It's funny how God uses different writers to draw inspiration from different sources. For some a song comes out of a time of intimate worship, for others it's through putting Psalms to song.



Scripture is a real source of inspiration for me (thankfully!!) Sometimes the Lord might put a phrase from scripture or a while team from scripture on my heart.



Sometimes a song might come out of a spontaneous time of singing. When I gathered a few songwriters from Church to write a spontaneous song about God being with us was sung. We then got writing "Emmanuel" together.



For me the most inspiration for writing comes from what's not already out there (sounds weird but bear with me...) Sometimes I'll hear an amazing talk or read a great book and I think to myself "there's no song out there (that I know of) that covers this area of theology/ doctrine". 



To demonstrate this a few years ago an evangelist called Adrian Holloway came down to my church to preach. He spoke about how we trade in our torn and filthy garments at the cross and we receive garments of righteousness and purity. I was really struck by this theme of Christ's righteousness being given to us so I decided to write a corporate worship song "My Righteousness" about this.



Another example of this happening was when Becky Pippert spoke at Forum 2011 on incarnational evangelism. She spoke on how the Father sent the Son into the world so in the same way we are sent out into the world to share Jesus' love with others. I couldn't think of any songs that touched on this so I wrote "Jesus' Name" and we used it as a response to her talks.



So Scripture, Spontaneous songs and the absence of songs inspire me to get writing. It'd be good to hear your reflections of your own writing too.



Written on 01/04/13 by Olly Knight