As a Bible student at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., Wes King—like a lot of college-aged people—didn’t really know what he would do for the rest of his life. But he did know that he loved music, and he was playing a lot of it: writing songs for youth groups and performing local concerts. "I wasn’t really pursuing [music as a career]," King remembers. "It just kind of happened."
Through his youth work in Georgia, King met Kim Hill and soon found himself playing guitar and singing back-up vocals on the tour supporting Hill’s debut album. Hill subsequently recorded several of King’s songs on her Talk About Life album, including "Snake In the Grass" and "Charm
Is Deceitful."
Record deal offers soon began to surface. King signed with Reunion and recorded two albums, Motivation and Sticks & Stones, before beginning work on The Robe. The album’s title song was among the last to be completed for the project, although songwriter Phil Naish had already written the music. King had heard and loved the tune, but had temporarily put it aside.
Then, he says, "It came down to the record, and it was between this song and another song, and I just didn’t know. We said, ‘Chase the Phil song.’ And so I started working on it."
At the time, King says he was asking himself, "How can I meaningfully close my concerts? What’s a way that I can invite people to become a Christian without playing ‘Just as I Am’ 50,000 times and threatening people that they’re going to go to hell tonight if they don’t?"
The answer came when King returned to his marked-up copy of Charles Spurgeon’s Sovereign Grace sermons, which he’d read the year before.
"I went back and went through some of my highlights," King recalls. "That’s mostly the way I write songs: I highlight and I go back and I read it, and I go, ‘Now, why did that impact me?’
"At the end of the sermon [‘High Doctrine’], Spurgeon says, ‘Sinner, you say you have no faith. You’re right. You have no faith. Faith is of God. Come as you are, and He will give you the faith that you need. You say you’re guilty. You’re right. You are guilty. Come as you are and God will pardon you. Sinner, you say you’re naked and ashamed. Come as you are, and the robe that He will clothe you in is made of a garment of the grace of His Son. Come as you are.’
"And I said, ‘That is it. That’s the song.’
"There’s a great quote," King continues. "Someone—I forget who—said that great writing is just stealing with discretion—because there’s nothing new under the sun. That’s really what I did. And all Spurgeon did was steal from the gospel itself, because that’s what the gospel is all about: The robe of righteousness that we wear because we can’t be good, we can’t try hard enough to please God. It’s something that has to come from without."
