Glory Revealed: Mac Powell, David Nasser
04-10-2007
by Brenten Gilbert

With the tagline, "The Word of God In Worship" and a goal to help turn this generation back towards the Bible, the Glory Revealed project seems to be a rather important and intriguing initiative. In an effort to get to the heart of the project, CMCentral's Sr. Editor brenten gilbert got in touch with author and speaker, David Nasser and Mac Powell (Third Day) to chat about the origins and goals behind Glory Revealed.

Below is a transcript taken from that conversation.

Okay, let's do this then.

Great. How are you both doing these days?

Wonderful, and yourself?

I'm doing pretty well, It's a nice day out.

Beautiful.

Okay, let's go ahead and get started. How was Glory Revealed conceived?

It all started with David. David was. . . Well, our families are really close. In fact, we just came from their house yesterday - we were there for 3-4 days and we had a really great time. Our families are really close, our kids love each other and we were on vacation together and Dave was burning some steaks. . .

(laughs)

And Dave said, "Hey, I'm writing this book and I'd love for you to. . . " Uh, I think what you had asked me was to sing a song or write a song, I can't remember but I was like, so. . . And I asked him more about it and I was interested in haveing a bigger part in the record. So, I don't remember if he asked me to produce it or if I asked him if I could produce it, but either way, we ended up that way and, even from the beginning he had the vision for it. Musically, he wanted it to be kind of bluegrassy and Amerricana, using some instrumentation. . .

So, I asked Mac if he'd be a part of this project and I knew that he was super busy, but he said that he had a couple weeks to just pour into this project. And it ended up taking about two years of our time. I think it was so much bigger than we originally envisioned. We were thinking, "Hey, we'll get a couple of friends to come on board and really help us to make a big deal of God's word with this music and before it was over with, we ended up with a Backstreet Boy and Steven Curtis Chapman and Michael W Smith on the record. So it was a really neat thing just to see God just start to rein all this together.

Yeah, David had done this before with a previous book he had written. He had gotten some friends - some independent artists together - to make a CD and we really thought that this time it would be the same. We thought it would be an independent CD and that he would sell it at places that he spoke, at churches and events. It just kind of grew from there and we started to think that it would be a shame if this didn't get heard by a lot more people. And the record was just about done and we played it for the record company and they just loved it. They had a bigger vision for it and it just kept growing and growing.

Yeah.

Cool. So, I guess an appropriate question would be, How was God's glory revealed to the two of you during this whole process?

Man, there are just so many great. . . You know, we need to write a book about the process. (laughs) There are so many great stories that have happened from making the book and from David finishing the book and from the CD and also putting the tour together. It really is. . . Someone asked us the question in the last interview, "What three words would you use to describe Glory Revealed?" And I said, Music, Scripture and Relationships. And I can't emphasize how much this record is based on relationships. Not only our relationship with God, but relationship with all of our friends who helped make this happen.

God's glory was revealed to me, personally, while making this record. One of my favorite of the many stories, I was listening to a rough mix of "He Will Rejoice," which is the first song on the album. It's based on Zephaniah 3:17, one of my favorite scriptures from many years ago, and I was listening to the CD in the car - this was during the second week of recording - and I got back in the car a few days later with the family and we were headed to lunch and someone turned the CD on. And I didn't know it, but they had been listening to the CD - there were a few songs on there, not the whole record, but a few songs - and all of a sudden Scout, who is my little girl - she's my oldest, she's seven years old - she started to sing the song. It says, "The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing." And I just started crying. I thought, man, the reason we made this record was for people to first be entertained, but more importantly to learn the scripture. To have it in their minds and in their hearts. And we've already - despite what the sales are gonna be, whatever that's gonna be like, however the critics are going to take it, whatever - it's already a success to me. I've learned scripture, David has learned scripture and our families have learned scripture. It's a success already.

Can't ask for more than that.

You know, Candi Pearson is one of the independent artists on this record, some people might be familiar with her through the Passion movement - she's one of the main voices on a lot of the Passion records. And Candi was in Atlanta with her husband - they live in LA - which is where Mac's studio is, they call it the Bat Cave. And we asked her to come and be a part of this project. A month before, she ended up being in Atlanta the day we were doing the recording, anyway, because her brother Rick Pearson, who was actually a young guy just started to find himself getting sicker and sicker and sicker. So she was in the hospital with him the day before she came to the studio. When she came into the studio she said, "Hey, I've written a song called 'Glory Revealed.' It's just something that God's been putting on my heart and it's about what John says about how God is making the rough places smooth and how He's taking the valleys and making them high, and He's taking the mountains and making them low. So that Jesus can reveal Himself in the situation."

