Music awards shows wear me down. I’ve been watching them since MTV launched the annual VMAs. I’ve watched so many, always trying to get the pulse of culture (where music has come from and where it’s going) that over the last couple of years I’ve passed on watching as a result of weariness, including last Sunday night. “All Creatures Great and Small” is a little less blood-pressure spiking, so that’s what we were focused on at our house during the Grammys.
When I woke up yesterday morning I wondered what my phone would tell me about the 68th version of what’s tagged as “Music’s biggest night.” Usually it’s the edgy stuff that hits the news first. True to form, there was the out-there stuff regarding the daring dress worn by Chappell Roan. Even CNN headlined their Grammys fashion recap this way: “At the Grammys, bad taste had a good night.”
But what really caught my eye was a video clip that I’ve watched over and over again.
As Jelly Roll took to the podium to accept his Grammy for Best Contemporary Country Album, his emotionally-charged acceptance speech did what many acceptance speeches for all kinds of awards have done over the years: he mentioned and thanked Jesus. Of course, that rarely happens on a music awards show. . . and in other settings you have to wonder if nods to Jesus are somehow an obligatory style of virtue signaling, much like pointing upwards to heaven sometimes is after scoring a touchdown. But something seemed very different this time around.
What Jelly Roll did was give testimony to the transforming saving grace of Jesus Christ, as he let people in the audience know about his own story of redemption. You have to watch (embedded below). Something about his message and delivery brought to mind a newly transformed Paul letting people know the before and after of his own Damascus road experience. Yes, Jelly Roll is a little more raw than some believers might like him to be, but it looks to me like this man is being incredibly genuine. There’s something simple, beautiful, and joy-inducing about his words. I love it! And to proclaim the light of the simple Gospel in a place that celebrates and rewards what is so oftentimes darkness. . . well, glory be to God!
I was struck this morning by today’s entry in the Martyn Lloyd-Jones daily devotional, Walking With God Day by Day. The top of the page featured these four words: “The Power of God.” I could only smile as I read. . . thinking about the power of God at work in an incarcerated future-country-music-singer’s life. . . and in my own. This is what Jelly Roll was tesifying to. Read on, and ponder the beauty of God’s work in your own life. . .
THE POWER OF GOD
And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.
Colossians 2:15
The plan of salvation displays to us, in a way that nothing else does, the power of God. The power of God was manifested in the Incarnation when He prepared a body for His Son and worked the miracle of the virgin birth—and what marvelous power! But not only that. I rather prefer to think of it like this: It is as we look at God in Christ and all that He did in Him and through this plan of salvation that we see His complete power to master everything that is opposed to Himself, everything that is opposed to the best interests of man, and everything that is opposed to the best interests of this world.
For the fact is that the whole problem has arisen in this way. One of the brightest of the angelic beings that were created by God rebelled against God and raised himself up against Him. That is the origin of Satan. He is a power, a person, an angel of great might. He is as great as this: He deluded a man and conquered him, thereby making himself the god of this world and “the prince of the power of the air†(Ephesians 2:2). The power of the devil is something that we seriously underestimate. He believed he had overturned all the work of salvation when the Son of God went to the cross.
But, says Paul in Colossians 2, it is there Satan made his greatest blunder, for by the cross God “spoiled principalities and powers,[and] he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it†(verse 15). Christ met Satan face to face in single combat and routed him; at the cross He fulfilled the promise given to man at the beginning, when Adam was told that the seed of the woman would bruise the serpent’s head. This was the plan of salvation.
A Thought to Ponder
The plan of salvation displays to us the power of God.
Yes. . . yes it does. Nobody is beyond being transformed by the amazing grace of God!