...tenderly bound

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, Lord, take and seal it; seal it for Thy courts above.

---Robert Robinson, 1758

It might be easy to see this verse as a guilt trip. What kind of lousy follower am I? Prone to wander, in debt to grace, I need a fetter --- a chain --- to bind me to God. Ouch. Then I remember that in this hymn, as in so much of life, it’s not about me. This hymn explores not human nature, frail and failing though it be. This text is all about the nature of God, a God who loves us enough to pursue us, to bind us to Godself with chains --- chains made not of might or threat, or violence, but of goodness. And in my inmost heart, I long to be held close to the heart of God, with fetters that tender. I am a debtor. For God’s unfailing mercy, I owe a debt I will never repay. Through God’s grace, freely given, I owe nothing.

Because of the weightlessness of my bonds, I will serve always out of love and gratitude. I’m bound like that.

...set free from fear and failure

Come, Thou long expected Jesus, born to set Thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us; let us find our rest in Thee.
Israel's strength and consolation, hope of all the earth Thou art;
dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart.
---Charles Wesley, 1744

Fear and failure. Fear and failure. Are there any two more potent negatively-charged concepts in modern language? Can anything paralyze us more, sap our energy, drain our creative potential, cause us to second-guess ourselves and doubt the motives of those around us, than fear and failure? When we are trapped behind masks of fear, limiting our life choices and building walls to divide ourselves from the 'other'; when our past failures echo in our ears and memories so loudly they drown out the call to venture again; here we are trapped, and here there is no rest.

Our word for sin is from the Greek 'hamartia', an archer's term for 'missing the mark' --- failure. This Jesus, then, born Israel's strength and hope of all the world, comes somehow with the power to set us free from the strongest chains --- the ones we forge ourselves from our own fears and failures. Our pasts are the only prisons we've ever needed, and we are expert jailers; we excel at imprisoning ourselves and others behind thick walls made of our own fears and the failures of the past, both personal and corporate.

Christ comes to leave not one stone on stone. Are you ready to be free? Are you ready for others to be free? Fear and failure have no power over us in the path of the coming Christ!