Yeah. And as she was telling us this, she said was sitting at Rick's bedside and that she felt like God was revealing Himself, that the glory of God was being revealed through Rick's sickness. She said, "I wrote this song out of scripture." And she sang the song and about an hour later we're sitting there eating dinner and she was just weeping and talking about how God was preparing a crowd, gathering a crowd, to show His glory through what Rick was going through. It was a real beautiful moment. I remember her husband went over to her and just put his arm around his wife and we prayed for her. Then you fast forward to a few months later and her brother ended up passing away. We've actually dedicated this record to him and his memory. I just think about how out of that hard moment, God was revealing Himself and just speaking to Candi. And now through this record, He's speaking to people who really need to see God. And so we have stories like that everywhere.

God just continued to say, "Hey, here I am, can you see Me?" "I'm right here in the middle of this mix, can you hear Me?" There's a song called "Worship the King," which is the only that was really written a long time ago. . .

No that's not true

(laughs)

The Tomlin song has been around.

You're right, I'm sorry. But this one song, "Worship the King" was written ten years ago, by a buddy of Mac's named Sonny. . .

Sonny Lallerstedt and he used to be in a very early CCM group called the Pat Terry Group several years ago and then he was the worship leader at my church for years.

and Mac said, "Hey, we gotta bring Sonny into this project." And there was a song that Mac really liked that Sonny did and he sang the song for us. And I remembered Mac looked at me and said, as Sonny was in the studio, this sounds so much like a Michael W Smith song, and Mac said, "We oughta get Smitty to sing the song." And I was laughing at the "we," because I don't know Smitty, because my friends open for Mac's friends. . .

(laughs)

So, Sonny comes out and we started to talk. And Mac said, "This sounds so much like a Smitty song" and Sonny said, "You know, when I wrote this song ten years ago, I remember thinking that it would be perfect for Michael W Smith."

Wow.

So God had put this song in hibernation for all these years just really for Smitty's voice to sing on it. Just little stories like that, where God just continued to confirm to us that we were on the right path.

Some powerful affirmation throughout the entire project, I guess.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and truly, when I say that, I honestly mean it. It's not one of those, fake answers that I would give a reporter. To me, we've already been successful with the record. Of course we want it to sell well. We want it to be a movement that affects people in a positive way, but it's already done that for us in our lives. It's already taught me a lot of things. It's helped my family and. . . Man, what a pleasure and an honor just to have been a part of it.

Now what was the process of picking the portions of scripture that was used as the basis of the songs? Some of these used are. . .

Obscure?

Off the beaten path?

We purposely did that, we wanted to have a few things that people recognized, but at the same time, the scriptures say, "Sing a new song." We wanted something different. Some things that people had not necessarily focused on before in scripture songs. And a lot of it comes from David, some things he had sent me to write. We had come down to about two weeks before we were supposed to record and we didn't have a lot of things. And I had told David that I didn't have much time to write songs, but kind of just had to out of necessity. I had told David to just send me a bunch of scriptures and I'd play around with them a bit and see if anything kind of clicks. And a lot of the songs that I wrote came from the scriptures that he sent me.

Also, Shawn Lewis, from the band Hyperstatic Union - he's a good friend of mine and he was engineering the record and playing on it - we went to lunch one day when we were in the studio. When we came back, Shawn was still there and he said, "Hey, I got a song idea while you guys were gone." And I think he did that a couple days in a row and he ended up getting two songs on the record. One was a Psalm I think, but it was an obscure Psalm, and one was from Job. Things like that were just happening where people were just digging deeper into scripture and not the normal things that you'd hear on Sunday morning.

Yeah, there's the Jude 25 and the Zephaniah and the Job passages, but then there's also the big anthems like Isaiah 53, where it's just, by the wounds of Jesus, we are healed. You know, by what He's done on the cross, I am saved. So there's the very obvious [passages] that will end up on the Christian tee-shirts at youth camps and there's the ones that people have to search a lot to find in scripture.

I didn't even know there was a Zephaniah. . .

(laughs)

Wasn't he one of the Beetles?

(laughs)

I was thinking about the focus of this project and wondering how, in a world that's so very saturated with commercialism - and an attitude of wanting more things and bigger things. . . Does it feel at all like you're casting these seeds onto soil that's already littered with briars?

