Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
This hymn has really been growing on me recently. Read the words… soak them in. If you have a hard time understanding them, think Yoda…
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 the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great 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,
Interposed 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.O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.
Words: Robert Robinson, 1758; appeared in his A Collection of Hymns Used by the Church of Christ in Angel Alley, Bishopgate, 1759.
Original (most popular) Music was written 54 years later: “Nettleton,” Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second, by John Wyeth, 1813.
My favorite setting of this song: David Crowder Band from Passion 2002 Our Love is Loud.
That’s a great hymn, Matt. I love the old hymns and the new life being breathed into them.
Makes you want to name your kid Ebenezer, don’t it Matt?
i really like the last part, it’s exciting for me. reminds me of the ending part of amazing grace that really picks up “when we’ve been there ten thousand years! bright shining as the sun…”
ps. everything from the “r” in “hers” ->right is only image (no links) down below for me with safari 2.0.3 running. the book link ceases to be a link mid-link (around the “a” in captivating). fighting for priority with the bars maybe? firefox is working fine. safari problem probably?
pps. not that i was trying to click on “cute overload” or anything blush
This is one of my favorites too. Man, hymns just destroy most of what we consider “good” christian music today. I think about some of the songs that I listen to and sing, and they almost feel inappropriate to offer to God. These men wrote excellent poetry about an amazing God. What do “Amazed” and “Rescue” have in comparison? (nothing against Jared Anderson) “How Deep the Father’s Love For Us” explores more about the love of God than all the songs I know; in more clear, concise, and theologically accurate words. I can’t write anything better, so I can’t rant too much, but these songs are overwhelmingly more beautiful than contemporary music.
Dustin, I agree with you in the case of songs like this one, and other favorites. What we have to realize though is that there were roughly 400,000 hymns written over the last couple of centuries, and a lot of them were crap as well. What we experience today is sort of a “hymnological Darwinism” survival of the fittest sort of thing. So lets not get too hung up on hymns vs. modern songs, realize that it took a thousand failures to get one gem…
True enough. I would agree that it’s an unfruitful direction to go, and a pretty unprudent thing to throw out there. Sorry for being quick to speak, and not listen.
When I look at my own feeble attempts at songwriting I see lots of junk, and then one thing that expresses what I want it to. Every piece of art expresses a little something of what we want it to; some do it better than others. All music is an attempt at expressing the glory of something in different ways. I can’t judge one over another. Maybe what I should have said is, “Let’s strive to communicate the glory of God accurately and powerfully; no matter what medium or form it takes.”
Good stuff, Dustin.
matt, you could probably confirm or deny this theory as it seems you’ve got a a decent understanding of history of praise music/hymnists.
i wonder if what we consider “good” hymns come from the experience of men who were already bent on their own discipleship under Christ, and had a life’s worth of experience in terms of grace and maturity to draw from.
the closest i can get to understanding is in the poetry i write (which i rarely even share because it tends to only be pleasing to myself and God, so i can sympathize with people who say “i can’t write good songs”), and i have noticed that the best stuff i write, the stuff that when i read it months later jumps off the page at me, is the stuff inspired by God doing something huge in my life.
i wonder if the men who wrote those classic hymns like “it is well with my soul” were men who God was moving in, and who were committed to holiness, and they just happened to be song-writers as well?
i guess i’m just thinking out loud about it. what do you think matt? chicken or the egg? musician or disciple?
songs…
Have a nice trip!…