Songs for Good Friday | Songs for Communion

For the past decade, I’ve linked to or included songs at Thinking Out Loud and Christianity 201 which are cross-focused, appropriate for a Communion Service (Eucharist) or Good Friday. There are also a number of songs we’ve done individually or as part of a worship team. I’ve never attempted to gather them all in one place.

These are not the top songs which come to mind for many of you, but ones which I thought might be lesser known, or are more lyrically rich. There are a number by UK artists, and I feel the lyrical depth we get from songwriters there exceeds the output we see from writers in Nashville. I have however included a few you should recognize.

This is the first time I’ve embedded a playlist — not a single video — so to keep it playing you either need to keep this blog page open, or click the YouTube icon to transfer the action directly to YouTube. Right now there are 21 songs, so if you want to have this playing in the background, you should be good for 90+ minutes.

Again, these are not “Easter songs.” A few of them move to the resurrection, but the idea was to focus on the arrest, trial, scourging, suffering and crucifixion of Jesus.

If the player does not open properly here is the link.

Have the Christ Mindset

Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, I will take a familiar passage of scripture and run over it in my mind and think about how I would restate it if I were paraphrasing it for someone else to better understand. I’m not sure if this helps me get back to sleep or keeps me awake, but it’s better than a dozen other directions my mind could go to at that hour.

One that I’ve focused on for years is a familiar part of Philippians 2. A couple of years ago I alluded to the fact I had done this (see link below) but hadn’t actually spelled it out at Thinking Out Loud. At C201, I posted an earlier version of the passage. This is the form it presently takes:

Have the same mindset as Christ, the anointed one.
Although he was God,
he didn’t see his divinity as something to be leveraged,
Rather, he practiced humility,
taking on the role of a servant,
And entering fully into the human condition,
Even to the point of death,
And especially a death of the worst kind.

For this, God elevated him to the highest level
and gave him a title above all others,
That at the very mention of his name,
Everyone would show submission physically,
and proclaim verbally,
that Jesus Christ is Lord.

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For further reading:

• This passage in The Message, The Easy-to-Read Version, and in The Voice. (Only today did I really look at these.)
• The passage as I rendered it 3½ years ago, in January 2013. (It’s very, very different.)
  
• August, 2014 article: How to Be Humble Like Me.