Come, Let Us Use the Grace Divine: Meaning, History, and Theology
"Come, let us use the grace divine"
- Written
- 1762
- Category
- Hymn
- Status
- Verified
- Rights
- Public domain
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Story
Come, Let Us Use the Grace Divine is Charles Wesley’s 1762 hymn on Jeremiah 50:5, calling believers to covenant with Christ through grace. Long associated with Methodist Covenant Renewal, it is often sung today to the traditional English tune KINGSFOLD as adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Overview
Come, Let Us Use the Grace Divine is Charles Wesley’s compact hymn of covenant commitment: a congregation receives grace, joins itself to Christ, makes a solemn promise of faithfulness, and asks God to ratify that promise by divine presence and saving grace. The hymn is not primarily about human resolve. Its opening appeal to “grace divine” and its reliance on Jesus’ power place covenant obedience within the prior action of God.
The text moves from corporate dedication to prayer. The singers promise to live and die for God, refuse to forsake him, and ask the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to receive their covenant. The final petition brings Christ’s covenant blood into view, linking perseverance with forgiveness and divine keeping rather than with self-sufficiency.
For worship leaders, the hymn is especially apt for Covenant Renewal, New Year, reaffirmation of faith, membership or discipleship services, and other occasions of corporate dedication. Its enduring Methodist use also makes it a useful teaching text for explaining how Wesleyan spirituality joins grace, accountable community, sacramental worship, and practical holiness.
Historical Background
Charles Wesley first published this text in 1762 as hymn 1242 in volume 2 of Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures. The printed heading gives Jeremiah 50:5: “Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord, in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten.” Wesley wrote three eight-line stanzas in double common meter, and the hymn’s opening almost immediately turns the prophetic summons into a Christian covenant with Christ.
The hymn is now strongly identified with the Methodist Covenant Service, but that association should not be confused with its original purpose. John Wesley had already held the first fully developed Methodist covenant gathering in London on August 11, 1755, seven years before the hymn appeared. Methodist historical research notes that Charles Wesley prepared no special collection specifically for Covenant Services. The 1762 hymn nevertheless became an early favorite for those occasions and came to be known popularly as the Covenant Hymn. United Methodist scholarship likewise cautions that there is no direct evidence that Charles Wesley originally wrote it for the Covenant Renewal Service.
The service itself drew on earlier Puritan covenant practice, especially material associated with Richard Alleine, but John Wesley shaped it into a corporate renewal of personal discipleship. In London, Covenant Services gradually became associated with the New Year: a New Year’s Day pattern emerged in 1762, and by the 1780s the service was normally held on the first Sunday of the year. Prayer and the Lord’s Supper were integral to the mature Methodist practice, giving the language of covenant, grace, and Christ’s blood a concrete liturgical setting.
John Wesley included the hymn in A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780) in the section “For the Society, Praying.” For that collection the original three double-common-meter stanzas were divided into six common-meter stanzas. Accounts of the 1778 Irish Conference show the hymn already functioning powerfully in a Covenant Service, especially its concluding petition that God apply the covenant blood, remove sin, and keep the faithful to the last day.
Modern hymnals often restore the three-stanza double-common-meter form. The United Methodist Hymnal (1989), for example, prints the text as hymn 606 with KINGSFOLD, a traditional English melody adapted as a hymn tune by Ralph Vaughan Williams. That musical pairing is much later than Wesley’s text and should not be treated as the hymn’s original tune.
Biblical Foundations
Jeremiah 50:5 is the hymn’s documented scriptural basis, not merely a later thematic association. Wesley printed the verse above the hymn in 1762, and the opening stanza closely follows its invitation to join the Lord in an enduring covenant. The biblical setting is Israel and Judah returning to seek Yahweh; Wesley applies that covenant language to a Christian congregation joining itself to Christ.
