The Songwriter Who Gave It All Away

In the 1990s, Rich Mullins was one of the most successful musicians in Christian music. His song Awesome God became an anthem sung in churches across the world, and his albums generated substantial royalties. By every measure of the industry, he had made it.

But Mullins made an unusual arrangement. He never saw most of the money. He asked his church to pay him whatever the average American worker earned that year, and the rest went to charity. He moved to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, where he lived in a small hogan and taught music to children. He drove an old Jeep. He owned almost nothing.

People thought he was eccentric. Some thought he was foolish. But Mullins understood something that the Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians — that everything he once counted as gain, he now considered loss for the sake of knowing Christ. Mullins once said in an interview that he didn't think God was interested in our accomplishments. He believed El Shaddai was interested in our hearts.

Rich Mullins died in a car accident in 1997 at the age of forty-one. He left behind no fortune, no estate to speak of. What he left behind were songs that still echo in sanctuaries decades later — and a life that looked remarkably like the One he followed.

Sacrifice is not giving God what costs us nothing. It is laying down the thing the world says we earned, because we have found something the world cannot give.