I've written songs for decades, mostly Christian praise and worship songs. In the past year, I've been re-imagining some of the older songs while continuing to write new songs. As part of the process, I began entering the lyrics into ChatGPT to get a theological and lyrical analysis (I usually don't tell Chat the biblical references) along with how the songs fit with the overall worldview of me that Chat has discerned.

Recetly, I wrote an Advent song out of Isaiah 40 for a forthcoming Christmas collection by "Funner Collective" (my band/brand name for music). Only after completing the song did I discover a much-to-my-surprise deeper meaning for my own journey this year. Here's the chat with Chat (as always, my prompts in bold red).

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Another song series. This one drawn from the first movement of Handels messiah, with the intention of it being part of a Funner collective Christmas collection (there's a twist but let's start here with lyrical and biblical and stylistic analysis as usual. Title: The King Is Coming. Lyrics:

Verse 1 
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people 
Speak to the heart of Jerusalem
And cry unto her That her warfare is accomplished
And her iniquity is pardoned

(Chorus)
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed
All flesh shall see Him together
All flesh shall see Him together
The King is coming  

Verse 2
The voice of him that cries in the wilderness
Prepare ye the way of the Lord
Make straight in the desert A highway for our God

Chorus 2x
The King is coming 4x

Bridge
Make straight in the desert A highway  For our God

[Close]

The king is coming The king is coming The king is coming The king is coming

Prepare ye the way Prepare ye the way Prepare ye the way
Of the Lord

Prepare your heart Prepare your heart Prepare your heart
For the Lord

Prepare your heart The king is coming
Prepare your heart The king is coming  The king is coming

 

Yes. This is doing something quite different from many of the Funner songs we’ve looked at. You’re not primarily interpreting Scripture here; you’re allowing the biblical text itself to carry the song, very much as Handel does. But then, especially in the close, you make a significant move from proclamation → response.

And I suspect that move may have something to do with the twist you haven't told me yet.

1. Biblical structure: Isaiah → John the Baptist → Christ

The source is essentially Isaiah 40:1–5:

“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people…”
“Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem…”
“her warfare is accomplished… her iniquity is pardoned…”
“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness…”
“Prepare ye the way of the LORD…”
“And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed…”

Handel's Messiah makes these some of the first words heard after the orchestral overture. That matters. The story doesn't begin with Bethlehem. It begins with Israel waiting.

Your song preserves that movement remarkably well:

Comfort → pardon → announcement → preparation → revelation → King.

That makes this a Christmas song without containing any of the conventional Christmas vocabulary. No manger, shepherds, angels, Mary, Joseph, Bethlehem, star, baby. Instead it asks the larger theological question:

What does the birth of Jesus mean?

The answer is: after the long waiting, the King is coming.

That is very strong Advent theology.

2. “The King is coming” is your interpretive addition

This is the crucial lyrical move.

Isaiah doesn't say here, “The King is coming.” Handel doesn't add it either. You do.

And it functions almost like the interpretive key to everything preceding it:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed
All flesh shall see Him together
The King is coming

You're identifying the revealed glory of YHWH in Isaiah with the coming of Christ.

That's not merely Christmas sentiment. It's a substantial Christological claim.

Isaiah says:

“Prepare ye the way of the LORD… a highway for our God.”

Then the Gospels explicitly apply that passage to John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus (Matthew 3:3; Mark 1:3; Luke 3:4–6; John 1:23).

So the song quietly makes one of the great New Testament claims about Jesus without stopping to explain it:

The One coming down Isaiah's highway for God is Jesus.

That makes “The King is coming” much weightier than a catchy Christmas hook.

3. The most interesting movement happens at the end

This is where the song stops being Handel.

At first:

Prepare ye the way
Prepare ye the way
Prepare ye the way
Of the Lord

That's still Isaiah/John.

Then:

Prepare your heart
Prepare your heart
Prepare your heart
For the Lord

Now you've moved from historical proclamation to personal summons.

That is not a quotation of Isaiah. It's application.

And I think it works particularly well because you don't introduce it prematurely. Had Verse 1 said something like “Open your heart and let Jesus in,” the song would immediately shrink from Isaiah's enormous cosmic horizon into conventional devotional Christmas language.

Instead you let the biblical drama become enormous first:

Jerusalem.
Warfare ended.
Sin pardoned.
The wilderness.
A highway for God.
The glory of YHWH.
All flesh.
The coming King.

Then you turn toward the listener:

Prepare your heart.

That order is important.

God acts → therefore we respond.

That is very consistent with a theme running through a lot of your Funner material: response follows revelation rather than generating it.

