Prone to Wander
Lord, I feel it. I appreciate an old baptist hymn. The words are always so deep. I would stand at my grandmother’s church on Sundays and wait for instruction to grab either the red or the blue hymnal because any true baptist church has more than one. “Victory in Jesus” ranked high up. I ran cross country in high school and every single race that I ran was done so with “Victory in Jesus” on repeat in my head. However, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” always hit home. The author of this hymn (Robert Robinson) truly writes the gospel in the song. “Jesus sought me when a stranger” and “interposed his precious blood.” Then “to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be.” He tells the story of the gospel that Jesus rescued us, and nothing by our own doing as we were strangers and there is nothing that we can do to repay him as we will be daily debtors to his grace. I should note that Robert Robinson wrote this hymn in the 18th century at the age of 22. I just don’t hear a lot of 22 year olds talking like that do you? I was going back and forth on majors at the age of 22.
It is really the lyrics that he writes near the end of the song that have always spoken to me. “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Take my heart oh take and seal it. Seal it for thy courts above.” Truer words have never been spoken. Each of us on this earth is prone to wander from our creator. We see it with Adam and Eve from the very beginning. We want to know what we are potentially missing out on or truthfully, if we could do things better.
The writer of this hymn, Robert Robinson, was sent away by his mother to be a barber apprentice (ever heard of such?) and he apparently went a little wild when he went away from home and then found himself completely convicted by the preachings of George Whitefield. This chain of events led him to write the well known lyrics “prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love."
The number one step in knowing Jesus is knowing what we are not and we are not Jesus. We humans are not able to stick to Jesus 100%. We depend heavily on him taking our hearts and sealing them. Just in my day to day life, my thoughts wander from Jesus focused and my actions soon follow whether it be through a poor reaction to an unseen circumstance, prideful motives or a moment of human fatigue and weakness. We mine as well start our day everyday saying “Jesus, take my heart oh take and seal it.” We desperately need his daily strength, grace and guidance. He is a constant and present help when we feel all the tugs of the world to have us wandering straight into the wilderness (and wander we will without his seal). His seal protects us and redirects us as we fight to keep our eyes on him.
I get very bad motion sickness and to keep it from happening, I have to focus on a fixed and unmoving point. If I take my eyes off the unmoving thing then things quickly start spinning. It is no different with Jesus. Keep your eyes on him to keep your world from spinning out of control. He is unchanging. He is fixed and his seal is fixed on you. What a “fount of blessing” that is.