Come Thou Fount

In 1758 the New Jersey legislature formed its first Indian reservation, George

Washington was admitted to the Virginia house of Burgess, and Haley’s comet

was first sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsh.

That’s all good and well, but now let’s talk about something else.

Also in 1758 a man named Robert Robinson wrote a hymn called “Come

Thou Fount”. A hymn we are all familiar with, and sing regularly in church. But

does one ever wonder what are behind the lyrics of this hymn? “Prone to

wonder, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” These lyrics strike me every

time I hear it, because it is the life and story behind the hymn that now “tune my

heart to sing His praise” whenever I hear it.

It was actually a while before 1758 that the story of this hymn began, when Robert was a young lad in London.

Robert was actually a rebellious, young teenager, his father had passed when Robert was young, and without

knowing how else to control him his mother sent him off to London to learn the skill of barbering.

Robert did not want to learn Barbering.

Instead, Robert learned the skills of excessive drinking, gambling, gang life, and soon found himself wandering

into a fortune tellers lair with a group of his buddies - all in a drunken stupor. It was that night in the fortune tellers

grasp that Robert began to sense a greater force in the world.

Spiritually shaken and disturbed, Robert then suggested their next visit be to a church. It just so happened that

same night one of the most famous religious figures of that time, George Whitefield, was preaching at a nearby

evangelistic event. It also just so happened Robert Robinson was in the same area. Whitefield’s message that night

was on Mathew 3:7, Jesus’ words to the Pharisees on “the wrath to come” left Robert, again, stirred and with a sense

that Whitefield was preaching directly to him that night.

Robert sobered up, was haunted by Whitefield’s words, left with his buddies...and three years passed.

Those years later Robert finally gave his life to Christ and began serving as a

pastor at the Calvinist Methodist Chapel in Norfolk England.

As much as it sounds like a happy ending for Robert, his story, like most of ours,

did not end there. Robert continually struggled on and off with his alcoholic tendencies,

and addictions to gambling. It was within those battles, in the year of 1758 that Robert

sat down to write a hymn for a sermon on Pentecost Sunday.

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

let thy grace, Lord, like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee”

The hymn was beloved by his community, and went on to become a favorite among the townsfolk.

Robert was still left struggling, and in a time he’d fallen away, and was on the road traveling by coach a woman

sitting near him in his coach began, ironically, preaching to him. I picture Robert now with a bored, possibly irritated,

yet slightly amused, look on his face as this complete stranger sat by him witnessing her heart out with little

knowledge that this man was a preacher himself. After a while of getting no where with Robert she pulled out a book,

“I want to read you something, and I’d like you to tell me your thoughts” the woman said flipping through her book.

She read him his own hymn...“Madam’” Robert began, “I am the poor fool who wrote that hymn, and I would

give anything to again be as happy as I was then.”

Robert returned to preaching, and was soon invited to preach in Birmingham,England for noted Unitarian Dr. Joseph

Priestly until 1790. He was fifty-four years old when he passed away quietly one night in his sleep.