Many years ago I was having coffee with a church planter. As we ended the meeting I asked how I might pray for him and the work to which God had called him. He simply said, “Pray that God would go with us.” That brief answer, with all of its trust and dependence on the Lord, sank into my heart.

My friend’s prayer request echoed Exodus 33:15. At a pivotal moment in the Exodus narrative, Moses asks of the Lord, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here.” Moses was saying that if he had the blessings of the promised land and all its comforts, yet the presence of the Lord was not with him, it would be meaningless. God’s nearness is what mattered most.

Ever since we began to plant The Trails Church in Celina, Texas in 2018, I had hoped to write a song on this theme. We have prayed continually that God would go before us. That we might sense the leading of the Lord in all of our planning and praying. That we might value his nearness and communion with Christ above anything else. We’ve prayed that the Lord would go with us and empower the mission to which he called the church in making disciples for his glory.

All of those prayers have found a place in the hymn “Our God Will Go Before Us.” We have found it a wonderful song to close the Sunday service, as a reminder that when we go out from the church gathering, it is the Lord who leads our way. And as we look ahead to the place “where songs of sorrow strain no more and our every breath is praise,” it is the Lord who will bring us safely to that forever home.

As the Lord Jesus himself promises in Matthew 28:20, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age."

-Matt Boswell