231. Rock Goes The Gospel - Green Day: "Boulevard Of Broken Dreams"

"Boulevard of Broken Dreams" is a song by American punk rock band Green Day, recorded for their seventh studio album American Idiot (2004). Reprise Records released "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" as the second single from American Idiot. The song's lyrics were written by lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong, and composed by the band. Production was handled by Rob Cavallo and Green Day. "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" remains one of Green Day's signature songs. It was ranked the number one on Rolling Stone‍ '​s Reader's Choice: Singles of the Decade list in 2009 and number 65 on the 100 Best Songs of the Decade list in the same year. As of 2010, it has sold 2,084,000 copies in the United States,. The single peaked at number two in the United States, making it Green Day's most successful song. The song was the ninth biggest selling single of the 2000-2009 decade with worldwide sales exceeding 5 million copies."Boulevard of Broken Dreams" won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year.

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don't know where it goes
But it's home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of broken dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I'm the only one and I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk a...

My shadow's only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
Till then I walk alone

Ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah, aah-ah
Ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah

I'm walking down the line
That divides me somewhere in my mind
On the border line of the edge
And where I walk alone

Read between the lines
What's fucked up and everything's all right
Check my vital signs to know I'm still alive
And I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk a...

My shadow's only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
Till then I walk alone

Ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah, aah-ah
Ah-ah, ah-ah

I walk alone
I walk a

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of broken dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I'm the only one and I walk a

My shadow's only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
Till then I walk alone

This Green day song is about the walk through life. Daily experience is like a boulevard of broken dreams. It's in this boulevard that the person in the song is walking alone. You can identify with the song in so many ways. Life seems like this at many times. Today in the Bible reading in Matthew 28:16-20  we will reflect on the promise of Jesus to journey through life with us

What a wonderful way to conclude a gospel. The story of the God who came from heaven to earth wraps up with the assurance, “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). Though Jesus was about to ascend, Matthew wants us to hear that the nearness of Christ’s incarnation continues. He who is Immanuel, God with us, promises to live up to His name. Jesus would soon return to heaven while His disciples went out into the world in gospel mission. But they were not going their separate ways. Jesus and His brothers could not be parted by the distance between the world and the heavenly realms. How can this be?

Jesus’ missional instructions can be well understood, “baptising them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (28:19). That gives an important insight into conversion and the sealing sign of baptism. Our lives get relocated when we are joined to Jesus by the Spirit through faith. We are launched into Jesus. So now our lives are “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). Paul writes dynamically of this reality when he says the Father “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (1:13). It’s as if God sent a moving truck to take us out of a dank, evil, broken neighborhood of sin into the spacious streets of freedom in Christ. Peter describes it as God’s “calling us out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). Jesus Himself stated this change of life-address even more mystically: “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20). These verses give some texture to the phrase Paul uses so often: we are now in Christ.

Jesus is with us always because Jesus is where I walk - unlike in the Green Day song. Believers are forever joined to Him they never walk alone. Jesus returned to heaven and spiritually took us along. What a mystery: “Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ … and raised us with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:5–6). Yes, this is a spiritual reality now, as my body quite obviously is still here on the ground. One day, of course, the union will be completed as we receive our resurrection bodies that we might always be in immediate communion with Jesus and one another.

Meanwhile, while we are on earth, Jesus stays with us through His Spirit whom He sends to us. Paul writes, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5). The Spirit is the personal presence of Jesus “housed” in us. By the Spirit, the Father and Son make a home in us (John 14:23). Christians, both individually and corporately as the church, are a dwelling in which the eternal exchange of love between the Triune persons gets lived out. The Holy Spirit in us keeps us joined to Jesus, who has taken His resurrection body into heaven. He ever lifts us up to see that our true life is located there, in Christ. We will then never journey the boulevard of broken dreams on our own, but in the power of his presence.

The biblical understanding of Jesus’ being with us is very different from any idea that Jesus’ presence just gives a helpful boost to the life I’m trying to make for myself. “I am with you always” does not mean I have a miniature Jesus tucked inside me for inspiration amid my ambitions or for comfort when things don’t go my way. Rather, my little life is taken up into the greatness of Jesus. He is with us most profoundly because by the Spirit we are in Christ. My purpose in life, then, is directed by His mission for His people.

So, I am propelled out of my cozy home where I’d like to stay while Jesus comforts me. He sends me to the cranky neighbourhood, back into the boluevard of broken dreams to witness to him with the awareness that Jesus loves him as much as He loves me. “I am with you as you love him in Me.”Jesus goes with me from my relatively safe street to the sharp neighborhood filled with angry lives. He takes me back into the boulevard of broken dreams and says “Pitch a tent there,” He whispers, “as I took up a tent of flesh in a broken world.” Right where I don’t want to be alone in, Jesus already is there. He even sends me to engage the people who will scoff at mention of His name. I’d like to avoid them, to keep away from controversy. But the Lord who continues to mix it up in the world He is reclaiming reminds me: “You are in Me, and I am sending My gospel into the world. So you can trust that I am with you as you go into those tricky conversations.”Jesus is with us always, first and most profoundly because His Spirit has taken us up into His life and, therefore, His mission. We do not walk alone in the boulevard of broken dreams.