Romans 14:8 illuminates the first stanza’s promise to live and die for God: Christian existence, whether in life or death, belongs to the Lord. Joshua 24:16 provides a close biblical parallel to the second stanza’s refusal to forsake God. These passages make the hymn’s covenant language communal and concrete: allegiance to God is confessed together and expressed in sustained obedience.
Hebrews 13:20–21 gives especially strong theological context for the closing petition. It speaks of the blood of an eternal covenant and asks God to equip believers to do his will. That combination of covenant blood and divine enabling helps explain Wesley’s characteristic balance: the singers truly promise obedience, yet they ask God to supply the grace by which the covenant can be faithfully kept.
Verse Explanation
The first stanza begins with grace and moves immediately to covenant. The congregation joins itself to Christ “with one accord,” gives itself to him through Jesus’ power, and makes a comprehensive promise to live and die for God. The stanza therefore establishes both the corporate character of the hymn and its insistence that commitment is enabled by grace.
The second stanza turns the covenant into a vow that must be remembered. The singers renounce forsaking God and abandoning reverence, then address God directly. Their promise does not stand alone: they ask God to come down and meet them, making divine presence the needed answer to human commitment.
The third stanza becomes a Trinitarian prayer. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are asked to receive the worshipers and give a peaceful answer in the presence of the heavenly host. The closing lines ask for the covenant blood to remove sin, for the singers’ names to be registered in heaven, and for God to preserve them until the final day. The hymn thus ends not in confidence in the vow itself but in confidence sought from God’s saving and keeping grace.
Theological Reflection
The hymn begins with divine enabling grace rather than with bare willpower. The congregation is called to “use the grace divine,” and its self-offering is made through Jesus’ power. In Wesleyan terms, grace does not make human response unnecessary; it makes faithful response possible. The covenant therefore becomes a grace-enabled act of discipleship rather than a bargain by which worshipers earn acceptance from God.
Its covenant theology is also unmistakably corporate. The repeated first-person plural turns Christian commitment into a shared act in which believers strengthen one another by confessing the same allegiance. The promise is serious—life and death are placed under Christ’s lordship—but the hymn immediately converts promise into prayer, asking God to hear, receive, and meet the covenanting people.
The third stanza is explicitly Trinitarian. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are invoked together, while the appeal to covenant blood centers salvation on Christ’s atoning work. The request that the blood “takes our sins away” prevents covenant renewal from becoming mere moral resolution: forgiveness and acceptance remain gifts grounded in Christ.
Finally, the hymn joins present commitment with perseverance and Christian hope. The singers ask not only to be received now but to have their names registered on high and to be kept “to that day.” Covenant faithfulness is thus presented as a life sustained by grace from present dedication to final salvation.
Church Impact
The hymn became one of the characteristic songs of Methodist covenant practice. Its liturgical importance grew after publication rather than being established by an original dedication to the service. By the late eighteenth century it was being used in Covenant gatherings, and John Wesley’s 1780 hymnal placed it among hymns “For the Society, Praying,” helping secure its place in Methodist corporate devotion.
Its transmission also shows how Methodist hymnody moved across changing forms. John Wesley’s six-stanza common-meter division became influential in British and American Methodist collections, while later hymnals often returned to Charles Wesley’s original three double-common-meter stanzas. The text has consequently remained adaptable to different musical settings while retaining a recognizable covenant identity.
In contemporary United Methodist worship the hymn is especially associated with Covenant Renewal and New Year observance, but its usefulness is broader. Its combination of grace, corporate self-offering, Trinitarian prayer, atonement, and perseverance makes it suitable for reaffirmation, dedication, discipleship, and services that call a congregation to renewed faithfulness together.
Musical Notes
A prominent modern setting of the hymn is KINGSFOLD, the tune printed with it in The United Methodist Hymnal (1989). KINGSFOLD is a traditional English melody, not an original composition by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Related forms circulated in England and Ireland and were published before Vaughan Williams’s hymnal work; he collected a version near Kingsfold, Sussex, in 1904 and used the place-name for his hymn-tune adaptation.
