[Friday's Devotional] - Fount of every blessing

As a worship leader, I try to keep up with new songs, but I have a love for older songs too.  Recently one song on my mind has been the old hymn “Come thou fount of every blessing”. I find it such a beautiful confession and celebration of our own sinful tendencies eclipsed by God’s incredible unending grace. The song is written from one of those moments of clarity where the songwriter is aware of his sin, aware of the grace that is required to remove it, aware this will not be the last time he will have to be washed in the grace of God, and knowing he will always be welcomed back. The song is such a great expression of how deep the grace of God is, it recognises the unfailing love of the grace of God, Streams of mercy never ceasing and Mount of God’s unfailing love.

 

The grace of God has always awed me, grace has never been so undeserved, so precious, but equally never so bountiful.  That I can be washed daily in that which is most precious and beautiful just leaves me in awe. It also recognises the paradoxical encompassing way in which we are called to God’s grace by God grace. Beckoned in an act of grace to receive grace, Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God and Hither by thy help I come, that we come to receive grace because of grace in the first place demonstrates the otherness of God, the way he really loves like no other. On top of all this it recognises the debt we owe to the grace of God beautifully in the line O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be, yet ends the hymn even more perfectly recognising that even though we are so in debt to grace we are also still so reliant on grace. Relying on it to bind us to him and bring us back to him that his grace might bring us home.

 

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,
Here’s my heart Lord, take and seal it, Seal if for thy courts above.

 

God’s grace has been the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced, since the day it first found me, so much so that I named my daughter after it.  But sometimes, day-to-day life can get pretty consuming and I can forget the beauty of it, and this song helps my heart remember the grace that first found it and will one day, I hope by God’s good pleasure, safely bring it home.

 

Tim Holt