Hurt By Johnny Cash…I Relate To That Song And I’m A Christian

Hurt lyrics

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar’s chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Bart Barber wrote an article that was featured on his own blog PraiseGod BareBones and SBCToday where he appeared to imply that Johnny Cash could not be a true born again Christian and sing the lyrics of the song Hurt or that it is opposite of the Gospel.

I can understand why some would think this, and Bart is not the only one who has come to this conclusion. But, if you look at the lyrics as I looked at them, as I believe Johnny Cash was singing them, the picture becomes strikingly different, and you can see that Johnny Cash is not only a born again Christian, but that it was more real and precious to him than to some who have not walked a rough road before coming to Christ.

Before I became a Christian, my goals were different, my thinking was different, I was young and very foolish. My ideas of success and enjoying life were dramatically different than they were after Christ. My life was difficult for reasons I won’t go into, but love was not something I always knew. I thought one had to clean themselves up before coming to Christ, even more so after becoming a Christian, and I knew I just couldn’t do it. I had things that I just couldn’t shake on my own. I had made choices that affected me for many years, and I didn’t have any intention of coming to Christ, being who I wasn’t, and having to fake my way through life. This was a time period when I could no longer cry, no longer feel anything, or so I thought. (I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel…)

Eventually however I understood that I could come to Christ as I was. Dirty, filthy, rotten and Christ would forgive me of those sins. He would begin to clean me up, a cleaning that would take place all throughout my life. I didn’t have to worry that I measured up, because of what He did on the cross, and by the resurrection, in his ministry on earth, I was accepted. This was overwhelming to me. I never forgot what Christ did for me then, or is doing for me now. Never.

When I heard the song Hurt as sung by Johnny Cash, I immediately identified with it. It’s a lot like Ecclesiastics in that the message I got from the song was that all the bad, all the times people were hurt because of something I did, hurt just as bad when I became older as it did when I first came to Christ and realized that I had hurt not only myself, but other people badly. That feeling never goes away. You don’t forget that even though you know you are forgiven. But it is a good deterrent not to do it again. It “hurts”.

You also realize that any material things or successes that you have, in the end, when you are retired, older, and people are dying that you know, mean nothing. It’s true that you take nothing out of this world when you go. It’s just meaningless, dust. All the accomplishments, all the money, all the endless hours of work when maybe you should have been with your family, are meaningless. Dust. What people remember is not how hard you work, what material things you had, but who you were, and especially, who you were with them. How you treated them, your laughter, your fun with them or your absence. I believe all this is intensified when you become a Christian.

As for the line of Johnny Cash believing he could save himself, I do not think this has to do with salvation, the meaning in my mind, because I could again relate, was he wished he could have saved himself all the grief, saved himself from hurting people and himself. I also agree with one commenter who said that death is something we as Christians hate because we know it’s not in God’s original plan, it’s not something that was supposed to be. In our new minds and hearts, we know this. We also know people that we love, either family members, or friends, who die and are in hell. That is something we hate. That was not to happen before the Fall. That’s the pain, that’s the sting. For the Christian, the sting of our own personal death is gone, but for those who are left behind the sting is still very real. We can pretend it isn’t, but it is.

So while I understand Bart’s point of view, if you are a person who made many mistakes before Christ, or a Christian who still made mistakes either earlier on in your Christian life, or at anytime during, this song is honest, real, and one that adequately describes our regrets as humans near the end of our lives and is perfectly in line with the end result of the Gospel, in that what Christ has done makes us see our sin for what it is, all our sin, and it overwhelms us what Christ did with that sin and in us.