Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

I sing this hymn so often to Vera and Emma they think it is 'their' song. I can sing it on autopilot, in fact. Today, however, the words of the hymn blew over my heart in a fresh way and I remembered the beauty and power of the words. As I thought through the hymn I added a few thoughts of my own along with selected Bible verses. I hoped it might be appropriate to share as we meditate on Christ's death and resurrection during this Easter season.

Come Thou fount of every blessing

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of the heavenly lights who does not change like shifting shadows. If you haven’t received an expected blessing, then you can know with certainty it isn’t the good and perfect gift for you, or at least not yet.

Tune my heart to sing Thy grace

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever! If my heart is tuned to the abundant and undeserved blessing of God’s grace and mercy it cannot easily be tuned to selfish wants, sinful desires, fleshly concerns.

Streams of mercy never ceasing

And yet, when our hearts are not properly tuned to His grace we can still be sure of His tender mercies and forgiveness.

Call for songs of loudest praise

Once we realize, deeply realize the depth of our sin and depravity and the even greater depths of His love and mercy there is simply no other response than to sing the loudest praise! Amazingly, in so doing we find our hearts once again tuned to sing of His grace.

Teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above

The journey of faith we’re walking is God’s way of teaching us the melody and lyrics of praise that the angels sing to Him: Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty! Who was, and is, and is to come! As we face trials, when hardships are thrust upon us from without or within, God’s holiness becomes all the more evident. His lessons are amazing in their precision as He excises our hidden sins while helping us fan into a flame the gifts He’s given us.

Praise the mount I'm fixed upon it
Mount of Thy redeeming love

He has redeemed us! We were bought at a price; it cost Him His life.

Here I raise my Ebenezer
Hither by Thy help I come

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far has the LORD helped us." One of the greatest, most freeing things we can know about God is that He is helping us. We would not make it without Him. We try and we try and yet in the end it was always Him lovingly guiding us.

And I hope by Thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive at home

My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. We will make it home. It is not in God’s good pleasure to lose those He has saved.

Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wandering from the fold of God

Jesus came looking for us! He isn’t a cold, impersonal God in heaven wringing His hands over our big problems. He came down, He comes down, He will always come down to share in our sufferings.

He, to rescue me from danger
Interposed His precious blood

Knowing we had no way to save ourselves He gave his blood to be the atoning sacrificial lamb. John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!

From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. When our debts overwhelm us on earth, we have only unpleasant, hard consequences awaiting us. Yet as our sins are a whelming flood, His grace frees us and indebts us to Him even as He erased our debt on the cross.

Let Thy goodness like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee

Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness leads you toward repentance? We don’t come to God and stay with God out of fear, but love. How wonderful to count on His goodness, knowing that even when we have trials He is for us. He is for us.

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

Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. We are sealed in Christ. He put His mark on the seal; drove a nail through it, in fact.

Here's my heart Lord, take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above!

Amen.