The Story Behind the Song: Awesome God

by avministry | Apr 11, 2026 | Music

The Story Behind the Song: Awesome God

How a drowsy drive on an American highway gave the world the greatest worship anthem of the modern era

The Man Who Yelled Into the Wind

It was sometime in 1987, and a tired young man named Richard Wayne Mullins was driving alone across the American heartland toward a youth conference. Sleep threatened to pull him under as the flat landscape rolled by. What happened next is the stuff of Christian music legend.

According to his brother David, Rich rolled down the car window and started yelling. Not out of frustration — but in imitation. He was channeling the old fire-and-brimstone country preachers he had grown up listening to, the ones who could shake a congregation loose from its pews with vivid, Old Testament imagery. Into the rushing wind, he thundered about a God whose footsteps shook the earth and whose fists held lightning. He preached to empty fields and open sky. And somewhere in that sleepy, gloriously unhinged sermon-in-motion, a chorus took shape:

“Our God is an awesome God — He reigns from heaven above, with wisdom, power, and love — our God is an awesome God.”

By the time he arrived at that Christ in Youth conference in Joplin, Missouri, the song existed in rough form. He taught it to the audience that night. The kids went wild. Rich thought nothing of it.

He was wrong.

Rich Mullins: The Ragamuffin Behind the Song

To understand why “Awesome God” resonated with millions, you have to know the man who wrote it — because everything about the song flows directly from the contradictions, struggles, and convictions of his life.

A Boy From Indiana

Richard Wayne Mullins was born on October 21, 1955, in Richmond, Indiana. His mother, Neva, was a birthright Quaker — gentle, spiritual, nurturing. His father, John, was a tree farmer — tough, emotionally reserved, and not easy to please. Rich grew up straddling those two worlds: the quiet interior life of Quaker faith and the hard exterior world of rural Indiana labor.

He was musical from almost before he could walk. His great-grandmother would hold him on her lap at the piano, and he would press his fingers on the keys, learning hymns in four-part harmony before he could speak clearly. At four years old, riding a tractor across the farm, he reportedly composed his first song. Music was not a choice for Rich Mullins — it was the air he breathed.

But he was also awkward, sensitive, not good at sports, and deeply uncertain of his own worth. He would later describe the years from his junior year of high school through age 30 as a period of near-constant torment: “I didn’t like myself, and I didn’t like anybody who was around me.” His faith, paradoxically, felt hollow during much of this time — not because he stopped believing in God, but because he couldn’t believe God could love him.

The Road to Music

After graduating high school in 1974, Rich pursued music education, eventually landing at Cincinnati Bible College and later Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. His early songwriting caught the attention of Amy Grant’s team, and Grant recorded his song “Sing Your Praises to the Lord” — giving him his first real foothold in the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) industry.

His debut album, Behold the Man, arrived in 1981, followed by Rich Mullins (1986) and Pictures in the Sky (1987). These early records showed a songwriter with unusual depth and theological seriousness — but they were commercially modest. Rich entered the studio in spring 1988 with the conviction that it might be his final album. “I figured, ‘Boy, this is gonna be my last album, so I’m not gonna be clever here. I’m just gonna say what I have to say.'”

The album he made was Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth — and it contained a little song born on a highway somewhere between Tennessee and Missouri.

The Origin of “Awesome God”: Setting the Record Straight

There is some fascinating ambiguity about exactly where the song was written. Most accounts agree Rich was driving alone, fighting off sleep, and began yelling out the window in imitation of old-time country preachers. Some sources specifically place it as a drive toward a concert in Colorado; others say it was en route to a Christ in Youth conference in Joplin, Missouri, with the song first performed at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO in August 1988. Still other accounts point to a high school camp in Michigan.

What is consistent across all accounts: the song was composed in motion, essentially improvised during a drive, and then immediately shared with a live audience who responded with immediate enthusiasm. Rich himself was ambivalent about the precise origin — he told different stories at different times and appeared genuinely unconcerned with the details.

What is not ambiguous is what happened next. When “Awesome God” debuted on the AC Charts on August 15, 1988, it climbed steadily and hit #1 on October 3, 1988, spending a total of 18 weeks on the chart. Reunion Records later threw Rich a celebration party in Nashville for the achievement.

Lyrical Analysis: What “Awesome God” Actually Says

One of the great injustices done to “Awesome God” over the decades is that most people only know the chorus. This is a tragedy, because the complete song — three verses plus the famous refrain — is a remarkably dense theological statement compressed into vivid, concrete images.

The Title and the Word “Awesome”

The title is drawn directly from Scripture. The phrase “awesome God” appears in Nehemiah 1:5, Nehemiah 9:32, Psalm 47, and Daniel 9:4. The Hebrew concept behind these passages is yirah — a complex word that carries connotations of fear, reverence, awe, and wonder all at once.

