Come Thou Fount

It has always amazed me, that in a day and age where song writers struggle to write songs with applicable meaning, that many hymn writers of old already succeeded in this feat centuries before today's artists! Take the hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." I am amazed at the theological richness found within the hymn that is easy to overlook when singing it.

First Stanza:
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

The author, Robert Robinson, recognizes that it is God who must tune our hearts to sing of the grace of God in songs of loudest praise. The Lord must teach us this "melodious sonnet" of His redeeming love. Our salvation is not something we earn or achieve through our own merit. The hymn writer writes that God tunes and teaches us to sing of the love of His redemption for us.

Second Stanza:
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I'm 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.

Ebenezer is an Old Testament reference to "God who has helped us." Certainly the Lord has come to our rescue from sin bringing us home to fellowship with Him. Once again the author notes how Jesus sought us when we were strangers wandering from God. "Interposed" is a key word referencing the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross taking our sins as His own. There was nothing we could do that deserved this sacrifice. Left to our own devices, we had wandered away! Christ did not only die for us, He also came sought to rescue us. What an amazing Savior we have!

Stanza Three:
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let that grace now 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

I think that might be my favorite stanza. When we think of the concept of being a "debtor" to something, a negative connotation immediately comes to mind. We do not want to be in debt. Sin is a debt. It is a debt that continues to grow larger and larger to the point where we would never be able to pay it off. Imagine a debt like that in your personal life. A debt that grows by the millions per year while you only made a tiny fraction of that amount. Even if you paid some of it off, the debt would only grow larger. But Christ is our sacrifice. He paid that debt for you and me. And now we are debtors but no longer to sin, but to His grace. And as we live day by day in the process of sanctification, our debt to grace increases and increases. But this is not a bad thing as the author notes for he wishes to be "constrained" with a fetter to the Lord.
The author recognizes the tendency in man to wander. But through the grace of God we can constrained and bound to Jesus Christ forever. What a wonderful promise that our Father gives to us.

Truly this treasured hymn of the church has much to teach us when we stop for a moment to meditate on its words.