Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love”
Come, thou Fount of every blessing; [1]
tune my heart to sing thy grace; [2]
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise. [3]
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above; [4]
praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
mount of God’s unchanging love!
[1] “Come”, comma. Of course, God is omnipresent. He’s already present—Jesus’ gaze is fixed on us—but we need to fix our gaze on Jesus, be reminded not only of that frequently, but also that He is the fountain and source of every blessing we have.
[2] My heart is to align with His. Ask for His forgiveness, not have any distractions, obey Him, etc. And what will such a heart want to do? That’s connected to the next line.
[3] What’s one of the proper responses to such grace and mercy? To praise Him with “songs of loudest praise!”
[4] The flaming tongues are the angels, and the primary example of their “melodious sonnet” is their perfect God centered praise in Isaiah 6 of “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty.”
2 Here I raise my Ebenezer; [5]
hither by thy help I’m come; [6]
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home [7].
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed[8] his precious blood.
[5] Ebenezer = a stone that commemorates God’s help and victory. (1 Samuel)
[6] Restating that: “we’ve come thus far in life completely dependent on God’s grace.” And we should remember and celebrate that. Which is one of the overarching themes of this hymn
[7] “at home” = in Heaven
[8] Interposed = He inserted, intervened to mediate, atone. The imagery here is of a sheep wandering from the flock, and instead of being devoured by the roaring lion, Jesus sacrificed and inserted His own blood so that we could be saved and part of God’s flock.
3 O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be! [9]
Let that grace now, like a fetter[10],
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.[11]
[9] grace ought to constrain our fleshly desires. We truly are in debt to the Lord for having saved us, and our response is to live our life as a living sacrifice. Denying the things that we would want to do in our flesh, and doing the things that the Bible instructs us to because we are so grateful that he paid our debt.
[10] fetter = like a chain or shackle. God’s grace ought to keep us from wandering. But when we stumble and momentarily fall to our old nature, the next line brings comfort.
[11] The Lord has saved us in His power. Our confidence is not in our ability to persevere, but in the power of Christ to sustain us with His grace and by His power. What an amazing reminder, and confidence it should give us.
The writer of the song wrote it when he was young, and later in life experienced wandering from God. He was in a train car with a lady, who was reciting the words to this song, unbeknownst to her who he was. When she got to the line in the first verse of “streams of mercy, never ceasing”, he said (paraphrasing), “Oh, madam, how much I wish I could experience the unending stream of God’s mercy again” And she said, “sir, if you repent, you will”. And he did. Let that be an encouragement to anyone you know who has backslidden spiritually, that God is merciful, and His mercy can draw them back.