Posted on by PaulHartC

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

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 God’s redeeming love.

Verse 3

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:
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.

There is much that is similar in the texts for this piece and “O God Beyond All Praising” which I looked at last week. I think that is appropriate as both songs were chosen for our wedding to bring focus on God and our reliance on Him, something we wanted to be a part of our marriage from day one.

But there is a theme in Come Thou Fount that I wanted to look at this week: our tendency to wander. The song up to this line in the third verse is filled with a great message: we need God to be able to experience and rightly praise God. The song is one of reliance on Him because He is the only one equipped to do the things He asks. So, after all of this confession and praise, pointing out God as the source of their faithfulness, the hymn sets up the reason for that need and later presents a solution.

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love;”

It strikes all of us from time to time, this urge to wander. It may come physically wandering, avoiding the places we ought to be and frequenting those we should be avoiding. It may come in the utilization of our gifts, exercising them with pride instead of humility. Or, as is most likely in my instance, it comes as our thoughts wander, leaving the things of God and settling in the depths of the lost. I think we tend to do this because it feels safer, not satisfying, and immediately pays off. But no matter why, it is wandering, and the more we do it, the farther we stray.

“Here’s my heart, o take and seal it; seal it for thy courts above.”

The lyrics give us the first component of the solution to this dilemma: realizing we aren’t in control and surrendering to the one who is. What the song speaks to, but never explicitly states is God’s response and promise which follows such a request. God doesn’t just let us wander alone after that. Sure, we may still veer off the path time to time, but the promise is that we don’t have to try and find God again; He never leaves us. He has sealed our hearts, never to wander off as we do. His love is perfect and eternal, which is why He helps us fulfill His commands, and never leaves our side in the process.

SDG,

-Paul Hart Cochran

Posted on by PaulHartC

O God Beyond All Praising

Verse 1:
O God beyond all praising, we worship you today
and sing the love amazing that songs cannot repay;
for we can only wonder at every gift you send,
at blessings without number and mercies without end.
We lift our hearts before you and wait upon your Word,
we honor and adore you, our great and mighty Lord.

I struggled to decide on how to categorize this piece. When my wife played the music for me, saying she wanted to walk down the aisle at our wedding to it, I knew it was a hymn, though I couldn’t have told you the words. Digging through my hymnal collection at the time yielded no results. This was because only one hymnal I have seen in recent memory even has this hymn included. Thus, it is a forgotten gem to those of us who once have heard it and a hidden treasure to those who need its magnificence in their life.

I say magnificence completely without sarcasm. First, this melody is nothing short of incredible. If you’ve not heard it, especially the transcription for organ, I recommend you stop reading this and go find it. It will be worth your time, to say the very least.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, are the words paired with this tremendous score, written by Michael Perry. The verse printed above shows the magnificence I spoke of. The words paint a picture of God being fully and completely out of our grasp. He is beyond our praising. We can only sit in wonder. And though we try to sing, those songs are wholly inadequate.

Now it is tempting here to write about God’s mercy and how His ultimate transcendence is of no consequence, but I feel that to be a cop-out. For all we know about God’s making a path for us to return to Him, we must never forget that He is still God. He is so far beyond us, limitless in all He can give, and speaking words which offer supreme authority. We will never be Him; we could never take His place. He offers us relationship because He loves us, not because we deserve it or, in many ways, can even handle it.

And this staggering transcendence, this overwhelming awe we ought to experience every time we think on Him, is exactly the reason why we can trust and wait on His perfect, holy ways.

SDG,

-Paul Hart Cochran