Redeeming Love Has Been My Theme: Reflections on There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood

He attempted suicide three times. He believed God had predestined him to damnation. And he wrote one of the most powerful hymns of the atonement the church has ever sung.William Cowper was not a triumphant man. He was a tormented one - a gifted poet and chronic sufferer who clung to the blood of Christ the way a drowning man clings to the only rope within reach. When he wrote "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood" in the quiet of Olney, under the pastoral care of John Newton, he was not writing from the mountaintop. He was writing from the pit, with a clarity about grace that suffering alone can produce.Redeeming Love Has Been My Theme is the eleventh volume in the Songs of the Redeemed series. Moving phrase by phrase through Cowper's hymn, Elias Hartwell traces the full arc of its theology - from the fountain opened in Zechariah's prophecy to the blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, from the dying thief's desperate rejoicing to the personal confession that redeeming love has been, and shall be till death, the one irreducible theme. Here is justification in its boldest imagery. Here is substitution without apology. Here is the blood that never loses its power until the last ransomed soul is saved to sin no more.For the soul in the pit who needs a rope, not a sentiment. For the believer who has doubted whether the fountain is sufficient for what they are. For everyone who has ever sung this hymn and felt, beneath its familiar words, the full weight of what it is claiming -The blood is enough.

Pagina's: 76, Paperback, Independently published