframe and then having to do it in a hurry, it just started to feel like every song sounded exactly the same. It would be real frustrating. I remember going to bed, just kind of down about, Man, this is not going to work out. I fell asleep somewhere along there, and then probably about 3 or so in the morning I woke up and I grabbed my journal - my pad and paper that I always keep next to me - and just started writing the first verse and part of the chorus. I went back to sleep and barely remember even doing that. In fact, I woke up the next morning, I packed everything up, I think it was the last day of camp, and we left. Then it wasn't for a month or so later when we were actually wrapping up the album. We got to the end, it was the 11th hour, and our producer and myself both are like, Man, it's missing something. Maybe something to tie the album up. I don't know what it is. I had this kind of nagging feeling, like, Man, there's something that I did a few weeks ago. So I started flipping through the journal and found this verse and a chorus and was flipping out, like Oh, my gosh, I barely remember doing this. So I was sitting there going, this is it. I wrote the second verse real quick, and then we sang it right there with the piano and the vocal. And other than the strings that were added to it later on, the vocal and the piano were coming back nice, without any changes or anything. And then it was like Okay, now we're done, now we're finished. So it was a pretty cool deal. I don't think it's ever happened like that before, but I'm glad that it did happen."

Millard tells us that this is one of just three MercyMe songs that had divine intervention, coming to him in about 10 minutes "like lightning in a bottle." The other two are "I Can Only Imagine" and "The Hurt & The Healer."

The song topped the Billboard Christian Song's chart for 23 weeks, making it the longest-ruling #1 in the tally's history. The record was broken by Hillsong's "Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)" in 2014.