Ordinary
Alex Warren · Ordinary - Single
Worship language, human object
What do these signals mean?
- Edifying: Points the heart toward God, truth, hope, or love.
- Worth Weighing: Real good and real concern together. Test it before you take it in.
- Take Caution: Leans toward what could dull or mislead. Approach carefully.
- Consider Avoiding: Celebrates what Scripture warns against. Little here builds up.
Weighed against Scripture
“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”
Jesus reserves the language of wholehearted love and devotion for God above all else. When a song applies that same posture to a human beloved, it is worth asking what throne is being filled.
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.”
Scripture itself celebrates human love as fierce, consuming, and almost death-defying. The longing here is not foreign to the Bible's own poetry about romance.
“Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.”
Paul warns about the pattern of honoring the created thing with the devotion owed to the Creator. The song does not intend idolatry, but the structure it builds looks like this pattern.
This is a love song that reaches for the highest language it knows, and that language turns out to be worship. Phrases like 'at your altar I will pray,' 'you're the sculptor, I'm the clay,' and 'oh Lord, return me to dust' are drawn straight from the tradition of addressing God, and here they are addressed to another person. That is not automatically wrong; the Song of Solomon uses ecstatic, embodied language for human love. But there is a difference between celebrating love as a gift and redirecting the posture of worship itself toward the giver. The song never quite clears that line.
No profanity or explicit content, but imagery like 'drunk on your vine,' 'edge of your knife,' and 'dead and buried' carries intensity. The song is surface-clean while running very deep emotionally.
The song borrows the full vocabulary of worship, altar, sanctuary, returning to dust, hallelujah, and points it entirely at a romantic partner. The frame is transcendence, but the object is human. That is not the same as reaching toward God, even faintly.
Alex Warren likely intends a sincere portrait of overwhelming romantic love, using sacred imagery to convey its magnitude. The intent reads as poetic and earnest, not mocking. But the choice to dress romance in the clothes of devotion is worth sitting with.
When you hear yourself using the language of prayer and worship to describe a person, what does that tell you about what your heart is treating as ultimate?