One night a few years back I was lying in bed unable to sleep. Since I’m so incredibly pious and I only ever think about holy things when I can’t sleep, I found myself rehearsing the words to the old hymn “Come Thou Fount”. Suddenly, even though I’ve been singing this song since I was a little kid in church, I paid attention to the meaning of the words, maybe for the first time.  

I am a songwriter, and I had never noticed that this is a song about songwriting! Robinson wants to sing about the forgiveness and relief he’s experienced since meeting Jesus and this song is his prayer. Let’s walk through the lyrics together. He begins by saying…

     Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace.

It starts with a simple direct address. Scripture talks about the Father as the “giver of all good gifts”. Then he prays that God ‘tune his heart’ so that he can sing about the grace he’s experienced.  

Already, he’s using musical terms. The human heart must be tuned like any instrument, since presumably it’s out of tune and will produce clashing dissonance, unless adjusted to the tonal standard of God’s reality. Scripture says the heart is deceitful above all else – it’s like a guitar whose tuning will shift if left out in the weather of this world. You might play an ‘A’ note, and an out of tune instrument will not rightly represent a real ‘A’ note, unless tuned first . So, the songwriter prays to be taught the truth about reality in order to represent what’s actually real in his song.

He goes on…

     Streams of mercy never ceasing call for songs of loudest praise!  

I love this line! Here he gives the reason why he wants to write a song in the first place; because, come on, streams of mercy that never cease? You’ve got to be kidding me; somebody oughta be singing about this! Why not me? But he doesn’t feel capable. So, he writes a song asking God to help someone who doesn’t feel like a songwriter to write a song.   

Our songwriter seems to have had a profound experience of mercy, and he wants to express his love – this is worth singing about! Maybe he was like the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with perfume and dried them with her hair in the presence of Simon the Pharisee. Have you ever read this scene in Luke 7? Simon is disgusted with Jesus’s interaction with the famously sinful woman, and Jesus asks who loves more – the one forgiven a lot or the one forgiven a little? Simon states the obvious. This woman loved much because she was so aware of the depth mercy it would take to able to reach and rescue her.

Also, this is part of the point of Josef Pieper’s little book that I’ve mentioned before on this podcast, “Only the Lover Sings”. The lover is the one who is willing to risk the naked vulnerability of facing God, and is rewarded with the ceaseless streams of mercy she finds there in Jesus’s eyes. That is why the lover sings. Like the hymn says: this calls for songs!

Next, he writes…

     Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above.

     Praise the Mount! I’m fixed upon it – mount of thy redeeming love!

He prays to be tutored in songwriting by the same Master Musician who taught the angels to sing. Then he praises “The Mount”. Which mount? The ‘mount of thy redeeming grace’. I think the the mount of redeeming grace might be Calvary. So, though the crucifixion is not explicitly mentioned, the cross of Jesus is all over this song.

Verse two begins with what might be an obscure word – “Ebenezer”. It’s a fun word from the Bible narrative. There are a few places where someone stacks stones to build a monument to remember some way that God has helped them. The Prophet Samuel raised one in Sam. 1:7, for instance,  and the Israelites build one upon finally crossing the Jordan river into the promised land. Ebenezer is a Hebrew compound word that literally means ‘stone of help’. So we get…

     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.  

Robinson is setting up a song-within-a-song. The Ebenezer Robinson is raising isn’t a stack of literal stones; it’s a stack of words and melody. The Ebenezer he builds as a memorial to God’s helping him is the very song you are singing. It’s a singable monument to God’s work in his life. Here it is, and you can stack the stones with him just by singing it.

The last verse goes like this…

     Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be;

     Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee!

Like the woman who washed Jesus’s feet, Robinson says that the grace he’s been shown constrains him, binds him like fetter (which is a shackle or chain). The love of Jesus has taught Robinson that real freedom looks like being shackled to goodness. The song becomes a paradigm for shaping an overall posture of gratitude in us. It’s the same posture Paul commands at the beginning of Romans 12 when he says “In view of God’s mercy.” Paul and Robinson suggest that now, since we’ve seen how good God really is, the most sensible thing is to be forever bound to sing back, in love, to the one who has sung a song of lovingkindness over us.

Robinson closes, saying…

     Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love.

     Here’s my heart, oh, take and seal it, Seal it for Thy courts above.

I appreciate the songwriter’s vulnerability and honesty here. He’s got no illusions about what he’s capable of. He’s totally in touch with his inability to be faithful and he’s realistic about his desires, which are confused at best, and willfully evil at worst.  

Like the bleeding woman who reaches out in the middle of a crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’s robe, Robinson offers his heart to Jesus, trusting that the Lord’s goodness will be more than enough to seal the deal. Jesus is so alive and so holy that if you touch him he’s not contaminated, rather, we are inoculated.

By the way, I can’t help but mention how inoculate is a surprisingly beautiful word. It means to transplant an ‘oculus’ or a ‘bud’ from one plant to another. The bud can be called the ‘eye’ of a plant, and comes from the Proto-Indo-European root that means, ‘to see’. If contact with Jesus inoculates us, then, his life of seeing God truly is transplanted into us, which grows in us a new way of seeing everything. That transplanted bud opens into the healing of the eyes of the soul. In view of God’s mercy, blooming in its final flowering to the full healing of our sickness of sin and death: resurrection. When that happens we will be able, like Lewis remarks, “to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” For all beauty is an invitation to be united to God, who is the Beautiful One. And a thing is beautiful to the extent that it makes the God available.

“Come Thou Fount” is a monument to the experience of having been loved by God, and singing it, like participation in all great art, transforms by contact, like touching the hem of the Lord’s robe. It changes our whole way of seeing, as Christ’s ‘oculus’ takes root inside of us. Streams of endless mercy well up to new and eternal life with the God who has loved us so well… that calls for songs!