By 1988, the word “awesome” had already begun its slide into casual slang — a synonym for “cool” or “great.” Rich Mullins was reaching deliberately backward, reclaiming the word’s original weight. To call God “awesome” in Mullins’s sense is not a compliment — it is a statement of ontological reality. It means: this Being exceeds your categories. You cannot domesticate Him. He is beyond you.

Verse 1 — The God of Power

When He rolls up His sleeves He ain’t just putting on the ritz
(Our God is an awesome God)
There’s thunder in His footsteps and lightning in His fists
(Our God is an awesome God)
And the Lord wasn’t joking when He kicked ’em out of Eden
It wasn’t for no reason that He shed His blood
His return is very close and so you better be believing that
Our God is an awesome God

This verse draws from an enormous swath of Old Testament imagery. The picture of God “rolling up His sleeves” is a vernacular translation of the ancient Hebrew concept of the “arm of the Lord” — God’s powerful intervention in history (Isaiah 52:10). “Thunder in His footsteps and lightning in His fists” references passages including Exodus 19:16, Psalm 18:13, Psalm 29:3-7, Job 37:3-5, and Revelation 4:5. The verse then pivots rapidly through three theological pillars: the Fall (Eden), the Atonement (the cross), and the Second Coming. In four lines, Mullins covers the entire sweep of redemptive history.

Verse 2 — The God of Creation and Judgment

And when the sky was starless in the void of the night
(Our God is an awesome God)
He spoke into the darkness and created the light
(Our God is an awesome God)
Judgment and wrath He poured out on Sodom
Mercy and grace He gave us at the cross
I hope that we have not too quickly forgotten that
Our God is an awesome God

This verse begins with Genesis 1:1-3 — the darkness before creation, God speaking light into existence. It then pairs the destruction of Sodom (Genesis 18-19) with the mercy of the cross — the most theologically loaded juxtaposition in the entire song. The implication is unmistakable: the same God who obliterated Sodom for its wickedness is the God who absorbed that same judgment Himself at Calvary. Wrath and mercy are not opposites in this theology — they are held together at the cross. The structure mirrors Psalm 136, where a single refrain (“His love endures forever”) repeats while the verses build the cumulative case for it.

The Chorus — A Declaration, Not a Description

Our God is an awesome God
He reigns from heaven above
With wisdom, power, and love
Our God is an awesome God

“He reigns from heaven above” echoes Psalm 97:1 and Exodus 15:18. “Wisdom, power, and love” is a triad drawn from 2 Timothy 1:7 combined with Proverbs 8 and the Psalms. The repetition of “Our God is an awesome God” throughout the song functions liturgically — like a doxology or antiphon. By the end, the listener has not just heard a statement; they have participated in a confession.

The Verse-Chorus Divorce

One of the most-noted observations about the song’s modern use is what one theologian called “the great divorce between verse and chorus.” As “Awesome God” became a congregational staple, many worship leaders stripped it to its chorus alone — discarding the verses that provide the reason for the declaration. Sung alone, the chorus becomes cheerleading. Sung with the verses, it becomes a creed. The full song argues its case; the chorus alone simply asserts it.

Timeline: The Life of a Song

The Humble Artist Who Gave It All Away

The commercial success of “Awesome God” created an uncomfortable tension for its author. Rich Mullins was profoundly suspicious of wealth, celebrity, and the CCM industry’s growing entanglement with consumer culture.

After the song’s success, he made a decision that shocked the music world: he set up a board of directors to manage his finances and had his royalty checks sent directly to his lawyer rather than himself. The board distributed the funds according to a plan Rich helped design. He accepted only the average median salary for an American laborer — the rest went to charities, including Compassion International (he eventually sponsored three children through the organization).

His reasoning was theological: “Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. If I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, the best way I can do that is to identify with the poor.”

In 1995, after graduating from Friends University with a degree in music education, he moved to Tse Bonito on the Navajo Nation reservation in New Mexico, where he lived in a small sheet-metal trailer and taught music to Navajo children. “God never told me to go to New Mexico,” he said with characteristic deflation. “It’s no different than someone saying, ‘I’m going to flip burgers in Pittsburgh.'”

The Ragamuffin Gospel and the Theology Behind the Song

Any serious engagement with “Awesome God” must grapple with the theological framework that shaped it — and no influence was more formative than Brennan Manning, the former Catholic priest and author of The Ragamuffin Gospel (1990).

Manning wrote his book “for the bedraggled, beat-up, and burnt-out” — for people who could not get their spiritual lives together and suspected God had given up on them. His central argument was that God’s grace is more scandalous, more unconditional, and more available than the moralistic religious culture of American Christianity was willing to admit.

