Welcome!  Hymns have been and continue to be a real source of inspiration to me.  My desire in this blog is to share special hymns with my readers hoping that the words will minister to them, especially in times of great personal need.  If one of these hymns ministers to you, please take time to leave a comment so that I know that my blog is helping others as much as it helps me. Sometimes I will also provide a link where you can go to hear the hymn played.  So, please join me here each week and sing along as we praise God together.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

COME THOU FOUNT OF EVERY BLESSING

As a teenager, Robert Robinson (1735 – 1790) went to a George Whitefield meeting with the purpose of ridiculing him. Instead, Robinson was converted and later entered the ministry. The text of this great hymn was written when he was only twenty-three years of age while he ministered at the Calvinistic Methodist Church in Norfolk, England. In the USA, the hymn is usually set to an American folk tune known as Nettleton, by attribution to the evangelist Asahel Nettleton who composed it early in the nineteenth century. It is one of those rare hymns that has survived the centuries and is still sung today, by many, as a song of praise and testimony. As I grew up I often heard song leaders and minisfers talk negatively about the words "prone to wander" in the third verse. I would agree that our salvation is secure and that nothing can take it away from us. But I also believe that all of us at times begin to wander and need to be brought back to the victorious life the Lord desires for us. I remember how my grandfather often talked about sheep who tend to wander away from the shepherd by nibbling a patch of grass here and then going to nibble another patch a little farther away and then another, and then another until they had wandered a distance from the shepherd. But the shepherd always brought them back. And isn't that the same with us? Aren't there things that cause us to wander away from the close fellowship that we can and should have with the Lord? But in His great mercy and grace, the Lord brings us back to Him and to close fellowship with Him. As the song says, daily we are debtors, but in His goodness He binds our wandering heart to Him. He truely is the fount of every true blessing.

(1) Come Thou fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace
Streams of mercy never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise
And teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above
Praise the mount, I'm fixed upon it
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

(2) Here I raise my Ebenezer
Hither by Thy help I 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
Interposed His precious blood.

(3) Oh, 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 Lord, take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Listen to it here. LISTEN

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