Author: Texas Gospel

Leviathan, the beast, and the God who holds all things

Published on by Texas GospelLeave a comment

JOHN COPIC

Scripture has never been afraid of monsters. From the primordial depths of Job’s poetry to the apocalyptic visions of John on Patmos, the Bible sets before us a creature of terrifying proportion: Leviathan, that coiling, fleeing serpent, that dragon in the sea. Do not mistake this for mythology borrowed carelessly from surrounding cultures. This is the language of sovereignty, pressed into poetic form to declare a truth that no philosophical argument could carry so forcefully: chaos has a limit, and that limit is God himself. In Job 41, the Lord asks with quiet thunder, “Who then is he who can stand before me?” No human hand can hook Leviathan. No harpoon can pierce him. Yet the God who made him holds him as a man holds a sparrow. The monster that terrifies creation is, to its Creator, a creature on a leash.

What Isaiah prophesies in chapter 27 is not a quaint mythological aside; it is the thread that, pulled carefully, unravels all the way to the book of Revelation. The beast that rises from the sea in Revelation 13, with its ten horns and seven heads and blasphemous names, is Leviathan wearing a new face. It is the same chaos, the same devouring power, the same human wickedness dressed in political and religious authority, demanding worship it was never owed.

And yet here is the startling thing. The vineyard in Isaiah 27 is tended. Every moment, the Lord waters it. He keeps it day and night. While Leviathan coils and the beast rages and false religion spreads its flattering poison, God is quietly, persistently, sovereignly keeping his people. The exile to Babylon was not abandonment; it was purging. When the scattered people of Israel returned to their land, the Asherah poles were gone. The altars to Baal had crumbled. Idolatry, that stubborn weed, had been scorched from the soil. The exile that looked like catastrophe was the very instrument of cleansing, the fierce east wind that removed what gentler breezes could not. God’s severity and God’s tenderness, it turns out, are not in contradiction. They are both expressions of his love for his vineyard.

The fruit that Israel failed to produce has now been scattered across the earth through the gospel of Jesus Christ. What Colossians 1 captures so beautifully, that the word of truth is “bearing fruit and increasing” throughout the whole world, is the fulfilment of what Isaiah saw from a distance.

The final word, however, belongs to Revelation 20. The devil who deceived, the beast who dominated, the false prophet who flattered, all are cast into the lake of fire. And then death itself follows. What remains is order, the order of a new heaven and a new earth, governed by the God who never once lost control. We are, right now, living in the middle of this story. The chaos is real. But the verdict has already been rendered, pronounced from before the foundation of the world and sealed at an empty tomb on the third day. The one who said “I will raise him up on the last day” will do exactly that. Come then to him, be reconciled to this God, and find yourself on the right side of that last and final morning.

For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death.

1 Corinthians 15:25-26

What Paul’s instructions about head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11 mean for believers today

Published on by Texas GospelLeave a comment

JEFF TURNER

The passage in 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul instructs women to wear head coverings in church is one that raises questions about how much of it applies today, but the underlying principle it is built on has not changed at all. In the culture of Corinth, a woman’s head covering was an outward sign of her submission to male leadership. It was a visible symbol that communicated something real about the order God had established. The symbol may look different today, but the principle behind it is not cultural; it is rooted in the way God created men and women to relate to one another.

I believe Paul’s concern was not the specific clothing custom itself but what it represented. A man covering his head in that setting would have reversed the order, and a woman removing her covering would have been a public act of rejection toward God’s design. Today’s cultures use different outward markers to communicate similar things, and Paul’s point is that whatever those markers are, believers should not use their appearance to send a message of rebellion against God’s order. The submission itself, grounded in how God made human beings, is what matters, and nothing outward should contradict it.

Do you disagree? Please leave comments below.

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.

1 Corinthians 11:3

Why Tribute Quartet’s new mountain song rolls away instead of climbing

Published on by Texas GospelLeave a comment

AMY TURNER

There’s something every songwriter chases: the instant a familiar story turns sideways and suddenly means something new. For Tribute Quartet’s Josh Singletary, that came while thinking about the stone in front of Jesus’s tomb, and just how little that stone actually mattered.

The group already has a mountain in its catalog of songs. “Halfway Up the Mountain” climbed to number one on the Singing News chart, the kind of song that becomes a signature. So when Tribute Quartet went looking for another mountain image, Singletary knew comparisons were inevitable. He also knew the new song had almost nothing in common with the old one.

“The great thing about this song, compared to Halfway Up the Mountain, is just the concept of it was a stone that rolled away,” Singletary explains. “It was a stone that was in front of the tomb. It could have been a mountain in front of the whole of that tomb, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It still would have moved.”

Provided to YouTube by Daywind Records
It Could Have Been A Mountain · Tribute Quartet
Forever
℗ 2026 Daywind Records
Released on: 2026-01-30

That idea became “It Could Have Been a Mountain,” a title that flips the usual mountain metaphor on its head. Where “Halfway Up the Mountain” is about the climb, the new song is about the size of the obstacle not mattering at all. Scale a mile high, seal it shut, do whatever you want to it; the resurrection happens anyway. The lyrics lean hard into that contrast, pairing images of the tomb sealed and guarded with the plain fact that none of it held. The hook repeats like a testimony being worked out in real time: it could have been a mountain, but it still rolled away.

