Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

My LCMS Lutheran Church is now using the new hymnal, The Lutheran Service Book. This morning we sang this great hymn, "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing", which is one we sang often in the Baptist Church when I was growing up. I don't think this hymn was included in our former Lutheran hymnals.

The words were written by Robert Robinson in 1758. The book Amazing Grace: 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions by Kenneth W. Osbeck includes this story about Mr. Robinson's conversion: "During his early teen years, Robert Robinson lived in London, where he mixed with a notorious gang of hoodlums and led a life of debauchery. At the age of 17 he attended a meeting where the noted evangelist George Whitefield was preaching. Robinson went for the purpose of 'scoffing at those poor, deluded Methodists' and ended up professing faith in Christ as his Savior." The latter half of verse two probably refers to this radical conversion.

That second verse starts with, "Here I raise my Ebenezer"------when I was young I wondered what in the world an "Ebenezer" was! Finally, after all these years, I've just now looked it up in the dictionary: "1.(in the Bible) the name given by the prophet Samuel to the stone he erected in recognition of God's help in defeating the Philistines, I Samuel 7:12. In Hebrew, "Ebenezer" literally means 'stone of help'."


The tune is by John Wyeth, 1813, from his Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, Part II.

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Verse 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.

Teach me some melodious sonnet,

Sung by flaming tongues above;

Praise the mount---I'm fixed upon it,

Mount of Thy redeeming love.

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Verse 2:

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.

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Verse 3:

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.

AMEN

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Cyberhymnal link: www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/c/o/comethou.htm