Author: Texas Gospel

SPECIAL CROSSROADS MUSIC

Southern Gospel music favorite Mark Bishop is so widely acclaimed for his singing that it’s easy to overlook the depth of his songwriting. Yet as his new Sonlite Records single, “Now Lazarus Can Sing” shows, he’s a conscientious and inspired craftsman whose unique way of looking at things has led to powerful affirmations of faith and salvation.

“I was watching the news as someone was being ushered through a bunch of shouting reporters, trying to get information from him,” Bishop recalls. “His people led him to a waiting car where he jumped in, and they took off. My songwriter brain kicked in, and for some reason I began to wonder about the story of Lazarus and the questions people would have lined up for hours to ask him.

“He had seen it. And he was standing right here in front of them. How could you not ask him what it was like? I’m sure what he saw was beyond description.”

Mark Bishop shares the story behind how he wrote “Now Lazarus Can Sing.”
With these thoughts in mind, Bishop has created a compelling vehicle that, in a profoundly Biblical way, embodies — by illuminating through down-to-earth dialogue rather than proclaiming in grand turns of speech — the miraculous story of Lazarus:

Have you seen Lazarus since that day?
Something about him has changed.
You know the day that I’m talking ’bout.
The day Jesus called out his name.

I spoke to him just the other day.
At the market I pulled him aside.
Can you remember the things you saw?
He put his hand on my shoulder and cried.

So I talked to his sister Martha.
“Martha, what’s he said to you?”
She said “he looks out of the window and smiles,
That his worrying days are all through.”

And even as the music swells and subsides, Bishop’s distinctive voice keeps the listener focused on the essentials, framed in a way that only he could have created.

“Just as important as what he saw… what about how he felt? He was a recipient of perfect love. He lost all of his worry… his doubt… his regrets… everything negative.

“He was no doubt the most changed man in the history of the world.

“And maybe,” the singer-songwriter concludes, “… just maybe… he brought back some other traits… a little bit of residue from heaven. That’s what this song is about; how heaven rubbed off on Lazarus.”