ActualChristianMusic
Read in

Psalm 107:13-16 vs. “Chain Breaker”

Zach Williams · checked 2026-08-21

What we checked

PassagePsalm 107:13-16 chapter ↗
Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)
Presents itself asinspired-by
Categorynot a quote
AlbumChain Breaker · 2016
Words addressed tonot addressed to God (sung about Him)
Teaching or experienceteaching (states truths)

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria not graded: this song never presents its words as scripture

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

  • Everything it says God does is something scripture says God does. Broken chains and an opened prison are Psalm 107's own images, and a shaken prison is Acts 16's
  • Never says it is quoting at all: no verse, no reference, no line framed as scripture, nothing to mis-cite
  • The rescue is God's work throughout. The hearer is the one addressed, never the one credited
  • Williams' published accounts of writing it tell a testimony and a prison visit, and name no passage. The song does not borrow authority it was not given
  • Sung outward to someone in trouble rather than inward about the singer's own week

⚠ Cautions

  • Three worship catalogues list three different scripture sets behind it, and the song supplies none of them. Anything you hear about "the verse" behind this song comes from a cataloguer, not the writers
  • Psalm 107's prisoners sit in the dark for a stated reason, and their deliverance turns on crying out to the LORD. The song states neither, so the same promise arrives without the psalm's terms
  • Verses 13 and 15 are the psalm's refrain across all four of its rescue stories. Read as the chain-breaking verse alone, they get narrower than the psalm made them
  • Across the transcriptions checked the subject is a third-person "He" plus the title Savior, with no divine name spoken. At least one published review reads the song the same way. A hearer outside the church has to supply the identity

Verse Proof

Psalm 107:13-16

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble, and He saved them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death and broke away their chains. Let them give thanks to the LORD for His loving devotion and His wonders to the sons of men. For He has broken down the gates of bronze and cut through the bars of iron.”

Psalm 107 opens the fifth book of the Psalter by calling the redeemed of the LORD to say so, gathered home from east and west and north and south. It then tells four short stories of trouble and rescue: travellers lost in a wasteland, prisoners in the dark, the sick, and sailors in a storm. Verses 13 to 16 close the prisoner story. The three verses just before them say why those prisoners are sitting there. They rebelled against the words of God and despised the counsel of the Most High, and He humbled their hearts with hard labour. Verses 13 and 15 are not unique lines either. They are the psalm's refrain, repeated at the turn of all four stories, so the same two sentences also carry the sick and the sailors. Only verse 16, the bronze gates and the iron bars, belongs to the prisoners alone.

What the song says, described not quoted

The song speaks outward, to a listener who is worn down. It opens with questions rather than statements, asking whether the struggle has been going on a long time, whether the pain is still there, whether hope has run out, and then answers with a run of role names for someone the lyric calls only "He": one who carries pain away, one who opens a way, one who shakes a prison open, one who saves, and the one the title names, who breaks chains. A bridge turns the answer into an invitation, asking the hearer to believe it, take it, and say so out loud. No verse is quoted, no reference is given, and nothing in the song is framed as scripture.

What crosses over from Psalm 107 is imagery, not wording: chains coming off, a prison opening, darkness ending. What does not cross over is the frame around that imagery. The psalm's prisoners are in the dark for a stated reason, and their rescue starts with a stated act. They cried out to the LORD. The song's trouble has no stated cause and its stated condition is belief. The psalm ends its stanza by telling the rescued to give thanks; the song ends its bridge by asking the hearer to testify, which is the nearest thing in it to the psalm's own close.

· Not a quote: The song cites no verse and presents no line as scripture. So the word-for-word standard does not apply. The chains and opened prison it sings about are things Psalm 107 says God does.

▸ Official upload. Now listen with the proof in mind.

The song's chains are anyone's. The psalm's chains have a reason, and the psalm says the reason before it says the rescue.

Why it matters

The passages people attach to this song did not come from the song. Three worship catalogues list three different sets: one pairs it with Psalm 107:14 and Isaiah 9:4, another with Acts 16 and Isaiah 58 and four more, a third with Isaiah 61:1 and Romans 8:2. That spread is the evidence. When a song names no text, every reader supplies one, and the supplied text can then get quoted back as though the song had cited it.

The second thing at stake is scope. Psalm 107 is precise about how its prisoners got into the dark and what they did about it. A song that keeps the rescue and leaves the setting open is not saying anything false, but it is handing the listener a wider promise than the stanza it resembles.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song fixes your attention on God.

