Somewhere along the line after I became a Christian, I reckoned that I would never be able to listen to Keith Richard’s guitar sound again. God had been softening my heart toward worship music and I was beginning to enjoy the experience. Part of my growth in this was chucking out a lot of records that had dodgy songs on them. One day while taking a shower, my Bose sound system was blasting out the lyrics, ‘When I’m on fire my body will be, forever yours nocturnal me.’ I had been merrily singing along till those lyrics and now they slapped me in the face. ‘Nocturnal me’ was definitely not the Holy Spirit and I was subsequently prepared to admit that I had been depending on my record collection more than I was depending on God. Anyway I faced the fact that Echo and the Bunnymen had to go along with the Rolling Stones, another major contender for winning top dog in the devil’s music.
Time passed and much later on another day, I was looking at You Tube, when I came across Peter Gabriel, an incredible artist whose albums inevitably had demonic influences, which meant that they had been chucked out like Mick and Keith’s. But then ‘Biko’ started playing. It is a song that mourns the death in a Johannesburg police cell of black South African activist Stephen Biko. I cried and cried not only for Biko but also because this song is such a big part of my heart. That day I heard divine inspired sounds in the music, because God weeps over the lives of people like Biko. This song had helped inspire in me a passion for social justice. God was giving me back songs that had helped me back in the dark old days before I knew Him. Now I was learning to worship to the sounds of Peter Gabriel and the Rolling Stones as well as the songs of the Vineyard and Hillsong. God turns up in many surprising places, much more than we would often expect and the devil definitely does NOT have all the good music.
– Jim Watt