Yesterday we concluded our worship service at Webster Bible Church by singing the still-famous hymn Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing. As the music team rehearsed this song prior to the service, I heard them sing the first line of the second stanza:
Here I raise my Ebenezer,
Hither by Thy help I’ve come.
I thought of this wonderful reference to 1 Samuel 7, when God powerfully rescued Israel from their enemies. Samuel then set up a large stone and called it Ebenezer (“stone of help”), saying, “Till now the Lord has helped us” (1 Sam. 7:12). It’s a beautiful story, yet I realized that some in the church might not know of it. So I decided to introduce the hymn before we sang it.
In addition to sharing the biblical significance of the second stanza, I also shared a brief word about the hymn’s author, Robert Robinson. He wrote it shortly after his conversion, when he was in his early twenties, after hearing the Great Awakening evangelist George Whitefield preach the gospel. Robinson’s hymn was a prayer that the Holy Spirit flood our hearts with streams of mercy, enabling us to sing God’s praises and to remain faithful to him.
That’s all I shared at the time, because that’s all I knew about the hymn writer, except that he also became a Baptist minister.
After the church service, however, one of our members blessed me with a a book titled Then Sings My Soul: 150 of the World’s Greatest Hymn Stories. It included the history behind the song, Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.
But something I read at the end of that biography on Robinson troubled me. So I decided to do some more digging.
Robert Robinson (1735-1790) had a rough beginning. His father died when he was only five years old. As he grew older, he was too much for his mother to handle, so she sent him to London to learn barbering. Instead, he got good at drinking and gang-life.
After getting a fortune-teller drunk on cheap gin, Robert and his friends went to Whitefield’s Tabernacle “to mock the preacher and pity his hearers.” Instead, Robinson was haunted by Whitefield’s sermon on Matthew 3:7: “Brood of vipers Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Whitefield wept as he warned his hearers of the Final Judgment. The Holy Spirit continued his work in Robert’s heart for the next three years until finally, on December 10, 1755, he “found full and free forgiveness through the precious blood of Jesus Christ.” He would soon write in his famous hymn:
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed his precious blood.
Soon thereafter Robert thought about entering the ministry, and he started preaching hour-long sermons to himself. A couple of years later, at age 22, he returned home, got married to Ellen Payne, with whom he would have twelve children!
Robert set up an Independent Calvinistic church in town. Then he received adult baptism and eventually became a Baptist pastor. In January 1759, he moved to Stone-Yard Baptist Chapel, Cambridge (St Andrew's Street Baptist Church), where he remained the rest of his life. His congregation came to number about a thousand.
Prone to Wander?
In his biographical sketch of Robert Robinson, Robert Morgan wrote,
Robinson continued working for the Lord until 1790, when he was invited to Birmingham, England, to preach for Dr. Joseph Priestly, a noted Unitarian. There, on the morning of June 8, he was found dead at age 54, having passed away quietly during the night.
In his lengthier biographical article on Robert Robinson, Bruce Hindmarsh notes that Robinson
was a man open to other viewpoints and tolerant – perhaps to a fault. He was friendly with political and theological radicals, including Unitarians and others who denied Christ’s divinity (Socinians). There was a small Socinian group in his congregation in Cambridge, and he refused to take sides against them when division opened up over the question.
How far Robinson, in fact, wandered theologically by the end of his life is a question still debated. If he hadn’t gone to Birmingham and preached in Priestley’s church just days before his death, he might have been remembered differently. A year before he died, he reaffirmed what he had written earlier, … and in one of his last letters he affirmed he was neither a Socinian nor an Arian.
Six years after Robinson died, the Anglican evangelical John Newton wrote to Robinson’s biographer, saying that he hoped his own spiritual history would terminate where Robinson’s began.
Newton’s words about Robinson haunt me. May our lives never outlast our spiritual fervency and devotion to Jesus Christ.
In fairness to Robert Robinson, however, Bruce Hindmarsh adds:
We should also remember with some sympathy that Robinson was, late in life, a broken man. By 1790, the year he died, he was physically and mentally ill. His sermons became incomprehensible, and some described him as insane. He never recovered from the death of his 17-year-old daughter Julie in 1787. He faced a financial crisis that could have sent him to debtors’ prison. And many of his friends had turned against him.
Thinking of his suffering at this distance, the final verse of his great hymn takes on more poignancy. The verse isn’t sung much anymore, but we can perhaps imagine Robinson at the end singing its first quatrain, trusting, as we all must, in Christ’s “boundless grace” as the ultimate hope in the face of death:
On that day when freed from sinning
I shall see thy lovely face,
Clothèd then in blood-washed linen
How I’ll sing thy boundless grace.