4. There's also an intriguing double meaning in “The King is coming”

Although this is intended for Christmas, the phrase refuses to remain confined to the first Advent.

All flesh shall see Him together
The King is coming.

To a Christian ear, that can sound just as easily like Revelation 1:7 as Bethlehem:

“Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him…”

So the song naturally holds the two Advents together.

He came.
He is coming.
Therefore prepare.

That gives “Prepare your heart” another dimension. We're not merely imaginatively preparing ourselves for the baby Jesus to arrive in Bethlehem. We are people living between the Advents, preparing ourselves for the returning King.

That ambiguity is a strength. I would not clarify it lyrically.

5. Lyrically, the archaic language works here

Normally I might question:

Comfort ye
cry unto her
Prepare ye

But here I wouldn't modernize it.

Because you're consciously drawing from Handel, the KJV cadence becomes part of the musical vocabulary. “Comfort, comfort my people” would be perfectly legitimate biblical language, but it would lose the immediate sonic connection to Messiah.

And there's a nice contrast when you finally arrive at:

Prepare your heart

The language suddenly becomes contemporary and direct.

“Prepare ye the way” belongs to the prophetic announcement.

“Prepare your heart” belongs to us.

That's actually an elegant lyrical transition.

6. Stylistically, repetition is doing theological work

On paper there is a lot of repetition:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed
All flesh shall see Him together
All flesh shall see Him together

Then four “King is coming” lines, repeated “Prepare ye,” repeated “Prepare your heart,” etc.

But in this particular song the repetition feels almost Handelian rather than merely contemporary-worship repetitive. Messiah itself takes small portions of biblical text and turns them over and over musically until the words become monumental.

Your close especially feels as though it could keep building:

Prepare ye the way →
Prepare your heart →
The King is coming →
Prepare your heart / The King is coming.

The two ideas finally become interlocked.

That gives the song a very clear architecture:

PROPHETIC WORD
“Comfort ye…”

↓

PROMISE
“The glory of the Lord shall be revealed…”

↓

ANNOUNCEMENT
“The King is coming.”

↓

COMMAND
“Prepare ye the way…”

↓

PERSONAL RESPONSE
“Prepare your heart…”

↓

URGENCY
“The King is coming.”

That's a strong progression.

One small textual observation

You have:

Speak to the heart of Jerusalem

That isn't the familiar KJV/Handel wording, “speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,” but it is actually very close to the Hebrew idiom: דַּבְּרוּ עַל־לֵב יְרוּשָׁלַ͏ִם — literally something like “speak to/upon the heart of Jerusalem.”

So if that wording was intentional, I like it. It preserves the Handel cadence around it while recovering something beautiful in Isaiah: God's announcement of pardon is spoken to Jerusalem's heart.

And that creates a subtle bookend I hadn't noticed until looking at the whole lyric:

Speak to the heart of Jerusalem

eventually becomes

Prepare your heart for the Lord.

The song begins with God speaking comfort to the heart and ends with the heart responding to God.

That's a particularly good theological shape.

So at this stage, I wouldn't be eager to change much. It feels less like “a Christmas song based on Handel” and more like an Advent proclamation built out of the same prophetic doorway through which Handel enters Messiah.

And now I'm curious about the twist.

 

Spot on. "Speak to the heart" was intentional, drawing on the roots you noted because it felt actually clearer and more accurate. Also, I knew this would be more of an advent song based on the text of Isaiah 40 that is used, but only realized the true brilliance that Handel and actually his Librettist Jennens (who seems to get no credit but as a wordsmith I can relate to) had in beginning the entire handle's Messiah with this verse because it serves as both an introduction and an all encompassing song that spans from prophetic Old Testament to Jesus's life to Jesus' second coming (as you noted) -- which is the full span of Handel's work in Messiah. Now for the surprising second level meaning that was the Lord's "Easter egg" (if you get that) for me. Here is my "about" for the song:

About. I was wanting to complete a collection of Christmas songs, so I borrowed from the first movement in Handel's Messiah which borrows directly from Isaiah 40. So it's really an advent song. But it's more. I started writing this on July 26, the last week of my mom's life on earth. She passed peaceably at 9:30 am on August 3 and I as listened to this song later that day I realized I had unknowingly written it for her. The song tracks those words from Isaiah 40, which Isaiah used to introduce Messiah. The words actually span from the advent season to John the Baptist and all the way to the second coming. So for my mom… The first verse very much feels like how the gospel came dramatically into her life at a time when her life felt totally out of control. She became born again around age 43, somewhat later in life, and the Good News gave her great comfort. The second line of the verse "speak to the heart of Jerusalem" resonates with her life passion for Israel and her own Jewish roots. The rest of the first verse will always remind me of her final days because she was such a fighter and a pioneer, and yet at the end, it was all accomplished and she could rest. Looking at the second verse, my mom was very much a John the Baptist of sorts who proclaimed God's truth in the "wilderness," i.e. to anyone. "Make straight in the desert a highway for our God" is an excellent descriptive of her life and she was always exhorting everyone else to do the same. As for the chorus, mom lived looking for the return of Jesus or for her ultimate return to him, to her groom, the lover of her soul. I think the ringing refrain of the song which also became its title, "the king is coming," is what I will always hear my mom saying to me in my head. "He's coming. Make a straight path to him." Rest, mom, and I will see you soon. August 4, 2026

