TobyMac: God Promised Us ‘He Would Never Leave’
TobyMac, who performed with his Diverse City band, said he couldn’t believe that Jeremy Camp and Crowder agreed to come on tour with him. “It’s like a triple headliner up in here tonight,” he said. The artist played hits including “Love Broke Thru,” “Cornerstone,” and “God Did It.”
“This world is tricky and getting trickier every day,” he told the crowd. “Man, sometimes it confuses me. Sometimes I lose my way in this world. Can ya’ll relate to that?”
In the middle of his set, TobyMac shared with the audience that he stopped reading his Bible after the death of his oldest son, Truett McKeehan.
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“About about six-and-a-half years ago, I decided I was going to read the whole Bible. I mean, I was going to start in Genesis and read to Revelation,” he said. “Not in one sitting, I ain’t that crazy. But, you know, I want to get to know the character of our God.”
“And I thought, what better way to start [at] the beginning and read to the end of his Word? So I opened it up and I started reading,” said TobyMac. But about two months later, his son Truett died at age 21.
“So I put the Bible down,” TobyMac said. “I couldn’t keep going. I didn’t have the heart. But I kept walking past it. Finally, I picked that Bible up and I held it up to God. And I said, ‘I’m going to give you a chance.’”
“Imagine telling the God of all creation that you’re going to give him a chance, right?” he said. “That’s what I told him and I meant it.”
“So I opened it up and I started reading again,” TobyMac continued. “And as I read, I learned something about relationship.”
“You see,” he said, “to have a relationship with anyone, you gotta be talking to them, and they gotta to be talking to you. You gotta be listening to them and they gotta be listening to you.”
“Well, the way I see it, the way God talks to us, is through his Word,” said TobyMac. “And the way we talk to him is through prayer. So if those two things aren’t happening, you gotta wonder, do I really have a relationship with God at all?
“And listen,” he noted, “there’s something beautiful that comes with having a relationship with the God of all creation.”
“What I’ve been hanging on to with everything in me for the last six-and-a-half years, is this: God promises that if you have a relationship with him, he will never leave you or forsake you,” TobyMac told the crowd. “It gets confusing when your heart gets broken, for all of us. And I started reaching out for some promises that God never made me.”
“You see, God didn’t promise us that we wouldn’t be hurt on this earth,” the artist explained. “He didn’t promise us that our hearts would not be broken. He didn’t promise us that we wouldn’t lose the ones that we love. What he promised is that he would never leave.”
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“And I can only tell you this from my own personal experience: He was there in the deepest of valleys,” TobyMac said. “And if he was there for me, he will be there for you, just like he promised, ‘cause he’s God.”
“It wasn’t always easy for me to find him,” he added. “Sometimes I had to wait. I had to wait a long time to get real quiet. But he was there. He didn’t leave. He remained, faithfully.”
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