Label: Rabbit Room Press
Release Date: 2009

What makes this bunch of songs unique is that I wanted to remind (or teach) the audience that the story of Christmas doesn’t begin with the birth of Jesus. Many people tend to forget or have never even learned that the entire Bible is about Jesus, not just the New Testament. So the musical begins with Moses and the symbolic story of the Passover (Passover Us) and works its way through the kings and the prophets with their many prophecies about the coming Messiah (So Long, Moses) to the awful four hundred years of silence before God told Mary she’d be having a baby (Deliver Us). After the song called Matthew’s Begats, which lists the genealogy of Jesus, the story picks up in more familiar territory with Mary and Joseph and the actual birth (It Came To Pass, Labor of Love). The final song is called Behold, the Lamb of God, which ties together the Passover and the beauty and scope of the story.

For the past three years the concert has been overwhelming from a spiritual standpoint. I can honestly say that I haven’t made it through one performance of the show without crying, which isn’t a testimony to the concert as much as it is to the power of the story of Jesus. And it really is that story that’s being told, in a new way. The audiences have expressed to me what I most want to hear, which is that they were blown away, that they got goose bumps, that they felt truly prepared to celebrate the Christmas season for what it’s really worth. I also heard over and over again that they wanted to take the record home.

Over the past few years, along with the string quartet I’ve had numerous guests appear in the concert: Phil Keaggy, Alison Krauss, Phil Madeira, Fernando Ortega, Ron Block (Union Station), Sean and Sara Watkins (Nickel Creek), Jill Phillips, Randall Goodgame, Jonathan and Amanda Noel, Todd Bragg, Silers Bald, Laura Story, Andrew Osenga, Steve Hindalong and others. This year the concert is being held at the Ryman Auditorium.- Andrew Peterson For this tenth-anniversary edition the original album has been remastered and a second bonus disc is included featuring songs from the Behold the lamb Tour in 2008.