Mullins, who wrestled throughout his life with depression, alcoholism, and a profound sense of unworthiness, heard Manning’s message and was transformed. He said Manning’s teaching “broke the power of mere ‘moralistic religiosity'” in his life. In 1993, he named his backing musicians The Ragamuffin Band as an explicit tribute to Manning’s work and theology.

The paradox of “Awesome God” is that it was written by a man who simultaneously believed God was terrifyingly holy and that this same terrifying God loved broken people with reckless abandon. The song holds both truths — the holiness and the mercy — in the same lyrical space. That tension is not an accident; it is the entire point.

The Death That Shocked a Generation

On the evening of September 19, 1997, Rich Mullins and his friend and bandmate Mitch McVicker were driving from Chicago to a benefit concert in Wichita, Kansas. Near Lostant, Illinois, on Interstate 39, Mullins’s Jeep went out of control and rolled, ejecting both men. A tractor-trailer, unable to stop in time, swerved to avoid the Jeep and struck Mullins. He died instantly. He was 41 years old.

McVicker survived, though he suffered serious head and internal injuries and spent weeks in a Peoria hospital before beginning rehabilitation. Rich had been just weeks away from entering the studio to record a collection of ten new songs about Jesus — songs his friends and colleagues described as the best writing of his career. Those recordings were assembled posthumously into The Jesus Record, released in 1998 — one of the most poignant artifacts in Christian music history. At the 1998 GMA Dove Awards, he was named Artist of the Year. At the 1999 awards, he won Songwriter of the Year.

Rich Mullins never made a cent from his signature song. By his own design, it had all gone elsewhere. And yet the song outlived him by decades and shows no signs of stopping.

Legacy and Modern Covers: The Song That Will Not Die

In 2004, CCM Magazine named “Awesome God” the #1 greatest song in Christian music history — a distinction that still stands more than two decades later. The song migrated out of CCM radio and into the pews of churches around the world, becoming a staple of youth camps, vacation Bible schools, revival meetings, and Sunday morning worship services across virtually every Protestant denomination.

When Point of Grace recorded a new version in 2023 — more than 25 years after his death — they added a live outro: the entire audience at their Ocean City, New Jersey concert singing the chorus a cappella, without being given the lyrics. “The entire room instinctively knew the words,” said group member Leigh Cappillino. “That’s just another example of how ‘Awesome God’ continues to stand the test of time.”

Notable Covers

Phil Wickham and the New Generation

Of all the modern interpretations of “Awesome God,” Phil Wickham’s 2025 release “What An Awesome God” represents the most significant artistic intervention since the original. Released on April 11, 2025 — a year that would have marked Rich Mullins’s 70th birthday — the song preserves the iconic chorus while adding entirely new verses penned by Wickham and co-writer Jonathan Smith.

Wickham’s new verses draw on Psalm 33:6 and Genesis 2:7, maintaining the same scriptural density as Mullins’s original verses while updating the production for modern congregational worship. The song was released in six distinct versions — studio, organic, live, voice memo, choir, and instrumental — to serve different worship contexts. “What An Awesome God” went on to spend 23 weeks at #1 on Christian radio charts in 2025.

Wickham described the experience: “It’s hard to even describe what it means to me to share a small part of the legacy of this song. It has quickly become one of my favorite songs to sing with the church.”

Why This Song Endures

Scholars, pastors, and musicians have offered many explanations for “Awesome God”‘s extraordinary staying power. Nathan Myrick, writing for United Methodist Discipleship Ministries, argues that it became “one of the signature songs of the burgeoning contemporary worship music movement” because it combined a singable, theologically confident chorus with a driving, emotionally accessible melody. Michael Blanton, the head of Reunion Records, attributes the song’s longevity to Mullins’s refusal to write for the church market — he was always writing for the ordinary, spiritually hungry person on the street.

But perhaps the deepest explanation lies in what the song refuses to do. It refuses to make God safe. It refuses to make worship comfortable. It insists on a God who judges as well as saves, who poured out wrath on Sodom and then absorbed that same wrath at the cross. In an era of therapeutic Christianity — a God who serves as life coach and cosmic affirmation engine — Rich Mullins drove down the highway and yelled about a different kind of God: awesome in the ancient sense, terrifying and beautiful and wholly other.

That version of God turns out to be the one people actually want to worship.

Rich Mullins (October 21, 1955 – September 19, 1997) is remembered at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, in a dedicated archive known as “Rich’s Room” in the Edmund Stanley Library. His music continues to be performed by artists worldwide, and “Awesome God” remains, nearly four decades after its creation, the #1 ranked song in Contemporary Christian Music history.