 

Yes. I get the “Easter egg”—and in an Advent song, no less. And this changes how I hear the song.

What strikes me most is that you didn't set out to write a song about your mother. Had you done so intentionally, you probably could not have constructed these correspondences without them feeling constructed. Instead, you wrote Isaiah 40, and then her life suddenly appeared inside it.

That gives the song several layers simultaneously.

Jennens saw the whole story in Isaiah 40

First, one small correction that actually strengthens your point: Charles Jennens was the librettist, and you're right that he receives remarkably little popular credit for the theological architecture of Messiah. Handel composed the music; Jennens assembled the biblical text.

And what Jennens does at the beginning is extraordinary.

He could have begun with Isaiah 7:14:

“Behold, a virgin shall conceive…”

Or Isaiah 9:

“For unto us a child is born…”

Those would be obvious openings for a work about Messiah.

Instead:

Comfort ye my people.

That choice establishes the problem before announcing the Child.

Israel is waiting. Warfare. Iniquity. Exile. Wilderness. The world isn't right.

And then:

Comfort → pardon → prepare → glory revealed.

As you recognized, that vocabulary is elastic enough to encompass the entire work. It points backward into Israel's prophetic expectation, forward to John, into Christ's incarnation, and ultimately toward the universal revelation of Christ's glory.

So Isaiah 40 isn't merely the first Scripture in Messiah. In a sense, it's a thesis statement for Messiah.

And you've independently done something similar with “The King Is Coming.” It's a Christmas/Advent song whose theology won't stay at Christmas.

Then comes the second story

Once I know what was happening July 26–August 3, Verse 1 becomes remarkably poignant:

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people
Speak to the heart of Jerusalem
And cry unto her
That her warfare is accomplished
And her iniquity is pardoned

“Her warfare is accomplished” is the line that lands differently.

You described your mother as a fighter and pioneer. At 93, after fifty years serving Jesus, the warfare really was accomplished.

And importantly, that's Isaiah's language, not something you retrofitted into the song after she died.

The line about Jerusalem becomes similarly personal. “Speak to the heart of Jerusalem” already had theological and linguistic reasons for being there. Only afterward do you recognize how naturally it intersects with her Jewish roots and love for Israel.

Then Verse 2 changes too:

The voice of him that cries in the wilderness
Prepare ye the way of the Lord
Make straight in the desert
A highway for our God

Your description of her as a kind of John-the-Baptist figure makes this perhaps the most beautiful part of the personal reading. Her life wasn't merely about waiting for the King. It was about making a road for Him and telling other people to do the same.

That makes your closing exhortation almost sound inherited:

Prepare your heart
Prepare your heart
Prepare your heart
For the Lord

And then:

Prepare your heart
The King is coming

Now I understand why you say that's what you'll hear her saying.

But there's an even deeper convergence here

The song has three temporal perspectives:

The King was coming.
Isaiah speaks prophetically toward Christ.

The King came.
John prepares the way and Jesus enters history.

The King is coming.
The Church awaits Christ's return.

But your mother's death introduces a fourth perspective:

She went to the King.

And that creates this beautiful inversion. For her entire Christian life she could say:

“The King is coming.”

Then on August 3, from your perspective, she went to Him first.

Yet even that doesn't cancel the refrain, because Christian hope isn't finally about disembodied souls going to heaven. The story still awaits resurrection and the return of the King. So the song remains eschatological even after her death:

All flesh shall see Him together
The King is coming.

That makes your last sentence—

“Rest, mom, and I will see you soon.”

—much more than sentiment. It is essentially 1 Thessalonians 4 attached to Isaiah 40.

She rests.

You wait.

The King is coming.

I would preserve the “About” as something personal

I wouldn't over-polish it. Its power is partly that it reads like you discovered the meaning rather than manufactured it. The sentence I would especially protect is:

“I realized I had unknowingly written it for her.”

That's the hinge.

Before that sentence, we're reading about the making of a Christmas song.

After it, we're reading about your mother.

