This 28-year-old Ohioan asked a question over and over again in 1889, hoping it would sink into the hearts and minds of those who would listen. This was the method of Jessie Brown Pounds, but asking “Are You Coming to Jesus Tonight?” wasn’t just a question that she hoped would penetrate hearers’ spirits and make them think. This one entreaty that she uses in each of her five verses emerged each time from a different person or group, at least one of whom she must have trusted would ultimately soften the hardened shell of someone’s heart. It’s as if she’s saying ‘No one wants to be abandoned, and alone forever! Take the hand of your loved one, friend, and even God, and come join the happy and contented.’ Jessie even suggests that this calloused person should look inward, and not ignore the voice that is trying to tell one the truth. It’s the only truth that matters for all time. Know what it is?
Jessie had a well-honed gift for writing that she’d been developing for over ten years by the time she wrote her musical question late in the 19th Century. Perhaps it was her subpar health and education at home that helped spur this talent on the farm in Hiram, in northern Ohio where she lived as a youngster. Although she eventually became a college graduate, Jessie’s career as a writer began in her mid-teens when she routinely offered some of her writing to editors of Cleveland-area newspapers and several religious journals, one of whom coaxed her to make the poems she crafted into hymns. Someone might say ‘And now you know the rest of the story’. Indeed, she produced several hundred hymn texts over the 60 years of her life, among them the one that she penned as a young woman in 1889. Even though many thought of her as a ‘new woman’, because of her higher education, Jessie also leaned on her Christian values to guide her life. Her hymn is likely one outgrowth of her association with journals that were part of the Stone-Campbell religious movement that was prevalent in the mid-to-late 19th Century. What she wrote shows the major focus of that movement – Christ, and bringing people to faith in Him. While her repeated question implicitly urges a response, she also had various messengers beseech the reluctant souls in the poetry. Besides the ‘Savior’ (v.1) and the ‘Father’ (v.2), Jessie must have thought ‘loved ones’ (v.3) and ‘friends gone before’ (v.4) would be very influential in this evangelistic objective. She ultimately presses the hearer to ‘be true’ (v.5) to himself. Was there someone or group of people to whom Jessie was writing at the time? Was this personal, maybe with the song intended to coax a family member or close friend who was still uncommitted? Some things we will need to discover directly from her, in the next life.
Jessie made her question an offering, too. Her words read like gentle persuasion, not fire and brimstone warnings. This Father-God ‘implores’ and his ‘love…outpours’(v.2); while ‘loved ones entreat’ (v.3); and friends ‘tenderly say’ what needs to be said (v.4); and finally, all ‘these voices invite’ (v.5). Had she alternately tried another approach, that is as biblically true as the one she employed here? Hell is real, she must have told herself and, at times, others who needed to hear that such a place might be one’s horrible and eternal destination. But, perhaps Jessie thought of some other verses in which God and love are intermingled, especially where that writer said He is love itself (1 John 4:8). He invented it, has perfected it. And so, Jessie evidently thought the best way to point others to Him was by adopting His most basic characteristic when talking to others. She didn’t try to tell people how they should answer her question. She just asked.
Biography of the author here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/p/o/u/n/pounds_jb.htm
See here also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_Brown_Pounds
See all the song’s verses and the refrain here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/a/r/e/y/areyouco.htm
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