Since seeing the movie I have gradually, by stages and degrees, grown to love Cash’s music, to the point that a number of his songs today rank as some of my favorite of all-time. While the movie Walk the Line was great and fairly accurate, it glossed over some important events in Cash’s life, most notably the role Christianity played in his later life while recovering from decades of drug abuse and hard living. Most amazing was his attempt to commit suicide by purposely getting lost in an immense cave after hitting rock bottom. Many hikers had lost their way in the caves before and eventually died before finding their way out. After crawling around in the dark for hours, Cash finally gave his life to the Lord and miraculously found his way out of the cave. This video from Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church explains:

 

 

Here is my favorite Cash song, Redemption:

 

 

Here’s a clip from Cash’s performance in San Quentin:

 

 

Finally, here is Cash’s last video ever produced, Hurt:

 

 

Russell Moore, a dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, is a lifelong fan of Johnny Cash. In a 2005 article for Touchstone magazine (HT: Between Two Worlds), Moore writes about Cash’s ability to reach a wide audience:

 

Cash always seemed to connect. When other Christian celebrities tried to down-play sin and condemnation in favor of upbeat messages about how much better life is with Jesus, Cash sang about the tyranny of guilt and the certainty of coming judgment. An angst-ridden youth culture may not have fully comprehended guilt, but they understood pain. And, somehow, they sensed Cash was for real.

 

 

Johnny Cash is dead, and there will never be another. But all around us there are empires of dirt, and billions of self-styled emperors marching toward judgment.

 

Perhaps if Christian churches modeled themselves more after Johnny Cash, and less after perky Christian celebrities such as Kathy Lee Gifford, we might find ourselves resonating more with the MTV generation. Maybe if we stopped trying to be “cool,” and stopped hiring youth ministers who are little more than goateed game-show hosts, we might find a way to connect with a generation that understands pain and death more than we think.

 

Perhaps if we paid more attention to the dark side of life, a dark side addressed in divine revelation, we might find ourselves appealing to men and women in black. We might connect with men and women who know what it’s like to feel like fugitives from justice, even if they’ve never been to jail. We might offer them an authentic warning about what will happen when the Man comes around.

 

And, as we do this, we just might hear somewhere up in the cloud of witnesses a voice that once cried in the wilderness: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”