Advent Music 1: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing!

Featured Hymn
Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Hymn #400
Words by Robert Robinson
Music from Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second
Tune Name: NETTLETON

Christmas is coming! Advent is here! It is the blesses season of the year when we focus our attention on the coming celebration of Christ’s birth–Christmas. The lectionary passages this week begin the Advent cycle, giving assurance of peace, but still urging us to pray for peace; telling us that we don’t know God’s time line, but still assuring us that God is with us now.

This week’s featured hymn was written by Robert Robinson (1735-1790). It even sounds like an old fashioned hymn, with the word font VS the modern fountain, it is only the first of many an archaic word! The meaning, however, is rich and full of genuine praise. Saved at age 17 and influenced by both John Wesley and George Whitefield, Robinson himself grew up to enter the ministry, first as a Methodist, and later in the Baptist church. Through an anecdote recorded by James Archer Spurgeon, the grandfather of C.H. Spurgeon, we learn that Robinson ministered in the church attended by Isaac Watts. Here is Spurgeon’s story:

“When I joined the Baptist Church at Cambridge, one of the most respectable churches that can be found in the world, one of the most generous, one of the most intelligent—this was a great many years ago, when I was young—nobody spoke to me. On the Lord’s Day I sat at the Communion table in a certain pew. There was one gentleman in it, and when the service was over, I said to him, “I hope you are quite well, sir?” He said, “You have the advantage of me.” I answered, “I don’t think I have, for you and I are brothers.” “I don’t quite know what you mean,” said he. “Well,” I replied, “when I took the bread and wine just now, in token of our being one in Christ, I meant it. Did not you?” We were by that time in the street; he put both his hands on my shoulders—I was about sixteen years old then—and he said, “Oh, sweet simplicity!” Then he added, “You are quite right, my dear brother, you are quite right. Come in to tea with me. I am afraid I should not have spoken to you if you had not first addressed me.” I went to tea with him that evening; and when I left, he asked me to go again the next Lord’s Day, so I went, and that Sabbath Day he said to me, “You will come here every Sunday evening, won’t you?” So old Mr. Watts and young Mr. Spurgeon became fast friends.”

How exciting it must have been to minister and worship and serve in the midst of these “giants of the faith!” And yet the story is told that in his later years, a woman asked Robinson whether he liked the hymn that she was humming–Come, Thou Fount. He is quoted as having responded with tearful eyes, “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.”

Hear the joyful words that brought a tune to the woman’s lips and tears to Robinson’s eyes.

The Lord is coming! The Lord has come! Peace be with you as you enter this Advent season.

Bill, Church Musician, November, 2013