Vaughan Williams introduced KINGSFOLD into The English Hymnal (1906), where he paired it with Horatius Bonar’s “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say.” The tune is in double common meter, matching Wesley’s original three eight-line stanzas. Its modal character, broad phrases, and repeated melodic architecture give the long stanzas enough momentum without making the covenant text sound hurried.
Because the tune and text were joined long after 1762, musicians should distinguish Wesley’s authorship from Vaughan Williams’s role as collector-adapter and hymnal editor. The pairing works especially well when all eight lines of each original stanza are sung as a continuous unit, preserving the movement from statement to prayer within each stanza.
Application
- Use the hymn when a congregation is renewing baptismal, membership, discipleship, or New Year commitments, and explain that the promise rests on God’s enabling grace.
- Invite worshipers to identify specific practices through which a shared covenant can become concrete: prayer, Scripture, worship, service, accountability, generosity, and reconciliation.
- Pair the hymn with Jeremiah 50:5 and Romans 14:8 so that its language of covenant and living or dying for God is heard in its biblical setting.
- When teaching the final stanza, connect covenant commitment with Christ’s atoning grace and with the prayer that God will keep believers faithful.
- Use the hymn corporately rather than only as an individual devotional text; its repeated “we” and “us” make mutual commitment part of its spiritual logic.
Discussion Questions
- Why does Wesley begin a hymn of solemn commitment by speaking first about “grace divine”?
- How does Jeremiah 50:5 change the way you hear the hymn’s language of a “perpetual covenant”?
- What is gained by making this promise as “we” rather than only as “I”?
- Why does the second stanza move from making a vow to asking God to “meet us now”?
- How does the final stanza connect covenant commitment with the Trinity, Christ’s atoning blood, forgiveness, and perseverance?
Teaching Tips
- Explain that the hymn was published in 1762 as a Scripture hymn on Jeremiah 50:5; it later became the Methodist Covenant Hymn, but there is no direct evidence that Charles Wesley wrote it specifically for the Covenant Service.
- Show both historical stanza forms: Charles Wesley’s original three eight-line stanzas and John Wesley’s later division into six common-meter stanzas.
- When using KINGSFOLD, identify it as a traditional English melody adapted for hymn singing by Ralph Vaughan Williams rather than as a tune he composed from scratch.
- Trace the hymn’s theology in sequence: grace enables commitment, covenant becomes prayer, Christ’s blood provides forgiveness, and God is asked to preserve believers to the end.
- Use Jeremiah 50:5, Romans 14:8, Joshua 24:16, and Hebrews 13:20–21 as a compact Scripture study alongside the hymn.
Sources
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Duke Divinity School, Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition — Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures, vol. 2, 1762, hymn 1242, pp. 36–37
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United Methodist Discipleship Ministries — C. Michael Hawn, History of Hymns: Come, Let Us Use the Grace Divine
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Wesley Historical Society archive — Beginnings of the Methodist Covenant Service
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Hymnary.org — The United Methodist Hymnal, 1989, no. 606, text and KINGSFOLD tune attribution
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Hymnary.org — KINGSFOLD tune authority and Psalter Hymnal Handbook notes
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Hymnology Archive — Dives and Lazarus, history of the traditional melody later named KINGSFOLD
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Ralph Vaughan Williams Society — A Short Biography
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University of Toronto Representative Poetry Online — Charles Wesley authority and biography
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World English Bible Classic — Jeremiah 50
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World English Bible Classic — Romans 14
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World English Bible Classic — Joshua 24
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World English Bible Classic — Hebrews 13
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Lawphil — Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, Republic Act No. 8293, section 213
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U.S. Copyright Office — Circular 15A, Duration of Copyright
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Come, Let Us Use the Grace Divine Lyrics and Guitar Chords
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