Come Thou Fount

“Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall.” ~2 Peter 1:10

The Englishman Robert Robinson was born in Swaffam, Norfolk in 1735. Robinson’s father died in 1743 when Robert was only eight years old. When still a boy, his mother sent him to London to undertake an apprenticeship as a barber, but sadly Robinson made friends with people who influenced him away from the Gospel and a godly way of living. Joining a gang of thugs, Robinson descended into a life of depravity.

In 1752 Robinson heard that a famous Calvinist preacher, George Whitefield, would be preaching in a nearby area of London, and he coaxed his cronies to join him in heckling the preacher and disturbing the meeting. They gladly acquiesced. Robinson and his gang descended upon the meeting with malice in mind. How disruptive Robinson was that day, I don’t know. But he himself did, at least, hear snatches of Whitefield’s sermon on Matthew 3:7, “But when [John the Baptizer] saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’” For the next three years, Robinson couldn’t eradicate from his mind Whitefield’s words, “Oh, my hearers! The wrath to come! The wrath to come!” Eventually he was converted in December 1755, before entering the Gospel ministry.

Robinson first began preaching in a Calvinistic Methodist chapel in Suffolk in 1758, before becoming a Baptist pastor in Cambridge from 1761 until the year of his death, 1790. In 1758 Robinson penned his famous hymn — number 457 in our hymnal, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”

In the third stanza Robinson wrote, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” Did Robinson wander away from the Lord? I hope not. However, later in his ministry he became close friends with Joseph Priestly, a founder of Unitarianism. (Unitarians deny the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and the necessity of the atonement.) Whether Robinson converted to Unitarianism is not certain, but he was accused of doing so, and Priestly performed his funeral service. There is also a story — though not verified — that on one occasion Robinson was riding on a coach when another passenger began humming Robinson’s hymn. Allegedly Robinson said to her, “Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then.”

We don’t know if Robinson did indeed wander from the Lord. Regardless, even the suggestion he did reminds us every time we sing his hymn to be diligent over our own souls. As Peter wrote, “Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall” (2 Peter 1:10).

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 unchanging love!

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.

O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be!
Let that grace now, 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.

Rev. Rob Dykes, Pastor of Preaching & Congregational Care