There’s also a second layer built into the song, one that pulls the story out of scripture and into the pews. Verses about facing “a night” where “hope is failing,” about feeling “buried in your fear,” turn the empty tomb into a template for whatever mountain a listener happens to be carrying. It’s a familiar move in southern gospel writing, taking a doctrinal moment and making it personal, but Singletary’s framing gives it a sharper edge than most: the size of your mountain was never really the point.

Singletary himself is something of a study in scale versus substance. He was born in Raiford, Florida, a town small enough that it barely shows up on a map, and there’s nothing small about what he’s built since. As Tribute Quartet’s baritone and pianist, he’s also become one of the genre’s steadier utility players, working as an arranger, producer, and studio musician on projects well outside his own group’s output. He now lives in Lebanon, Tennessee, with his wife, Kahlie, and their dog, Hovie, close enough to Nashville’s session rooms to keep that side of his career humming alongside the road schedule.

That dual life, road quartet member and behind-the-scenes producer, tends to show up in the songs he helps shape. “It Could Have Been a Mountain” has the structural instincts of someone who thinks about arrangement as much as message: a repeated hook built for a room to sing back, a bridge that widens the story from history to personal application, an ending that just keeps rolling the phrase away until it feels less like a chorus and more like a release.

Whether it reaches the chart peak “Halfway Up the Mountain” did remains to be seen. But for Singletary, the comparison was never really the goal. The whole point of the new song is that the mountain, and the number attached to it, was never the thing that mattered.

John Darin Rowsey found more than he expected in “Where Healing Happens”

Published on by Texas GospelLeave a comment

AMY TURNER

Some songwriters doesn’t chase the spotlight so much as build the stage for everyone else to stand on. John Darin Rowsey has spent decades doing exactly that, first with New Journey, then Karen Peck & New River, and for the last dozen-plus years as the songwriting engine behind The Guardians, the southern gospel quartet rounded out by Pat Barker, Paul Lancaster and Dale Forbes. Their new project, Where Healing Happens, might be the most personal thing he’s ever put his name on.

Rowsey started singing in front of crowds at 11 years old, an age when most kids are still figuring out how to talk to strangers. That early exposure shaped a career defined less by ego than by service; he’s the guy in the room writing the songs other people get to sing, and he’s made peace with that role in a way that feels almost countercultural in an industry built on hooks and headliners. Hundreds of songs, multiple number-one hits on the southern gospel charts, a Dove Award. The résumé speaks for itself. But ask him about this particular record, and something shifts in his voice.

“You know, it was really a labor of love,” Rowsey says. “I feel like the songs that are on this project speak my heart more so than just about any project I’ve ever been a part of.” He pauses on the why of it, landing somewhere true: “I guess it’s because we all walk through seasons that are difficult. We walk through seasons of joy. Every season is different, and different songs come out of those seasons.” The album, he explains, was built to meet people wherever they are, grief, gratitude, doubt, all of it: “We were able to pick songs on this project that help you walk through every season of your life.”

What catches Rowsey off guard, even now, is what happened once he handed the songs over to his bandmates. Writing them was one thing. Hearing them sung back was another entirely. “The guys took the lyrics and sung them, it was way above my expectations,” he says. “I thought I knew they would do a great job, but I never dreamed that they would interpret the songs the way they did.” There’s real surprise in that admission, the kind that only comes when collaboration outpaces even a songwriter’s own vision for his work. “I think this record means more to me because of that than any I’ve ever been a part of. So I’m really thankful for that.”

That gratitude tracks with everything The Guardians have built their identity around. Three Dove Award nominations, a string of number-one songs, Fan Awards, and still the group’s mantra traces back to John the Baptist in John 3:30: “He must increase but I must decrease.” It’s a strange thing to hear a quartet with this much chart success talk about diminishment as the goal, but that’s the tension that seems to animate the group, ambition in service of something bigger than themselves.

Occasionally they’re joined onstage by founding member Dean Hickman, a man who’s logged more than 60 years in southern gospel music, a living thread back to the genre’s roots standing next to a group actively reshaping what it sounds like now. It’s a lineage thing, the old guard blessing the new, and it fits the arc of a group whose newest record is, by its own songwriter’s account, less a product than a testimony.

Where Healing Happens isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It’s trying to be honest about the seasons people actually live through. For Rowsey, that honesty is the whole point.

Who the 144,000 in Revelation 7 are and what they will do during the tribulation

Published on by Texas GospelLeave a comment

JEFF TURNER

The number 144,000 in Revelation 7 refers to a specific group of Jewish believers, 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, who will be sealed by God during the tribulation. This period falls between the rapture of the church and the return of Christ to establish his thousand-year reign, and it will be marked by a series of escalating judgements on the earth, described in Revelation as seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls, each more intense than the last.

Running alongside that judgement will be a worldwide proclamation of the gospel. Angels will carry the message through the skies, martyrs will be raised back to life to testify, and these 144,000 Jewish men will go out from every tribe to preach. The tribal records were lost when Jerusalem was destroyed, so most Jewish people today have no way of knowing which tribe they belong to, but God knows, and he will call out and ordain these men for this specific mission. The salvation of the nation of Israel as a whole is also part of what Revelation indicates will take place during this remarkable period.

And so we are left with this breathtaking truth: that even in the earth’s darkest hour, when the seals are broken and the trumpets sound and the bowls of wrath are poured out, God will not leave himself without a witness, because he never has, and he never will.

saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees until we have sealed the bond-servants of our God on their foreheads.”
And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred and forty-four thousand sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel:

Revelation 7:3-4