Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it

Here are the choirs and orchestra of Brigham Young University in a beautiful and inspiring performance of an old hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”.

The words were written by Robert Robinson in 1759 and set to an American folk tune called NETTLETON by John Wyeth in his Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second in 1813.

I learned the song as a child and especially liked this verse:

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, 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.

And here is a verse rarely sung nowadays or even found in print:

O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.

If you are the sort of person who really enjoys arguing about the relative merits of Calvinism or Arminianism, or criticizing some particular group of people for their obviously defective theology or bizarre practices, please go do it on someone else’s blog -- I recommend Scot McKnight’s or Michael Spencer’s. Or perhaps you could find a quiet spot in a library somewhere and write a 3,000-word research paper on, say, The History And Meaning Of The Phrase “Here I raise my Ebenezer” And Its Ramifications For Postmodern Society In America In The Twenty-first Century. As for the rest of us, we prefer to listen to this impressive choir and orchestra praise God with their voices and musical instruments so excellently while we ponder our eternal destiny.