How do you feel about yourself as a Christian?

Perhaps you feel like a failure. Your prayer life is patchy (at best), and your Bible reading plan is a distant memory. When you’re at church, you look around at the ‘good Christians’ and wish for the same picture-perfect devotion. To make it worse, you’re battling the same old sins, which never seem to abate.

Or maybe you feel good. You pray and read the Bible daily, and give generously each month. Your family is walking with the Lord, and you’ve evangelised to several colleagues over the last few weeks. The battle over sin feels easy, and life feels fruitful.

However you feel—flourishing or failing—the truth is that we come to the Father with empty hands. He’s not checking your good works at the door with a sign reading ‘only successes allowed’. Nope. You come to the Father through Jesus’ spotless record, counted as your own. Whether you’ve had the best or worst week, you are covered with Christ’s perfection, not your failures or achievements. You bring nothing.

This is at the heart of our homegrown song Come to the King. It’s an invitation to return to God with all our brokenness, sin, and weakness. As one line puts it:

“Bring all your heart, you’re welcomed as you are.”

God doesn’t ask us to polish ourselves up beforehand, but to come empty-handed and messy and let him do the mending.

Come with nothing, together.

But there’s another layer to the song. Although it began as a moment of personal devotion, Come to the King is also a song for the church. We return to God in community. On our own, we often become paralysed by guilt, shame, introspection and despair. We need words of encouragement and challenge, and the regular rhythms of life groups and Sunday services to shake us out of ourselves. Shoulder to shoulder, we come with nothing, together.

So, when writing Come to the King, we made a few intentional moves. In the first draft of the chorus, there was no ‘all we need’, only ‘all I need’, which we quickly changed. We wanted something we could belt out together, as one church family. And when our producer suggested recording group vocals, we were keen to try it out. During our Worship Team Night in August, we set up a couple of microphones, filled the room, and recorded the bridge and final chorus live. Rather than only one or two voices, this song now has 25.

Come to the King drops next Friday (14th Nov) across streaming platforms, and we can’t wait to share it with you. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we have, and that it causes you to worship without striving or performance.

Until then, you can pre-save the song here so it’s waiting for you on release day.