Wander. 27 Day of Lent. Prone to wander?
At the top of the list of favorite classic hymns is “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” which was written in 1757 by 22-year-old Robert Robinson, a newly converted ragamuffin who had recently become a Methodist preacher wrote this hymn to express his joy in his new faith but within the words we sense his internal struggle to remain faithful.
Come, Thou Fount of every 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.
Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I’ll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood;
How His kindness yet pursues me
Mortal tongue can never tell,
Clothed in flesh, till death shall loose me
I cannot proclaim it well.
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.
As much as I love the hymn in its original version I have found it ironic to see how the lyrics have wandered from the Robinson original. In our church hymnal we sing an updated version that dropped ‘Here I raise mine Ebenezer.’ The following version was adapted by E. Margaret Clarkson in 1973:
Hitherto Thy love has blessed me
Thou has brought me to this place
And I know Thy hand will bring me
Safely home by Thy good grace
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Bought me with His precious blood.
Basically in our Biblically illiterate age Ms Clarkson thought no one knew what Ebenezer meant , most linking it to Dicken’s character Ebenezer Scrooge. Do you know what it means? Do you know what the difference is in a rock and a stone? If I see a rock in the woods on a hike, it’s called a ‘rock’ but if I take it from its natural place and put it in my garden, it’s called a ‘stone’. The rock itself hasn’t changed but what it’s being used for has, that’s why its name has changed to a stone. Below is an Ebenezer stone of help a friend gave to me.
This small stone sits on my desk but in 1 Samuel 7:12 tells us that the prophet took a large stone and placed it between the towns of Mizpah and Jeshanah. He named the stone Ebenezer, which means ‘the stone of help’ for he said, ‘up to this point the Lord has helped us.’ Many times in the Bible (the stories of Noah, Joshua, Jacob, and Samuel are just a few) a stone was used as a reminder of how God helped someone. An Ebenezer stone is anything that reminds us of how God has helped us in the past.
Opps.
See, I’m prone to wander.
Back to the point. The editorial Wandering from the original version of “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Some hymn editors had a more serious reason to edit the original words of Robinson based on a theological complaint with the song. In several hymnals “wandering” is replaced with “yielded,” and “prone to wander” with “let me know Thee in Thy fullness”.
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let that grace, now, like a fetter,
Bind my yielded heart to Thee.
Let me know Thee in Thy fullness;
Guide me by Thy mighty hand
Till, transformed, in Thine own image
In Thy presence I shall stand.
Those in the holiness movement disagreed with the lyrics that sing, “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” Mark Altrogge says, “Though I know believers are tempted to wander and tempted to be unfaithful to Christ at times, I don’t see that Scripture says we are still ‘prone’ to sin and wander.” Rather, “The Bible says believers are ‘prone’ to obey the God they love. Prone to follow Jesus.”
He cites Ezekiel 36:25-27 and these powerful words: I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
Ricky Alcantar defends the original lyrics as he looks to the context of that verse, showing that Robinson is pointing to a genuine tendency to wander. “Within our lives are these opposing desires to honor God and to honor self, to flee from sin and to flee to it. This is the simul justus et peccator of Martin Luther and the “wretched man that I am” of Romans 7. The fact that we are simultaneously righteous and sinful, sinful in our actions and yet righteous in our standing before God. In good conscience I can continue to sing that I am prone to wander.”
I think both sides have valid points, but I myself wish to sing with a voice poor in spirit as I lift begging hands up, ‘that God would bind my wandering heart to Him’. Within me is this constant competition, this brutal battle, between two “prones.”
I believe I am being renewed, being made like Christ, holy, and through God’s sanctifying power sin’s power is lessened as a greater preference toward holiness overwhelms the inclination to wander toward sin.
But also “I know that all God’s commands are spiritual, but I’m not. Isn’t this also your experience?” Yes. I’m full of myself—after all, I’ve spent a long time in sin’s prison. What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary. But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help!
I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?
The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different. Romans 7:15-25 MSG
There are many areas in my life where I was once prone to wander, but am now prone to obey. This is not my doing. I know that I could never have tried hard enough to have victory over sin’s power over me by self effort. This spiritual growth is not some act of the will that has hardened me against wandering. Rather, this is the work of the Holy Spirit, by grace through faith giving me a greater preference toward holiness which overwhelms the inclination to wander toward sin. I realize that the temptation to wander will never be gone in my life, but there is no doubt a greater power that binds my heart to His. Love. I am loved by a great God that I come to love more and more and so I wander less and less. God’s love is a powerful testimony to the transforming grace of God.
King David the psalmist also wrote of this struggle to wander in His great anthem to the Scriptures, saying, “With my whole heart I have sought You; oh, let me not wander from Your commandments!” (Psalm 119:10) A man after God’s own heart, David clearly prays that God would keep him from wandering.
And Jesus affirms this wholehearted cry for help from the wanderers among us who beg for his tender love to bind us to Him. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Live loved and wander less.
4jlkelly 