Wow, what a question.

Yeah.

You know, I think it feels like that to a certain extent. But you know, If you take that analogy that Jesus used with the sower, some of this is gonna land on some places where briars are gonna come up and choke it out and then some of it's gonna land on some good soil. All we can do is really sow and, we're not the ones that make the seeds grow, we're the ones that hopefully sow the seed and help prepare the soil that it's gonna be landing on, but God's the one who makes it grow - going back to what Paul says in scripture. So I don't feel like it's wasted time at all because I've already seen the results of those seeds being sown.

Well, I think you're right, man, I think people in many ways are just too busy and even the church have just caught this really bad cold of materialism. You know, if the world's got the flu, we definitely have gotten the cold of it and I think the Word of God is great prescription. We can come in and fill people's cars, when they turn their radio on, with God's Word through these songs and fill their CD player at work with God's Word through these songs. We just believe that God's Word is active and living and sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting through bone and marrow. So, that said, we just love the fact that this album is going to go into people's lives. I just pray that if a husband and wife are fighting and their marriage needs healing that, by His wounds, they will be healed. And that this song will do that in the life of people. If there's a father who's mad at his son and they haven't talked in a few years, you know, he'll find comfort in this song and, by His wounds, their relationship will be healed. Just song after song that we'll see God's Word do what it can do.

Isn't it weird though, brent, that it almost feels like you have to, not apologize, but go out of your way to explain to people that, hey, it's a scripture record, but it's not bad. It's good.

(laughs)

You almost have to tell people, "Hey, it's okay. Get over the fact that it's a Scripture record." They just feel like it will be bad music. But it ought to be enough to just say that it's filled with God's Word and people [should] go, "Yes!" Instead of [getting excited that] it's filled with God's celebrities or that it's filled with a certain kind of music. I think we have those things gifted by God for this music, but really the "celebrity" on the record isn't Mac Powell or Mark Hall from Casting Crowns. The celebrity of this record is God who's all in this project and His Word is throughout the songs.

Yeah. And I think that it was something we were really careful about when we were making the record. I mean, we had so many opportunities to add even more bigger names and we purposely decided. . . Hey, there are certain friends that we want on here. There are people who we love their hearts and their music. But at the same time, we don't want this to be all about the big names of CCM. And we purposely kept - and it was a struggle - some independent artists on here and some lesser-known artists, because we didn't want it to be overdone. In an analogy that David used, we didn't want the frame to be bigger than the art, and what we wanted to talk about. And that was the Word of God, so I think we found a good balance in it.

Definitely

So much of that was just Mac. . . Having him involved with this was such a blessing, because I confess, you get a demo of an artist, who you just love and you love their music and you even struggle with idolizing them because God's used them in a mighty way in your life and you just go, "Wow! Let's totally kick some of these artists to the side and include these artists instead. They sound great and they want to be involved." And Mac would come in and say, "No, it has to be well-balanced." And really the heart of it was finding whose voice sounded like where the song was coming from and what the song was supposed to be saying. And it was great because Mac would just come in and go, "No, we really want to keep this guy on, or this person on." I just appreciate that, because now looking back, it's perfect. What God landed in the right places and the right voices. . .

There were moments when I would get a demo from somebody who wanted to sing on this record who was more well known than the person who ended on it. And I was ready to pull the lever and go there. But Mac would go, "No, this is probably not the best person for this yet." It's just a great balance and a good partnership for us as friends to work through that.

Absolutely.

That's good. Ans just to clarify, I wasn't implying that it was a waste of time. . .

(laughs)

Oh no. . .

I still think it's a great question actually.

Yeah, it really is.

Clearly, we're all called to sow, regardless of the soil. . .

Yeah.

But just to follow that up, I would ask what practical steps you would recommend taking in order to block out the "weeds" in one's life as they listen to this record?

That's a really good question too, man. I think. . . We really hope. . . It's a hard thing, because, like David was saying a second ago, on one hand, I don't even want to talk about the scripture, because I want people to hear the music and enjoy it as music and as worship music, hoping that they're surprised by it. I think that people do that a lot with Third Day songs. They'll hear some music and then two years later, they'll be reading something in scripture and be like, "Oh, that's in a Third Day song. I didn't even realize that was scripture."

Yeah.