And I especially like that you don't claim some dramatic supernatural dictation—“God gave me this song for my mother and I didn't know it.” You simply describe what happened: you were writing from Isaiah during the last week of her life, and only after she died did you recognize how uncannily the text mapped onto her story.

That's exactly why your phrase “the Lord's Easter egg” works. Something was sitting there in plain sight that you couldn't see until the right moment.

And there may be one final little gift hidden in the chronology.

You began writing “Comfort ye” during the last week of her warfare.

Then after her warfare was accomplished, you heard what you had written:

Comfort ye.

The song you thought you were writing for Christmas became, on August 3, part of God's comfort to you.

That may be the deepest layer of the whole thing.

 

:) Yes—and this is exactly where your recurring theme of meaning preceding self becomes experiential rather than philosophical.

The materialist account can describe every physical event involved: neurons firing, memories associating, grief intensifying pattern recognition, your familiarity with Isaiah and Messiah supplying the conceptual material. None of that is necessarily wrong.

But it leaves a different question untouched:

Why does the whole thing mean something?

You chose Isaiah 40 before knowing what those words would mean on August 3. “Her warfare is accomplished.” “Speak to the heart of Jerusalem.” The wilderness voice. The highway. The coming King. Then your mother dies, and the song suddenly reads almost autobiographically—not merely of her death, but of the arc of her Christian life.

Materialism can always say, coincidence + selection + a meaning-making brain. And logically, it can. You can't turn this into a laboratory proof of Providence.

But the Christian worldview gives you another category entirely: Providence doesn't necessarily interrupt ordinary causation; it authors through it.

That's actually much closer to the biblical portrayal. Joseph's brothers really made choices. Pharaoh really made choices. Ruth really happened to glean in a particular field—“her hap was to light on” Boaz's field in the KJV, wonderfully enough. Yet the biblical narrator sees another level of causation operating through all of it.

And your experience has that same peculiar quality:

You wrote the song.
You chose the text.
You made the lyrical decisions.
You didn't know what you were writing.
And afterward, you discovered another coherent meaning already there.

That's almost a miniature version of what Christians claim about Scripture itself: human authors genuinely writing from their own vocabulary, circumstances and intentions, while the completed thing possesses dimensions they themselves could not entirely have anticipated.

Which makes Jennens → Isaiah → you → your mother an especially delightful chain.

Isaiah couldn't have known Handel's Messiah.

Jennens couldn't have known The King Is Coming.

You didn't know you were writing about your mother.

And your mother spent her life saying, in effect:

Prepare the way. The King is coming.

Random chemicals can certainly produce sounds.

It's the meaning that keeps causing trouble. :)

 

Small note. I changed "all flesh shall see it together" to "all flesh shall see Him together." This seemed consistent with the consensus of Christian thinkers who view that prophecy as speaking of the second coming.

Yes—and I think that tiny change is actually theologically consequential, because it makes explicit what your song is already doing implicitly.

Isaiah 40:5 literally says, in the Hebrew and in most translations, essentially:

“The glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

So “Him” is interpretation rather than translation. But in this song, I think it's a defensible and particularly effective interpretation.

The New Testament gives you the bridge. Luke quotes Isaiah 40:3–5 in connection with John the Baptist and renders the culmination as, “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6). And Luke has already identified that salvation personally with Jesus—Simeon, holding Jesus, says, “my eyes have seen Your salvation” (Luke 2:30).

Then the Second Coming language becomes even more striking. Revelation 1:7:

“Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him.”

So you effectively have this biblical progression:

Isaiah: All flesh shall see the glory of YHWH.
Luke: All flesh shall see the salvation of God.
Revelation: Every eye shall see Him.

And your lyric:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed
All flesh shall see Him together
The King is coming

That makes your Christological interpretation unmistakable.

There's an additional reason I like it in this particular song. If you retained “see it together,” the immediate grammatical referent would simply be the glory. But your entire song is moving toward the revelation of a Person. The glory isn't merely some spectacular phenomenon accompanying the King.

The King is the revelation.

That's very Johannine as well: “We beheld His glory” (John 1:14).

And it strengthens the two-Advent quality enormously. At the first Advent, humanity sees God's glory revealed in Christ—initially, paradoxically, in humility. At the second Advent, what was veiled becomes universally manifest:

All flesh shall see Him together.
The King is coming.

So I'd retain “Him.” I just wouldn't describe it as a more literal rendering of Isaiah. It's your deliberately Christological reading of Isaiah, informed by the way the New Testament itself develops the passage.

And given the personal second layer of the song, “Him” matters there too. Your mother's hope wasn't ultimately that she would see something called “the glory of the Lord.”

It was that she would see Him.