"Come, Thou Fount of Every blessing": A meditation

It's been a while since I posted on the wisdom of the saints who have gone before. We sang "Come, thou fount of every blessing", by Robert Robinson, as the closing hymn in church last Sunday, and as always it struck a chord with me. Here is the text, which  is near identical to the first three verses of the original.

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,  

tune my heart to sing thy grace;

streams of mercy, never ceasing,

call for songs of loudest praise.

Teach me some melodious sonnet,

sung by flaming tongues above;

praise his name--I’m fixed upon it--

name of God's redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer,

hither by thy help I’ve come;

and I hope, by thy good pleasure,

safely to arrive at home.

Jesus sought me when a stranger,

wandering from the fold of God;

He, to rescue me from danger,

bought me with His precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor

daily I’m constrained to be!

Let thy goodness, like a fetter,

bind my wandering heart to thee:

prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

prone to leave the God I love;

here’s my heart, O take and seal it;

seal it for thy courts above.

And yes, this was originally 5 verses. Hymnary, which is a great resource, and has as many versions as they can find hymn books (and they can find a lot), lists only one hymnal, from 1791 and presumably the original, which includes all five. The last two verses are a little...weird. And if the Regency and Victorian hymn book editors left it out, you know they have to be a little funky. To sum it up--the original hymn ends by asking God to tell the singer to "Get me up and die".

Ok, this is a geyser, not a fount, but it looks a lot nicer

This hymn sits proudly in the middle of praise songs, before that term was taken over by sappy Jesus-is-my-boyfriend pseudo pop nonsense. The theme, thesis, focus of the song is God and all that he has done for the one who believes in him. It opens with a supplication to God, the 'fount of every blessing', to change the singer's heart, and teach them how to properly praise God. What could be more pleasing to God than 'some melodious sonnet/sung by flaming tongues above"(other than the repentance of one sinner)? The earnestness of the writer/singer is immediately apparent. Its almost as if his entire being were straining towards this one goal of praising God. It sounds odd, but every time I sing this, I feel a deep sense of yearning, almost homesickness.

The second verse has lead to many a 'huh?' I'm sure, unless you had one of the hymnals which kindly gave the Biblical reference and a note of explanation for what an Ebenezer is. It is, of course, a stone monument raised to commemorate God's help and salvation (Dickens didn't name Scrooge that just because it sounded funny). In fact, the second line essentially explains the first. I love this verse, for all it encompasses. I always imagined that this song, with its declaration with our dependence on God and devotion to him, was a kind of modern day ebenezer (if I actually went around erecting stone monuments for all the times God has helped me, my yard would resemble nothing so much as a grave yard).

The author's description of Christ's salvific act, which brings to mind the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Good Shepherd, and emphasizes the personal quality of Christ's sacrifice.  I like the original wording, which replaces 'bought' with 'interposed', if only because it gives me this mental image of me being in the process of being dragged off to Hell, and Christ stepping between me and damnation to cover me in his blood and purity. Gory and graphic? Yes, but we are talking about eternal damnation here. It should be dramatic. I want to have a sense of the cost. I somehow imagine God as having infinite money, should it come to that. And yes, it says 'purchased with his blood', but purchase has already put money on my mind. Somehow interposing gets the point across better, but that's probably a personal preference, not a theology thing.

The last verse does a pretty little inversion of ideas. Grace is freely given, otherwise it is not grace, but here the singer considers himself permanently indebted to it. We usually think of being saved as being freed from the chains of sin and death, but the writer acknowledges that he is 'prone to wander' and asks that God's mercy be used to fetter (aka old school handcuff) himself to God, so he can't wander away anymore. This reminds us of the seeming contradictions of faith. By choosing faith, we have to give up, or at least try to give up, a lot of our selfish impulses, which to the outside world looks more constrained than ever. But in giving up our 'freedom' to do whatever we want, we gain a new, better freedom in Christ. We can live free from doubt, from  guilt and shame (though we often do a terrible job of showing this). We can live knowing, truly knowing, that whatever happens to us in this life, we have an eternity with God to look forward to. We no longer have to be afraid, not of sin, not of other people, not of anything the world can throw at us. Songs like this remind me of this reality in Christ, and urge me to walk more in the new life, and less in the old.