So in a way, I want to surprise people with that, but at the same time, the purpose we really started out on was to really have this be a. . . and I hate to even say this because it's not the - I don't know the right word, I want to say "sexy" but that's not the right word. (laughs) But it's not the sexy thing to say, to go, "This is a record full of scripture." That's kind of, to a lot of listeners, a turnoff.

Right.

But to say that this is a tool and that this is an educational thing. . . If I read your review about a record and it said that it was a tool for learning scripture or that it was very educational, I'm thinking, "Oh, that's gonna be boring"

(laughs)

So on one hand, I don't want to say that, because I want people to love it for the music and listen to it for the music, but it's so powerful of a record in the combination of good music and the scripture. And the key element for us is for people to learn the scripture, so that's what we have to talk about and that's what we want to talk about. Hold on, I forgot the initial question. . .

(laughs)

Well, I think you're answering it in a great way, Mac. But you know, to add just a little fuel to that. The heart of this project - the agenda - is to allow people to plant their lives - to root their lives by the streams of God's living truth. And people have sown the seeds of their life by the streams of this world, like you said, materialism and stuff like that. It's amazing to me that most people that I hang out with in the church know plenty about their iPod. They know plenty about their mac and how to download something onto it. They know plenty about entertainment. They can talk for three hours about Britney Spears shaving her head or about Anna Nicole Smith dying tragically. And they know culture, but they don't know scripture. And we just wanted to come in there and, this is nothing new, by the way - there are other scripture records that exist. But we wanted to come in and say that in this moment of history, God's given us a voice into the life of His people and the life of the church. God has given Mac Powell, Michael W Smith, and David Crowder. God has given myself in a smaller way as a speaker and as an author. God has given us the ear of this church and so we want to now turn their ear to scripture, through this project. And we believe that when we do that, God's gonna be blessed and then we're gonna be blessed.

Right. And now I remember the question. (laughs) This isn't a record that people are gonna be booming in their stereo systems at a party or with their windows rolled down, driving down the road, booming it loud. This is definitely one of those records where you go off by yourself and spend some time in devotion of just singing and listening to these songs and worshipping the Lord. Or, in a group setting, we also, when we were making this record, I just thought that it was going to be perfect for cell groups - different churches call them different names - these small groups that meet on a Tuesday or Thursday night. These small groups of ten or twelve people who go off to study God's Word and they do worship, but you don't have to have a worship band. And that was another reason for not putting drums on the record and just having simple percussion and some acoustic instruments so that a handful of people can go off together in their small groups or their Sunday School class or whatever and sing these songs and not have anything missing, because there's not this huge production. So I think that's something we should certainly help people to do with this album.

There are no drums, but there is a cardboard box.

There is a cardboard box and some shakers and an egg and one of those egg looking fruits, like a banana with some seeds in it - that makes a cool shaker noise.

(laughs)

But dude, all that said, let me be the first to say. When I listen to. . . When i grab one of my interns, one of these college kids whose got nineteen holes in his ears and hair sticking up past the nine foot ceilings, when I look at his iPod, he's listening to Nickel Creek. He's listening to old James Taylor. He's listening to Old Crow Medicine Show. This generation has really gone organic musically. So as much as they're listening to the Coldplays and the piano-driven stuff, they're also going ancient and rootsy. And I don't think with this record we could be like, "Hey, I've got this really stunning new style to deliver the Word. But I think it kind of fits into a lot of the kind of music that this new emerging generation is kind of gravitating towards anyway.

Definitely. And I was blasting it my car the other day. . .

(laughs)

I hope so. I hope somebody does that.

As loud as my minivan's stereo goes. . .

(laughs)

You hear the speakers pinging with every beat. . .

Exactly. It's all distorted.

(laughs)

That's good stuff, guys thanks. Now we've got the book, the CD, and there's also a tour. . .

Yeah. We didn't talk much about the tour. We're really excited about the tour. It's gonna be about three weeks of us and some of our close friends going out doing a lot of songs from the record and doing each other's songs. We'll all be on stage together, so it's not like I'll perform and then I'll leave and then someone else performs and they leave. We're all out there together. It's gonna be a great night.

I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Great.

Tell all your friends to come see it, we need all the support we can get.

Well, alright. I think we went a little bit long, but hopefully you guys can still grab your lunch and. . .

It's just 'cause we talk too much.

(laughs)

Well, you guys have a great day. Thanks for chatting.

Thanks buddy.

Have a good one.

For more information, visit GloryRevealed.com or MySpace.com/GloryRevealed