What a loop of this plants is a list of things God does, held in the second person and offered to whoever is listening. That is why the dwelling tag is God rather than mixed. There is no week of the singer's own being narrated here, and the "you" in it is the hearer, not the singer talking to himself. Repeated, it stocks the mind with a stack of true statements about God's habits, and those are useful things to have already memorised at three in the morning. What it will not plant is the other half of Psalm 107, which is that the prisoners cried out and that the rescued were told to say so. The song gets to the second of those in its bridge. For the first, read verse 13 alongside it and let the psalm supply the verb.

Sources

Corrections

No corrections to this proof yet.

Think we got something wrong? Tell us what and where, and we will check it against the text. Real errors get fixed here, dated, in public. Every correction on the site →

Where the text survives the song

Not a ranking, and not a swap. If what you came for is the passage sung whole, these proofs found it kept: word-for-word verified, or paraphrase that says so and names its source.

✓ VERIFIED “Psalm 11 (English Standard Version)” The Corner Room (Adam Wright) Psalm 11:1-7 Sing it straight through. It is all seven verses of Psalm 11, in order, in a version the track title names. A reviewer says one verse comes back as a refrain, and it is the psalm's own verse.

✓ All seven verses, in order. We set the printed sung text beside an ESV and compared it word by word: 131 words, all matching, nothing added and nothing dropped

⚠ The printed text under the video lists each line once. It is not a map of the song. A review of the album says verse 4 comes back as a refrain

 ✓ VERIFIED “Psalm 16” The Corner Room (Adam Wright) Psalm 16:1-11 You can sing this one straight through. It is all eleven verses of Psalm 16, in order, in a named version. What you repeat is the psalm.

✓ The printed sung text carries all eleven verses of Psalm 16, in order, with no line printed twice and no refrain added

⚠ The track title alone will not tell you which Bible you are singing. On Apple Music and Spotify it is just "Psalm 16". The version is named on the album page and in the video description.

 ✓ VERIFIED “Psalm 53 (English Standard Version)” The Corner Room (Adam Wright) Psalm 53:1-6 Yes, you can sing it. All six verses of Psalm 53 are here, in order, from a version the release names. The words you repeat are the psalm's own.

✓ The printed sung text carries all six verses of Psalm 53, in order, and every one of its 142 words matches an ESV of the psalm

⚠ The printed text is not a transcript. A review of the album calls the psalm's opening line the song's refrain. We did not listen through to count repeats, so that rests on the review

More songs like this

NOT A QUOTE “Rescue Story” Zach Williams 1 Timothy 1:15-16 Sing it. It quotes nothing and never says it is scripture, and it is one man's rescue sung to Jesus. Read 1 Timothy 1:16 beside it, where a rescue is told for other people's sake.

✓ Nothing in it is presented as scripture. No book, chapter or verse is named anywhere in the song, and nothing is framed as a quotation, so there is nothing here to mis-cite

⚠ Every passage tied to this song comes from outside it. The artist-partnered plan assigns three. A blog names Psalm 40:1-3. A podcast runs through Ruth and seven more. None of them is the song's own

 NOT A QUOTE “All Creatures of Our God and King” Sovereign Grace Music Psalm 148:7-10 Sing it. Nothing here is presented as scripture. Its resemblance to Psalm 148 comes from Draper's English, which turned Francis's praise of God for creation into a call addressed to creation.

✓ Says it is nothing but a song. No verse is cited on the recording, no translation is named, and the credit line points at the poem it came from rather than at a chapter of the Bible

⚠ The Psalm 148 resemblance belongs to the English. Francis's Italian praises God for the sun and moon and calls them brother and sister rather than ordering them to praise. A singer told this is Francis's Psalm 148 is being told two things, and only one of them is checkable

 NOT A QUOTE “Gratitude” Brandon Lake Psalm 51:15-17 Sing it. It quotes nothing and never says it is scripture, so there is no citation to check. Psalm 51 is our pairing, not the song's, and the psalm's empty hands are empty over sin rather than over smallness.

✓ Never says it is quoting, anywhere: nothing is cited in the recording, in the rights holder's upload description, or on the publisher's chord chart

⚠ No passage is cited by the song, by the writers' published account of the session, or by the rights holder's chord chart. Every verse attached to it was attached downstream

262 songs checked so far. Nothing for the song you want? Ask us to check it.