~Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing

       Turning to the young Robert Robinson, the bleary-eyed gipsy fortune-teller pointed a quivering finger and said, “And you, young man, you will live to see your children and your grandchildren.” 

       Robert Robinson suddenly paled and said, “You’re right.  She’s too drunk to know what she’s saying.  Leave her alone.  Let’s go.”

       But her words haunted him the rest of the day.  “If I’m going to live to see my children and grandchildren,” he thought, “I’ll have to change my way of living.” 

       That very night, half in fun and half seriously, he took his gang to an open air revival service nearby where the famous evangelist, George Whitfield, was preaching.  “We’ll go down and laugh at the poor deluded Methodist,” he explained

       Two years and seven months after hearing that sermon, twenty-year-old Robert Robinson made his peace with God, and “found full and free forgiveness through the precious blood of Jesus Christ.”

       Joining the Methodists, and feeling the call to preach, the self-taught Robinson was appointed by John Wesley to the Calvinist Methodist Chapel, Norfolk, England.  And there, for the celebration of Pentecost (Whitsunday), in 1858, three years after his marvelous conversion, he penned his spiritual autobiography in the words of this hymn.

—Ernest K. Emurian

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Come, Thou Fount[1]

1           Come, Thou Fount of ev’ry 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 Thy redeeming love.

2           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,

Wand’ring from the fold of God;

He, to rescue me from danger,

Interposed His precious blood.

3           O to grace how great a debtor

Daily I’m constrained to be!

Let that grace now, like a fetter,

Bind my wand’ring 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.