Have you ever read a book, seen a TV show or watched a movie that had a profound impact on your life? Media has a huge influence in our culture and it’s important that we choose to fill our lives with Godly things. I was reading Frank Peretti and Ted Deker’s book House one night and this song was inspired.
In House, the characters find themselves trapped in a haunted bed and breakfast. There is no escape. The people trapped inside are given an ultimatum, a list of rules that must be completed by dawn if any of them want to survive. The rule, there must be one dead body at dawn. At the beginning of every chapter is printed the time (example 1:37am) and “One Dead Body”. As the hours start to wind down and dawn approaches, there is a slight but profound change made at the beginning of each chapter “The Wages For Sin Is One Dead Body”.
Up until that point, I hadn’t really gotten the point of the book. I’m really not into haunted ghost stories and horror ect… so I was a little lost. Why would these people write a book about a haunted house? What was the eternal value in that? When I read that sentence I knew what they were after. Sure enough, they paralleled the story line in the book to the sacrifice that Jesus made for us. The wages for sin, One dead body.
I wrote the bridge to the song Another Chance that night “You laid it down, You gave Your life, You traded crowns, You sacrificed”. House was an interesting book that I probably won’t read again (of course I never read a book more than once ?) but the impact that that one sentence had on my outlook on life changed me from the inside out.