One of my favorite hymns is “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”, by Robert Robinson. I feel like the lyrics express my own sentiments and, I would guess, can be identified with by many others. Here are the lyrics from the song sung by Freddie Ashby on the album Reflections of Christ (you can listen to it at http://www.reflectionsofchrist.org/multi_music.php):
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.Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I’m 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.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.
Seal it for Thy courts above.
I am doing a sprint triathlon tomorrow in St. George, and as I drove down to St. George today, I listened to this song. The part that really struck me today is in the last verse as it asks the Lord to bind our heart to Him, and then, we willingly giving our heart to Him. This reminded of the lesson I taught to the 17 and 18 year old youth in Sunday School last week. The humble followers of Christ were sanctified because they “yielded their hearts unto God” (Helaman 3:35).
Elder Neal A. Maxwell expounded upon this in General Conference in April 1985:
“It is only by yielding to God that we can begin to realize His will for us. And if we truly trust God, why not yield to His loving omniscience? After all, He knows us and our possibilities much better than do we.”
I think this is the challenge of our earthly life. We are here to become like our Heavenly Father. Our heart is truly the one thing we have that we can give to Him. He has a plan for each of us and we must learn to trust Him and yield our heart to Him. His will is infinitely more important than our will as “He knows us and our possibilities much better than do we.”
So, today I am grateful for hymns of praise that touch my heart and remind me to “yield my heart to Him” and then He will “seal it for [His] courts above.”