When joy is the text, let your music make the case — a lesson from Habakkuk 3:17-19
By Robert Wright | New Light Baptist Church | October 12, 2025
Some texts dare you to feel what they say. Habakkuk 3:17-19 is one of them. The prophet looks at a landscape stripped of everything — no figs, no grapes, no olives, no cattle — and still declares: yet I will rejoice. On October 12, Rev. Mariko Billups stood on that text and preached a word that every musician in the room needed to hear: joy is not a feeling you wait on — it is a choice you make.
The sermon, titled “Count It All Joy,” carried three interlocking convictions: that joy can coexist with lack, that genuine praise is an act of worship in hard times, and that the Sovereign LORD becomes your strength precisely when your own resources run dry. Rev. Billups pressed the congregation to stop waiting for circumstances to improve before they praised God. The fig tree is bare. Praise anyway. The vines are empty. Rejoice anyway. Choosing joy is the sermon in a sentence.
So what does a musician do with a text like that? You don’t pick songs that describe the empty fig tree. You pick songs that model the response to it. The music should embody the yet — that pivot word in verse 18 that changes everything. The GMWA’s “After the Rain” is a declaration that the storm is not the end of the story — joy comes after, not instead of, the trial. That is exactly the spirit of Habakkuk’s yet. The Georgia Mass Choir’s “God’s Great Joy” roots the congregation’s joy in God’s character rather than their circumstance — which is precisely what Habakkuk did. And Douglass Miller’s “Unspeakable Joy” is a command to the body — a high-energy, full-voiced celebration that doesn’t ask permission from the circumstances.
The lesson for song leaders is this: when your pastor preaches joy as a choice, your music must make that choice audible. Don’t give the congregation a song about how hard the valley is. Give them a song that climbs out of it. Habakkuk didn’t describe his pain and stop there — he declared his praise and kept moving. Your song service should do the same.
One more note from verse 19: “He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he enables me to tread on the heights.” That is sure-footed faith — not stumbling through the trial but moving with confidence on high ground. Earnest Pugh’s “Yet Will I Trust” captures that elevated posture perfectly and makes an exceptional closing selection for any service built on this text.
