A hymn and its story
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
Words by Robert Robinson, 1758 · written at about twenty-two
A young man who knew his own wandering heart wrote 'prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,' and asked God to bind that heart to himself.
The story behind it
Robert Robinson grew up rough in eighteenth-century England, fell in with a hard crowd, and by his own account was heading nowhere good until, as a young man, the preaching of George Whitefield turned him toward Christ. He wrote this hymn around 1758, when he was only about twenty-two, still close enough to his old life to know exactly how easily a heart drifts.
That is why the hymn's most quoted lines are not triumphant but tender and self-aware: 'Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.' The middle verse raises an Ebenezer, a 'stone of help,' borrowing the moment in 1 Samuel where the prophet set up a stone and said, 'Hitherto hath the LORD helped us.' Robinson's own later life had its wanderings, which makes his prayer all the more honest: he knew he needed his heart sealed to God.
The words
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.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.
The Scripture behind it
Why it still moves us
Most of us can sing the first verse easily. It is the last that undoes us: the confession that we are 'prone to wander,' that we drift from the very God we love. The hymn does not respond to that danger with willpower but with a prayer, 'take my heart and seal it,' asking God to hold what we cannot hold ourselves. It is the honest cry of anyone who has meant it before and drifted since, and it is exactly the kind of prayer God delights to answer.
Sing it, and mean it
A hymn is a prayer you can carry in your chest. The people who wrote these did not write from a stage; they wrote from shipwreck and sickbeds, from ordinary faithful mornings, and handed us words for the days we cannot find our own. You do not have to sing well. You only have to lift it, and mean it, to the One it is about.
Meet the One these hymns are aboutWorship in The Living BreadReturn to God todayRead 1 Samuel 7Jesus Christ is Lord.
Frequently asked questions
- Who wrote Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing?
- Robert Robinson, an English convert, wrote it around 1758 when he was about twenty-two, not long after turning to Christ under the preaching of George Whitefield.
- What does 'here I raise my Ebenezer' mean?
- An Ebenezer is a 'stone of help.' In 1 Samuel 7:12 the prophet Samuel set up a stone saying, 'Hitherto hath the LORD helped us.' The line means: I mark this moment to remember how far God has brought me.
- What does 'prone to wander' mean?
- It is an honest confession that the human heart drifts away from God even when it loves him. The hymn responds not with self-effort but with a prayer for God to seal the wandering heart to himself.