The First Time

MercyMe opens by admitting to overconfidence: "I thought I knew Your face, I thought I tasted grace, but I had never felt anything close to this." It's an unusual way to start a worship song — not with a fresh discovery, but with the confession that an old, familiar idea of grace turned out to be smaller than the real thing.

The verses lean into that same honesty about effort: "after all of my searching, all of my reaching, I'm left with nothing, nothing of worth." That admission of coming up empty-handed lines up with Ephesians 2:8-9's point that grace was never something searching could produce — it has to be given, which 2 Corinthians 5:17 frames as an actual remaking, not a touch-up.

The title phrase — "it feels like the first time" — repeats until it stops being a metaphor and starts sounding like the song's actual claim: grace doesn't run out or get old with familiarity. That's close to Lamentations 3:22-23's "new every morning," mercy that keeps arriving fresh rather than wearing thin with repetition.