Bind My Heart To Thee (jon bloom) In my observation and experience, the most loved verse from Robert Robinson’s hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is this one: O to grace how great a debtorDaily 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. Why do Christians love this verse? Because it beautifully helps us pray the groaning we experience as we live the paradox of the Christian life that Paul described in Romans 7: I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. (verses 21–23) Robinson captures in verse the strange experience of the Godward heart. It longs for God and experiences “dim mirror” delights in him while at the same time living as a captive in a bodily prison of godless wanderlust (1 Corinthians 13:12). We find it reassuring and encouraging to express this struggle in a prayer-song with our fellow wander-prone Godward friends. In the fight against wandering, the Godward heart needs constant encouragement. The Bible tells us to “exhort one another every day” so that sin doesn’t harden our hearts (Hebrews 3:13). Let me recommend one very helpful new source of heart-exhortation: A Godward Heart: Treasuring the God Who Loves You by John Piper. It’s a collection of fifty brief (2–3 pages) devotional meditations on a broad range of topics, but all of which are designed to help you pursue loving God — the God who loved you first (1 John 4:19) — with all of your heart. As Christians, we are all part of the Resistance. We resist the devil and his schemes (James 4:7), we resist the temptations we see (1 John 2:16) and, the most difficult of all, we resist the deceitful part of our heart that is so prone to wander from God (Jeremiah 17:9). Our prayer is that this book would be used by God as a means of grace to help bind your wandering heart to him
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 09:04:35 +0000
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