LISTEN ONLINE“Damned and beyond hope,” was how eighteenth-century hymn writer William Cowper described himself before he met Jesus. After three failed suicide attempts and a prolonged stay in an asylum, he had never felt so utterly lost.
One day, he found a Bible lying on a bench. He sat and read of Jesus’ love and compassion towards despairing individuals just like himself. “I saw so much benevolence, mercy, goodness and sympathy with miserable men, in our Saviour’s conduct, that I almost shed tears upon the revelation; little thinking that it was an exact type of the mercy which Jesus was on the point of extending towards myself.”
As he sat with Jesus on that bench, increasingly Cowper discovered the same love as the “tax collectors and sinners” had received when they ate and drank with him (Mark 2:15). This group were the outcasts, the unloved, the despairing—the “miserable” as Cowper put it. “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners,” Jesus said, explaining His choice of companions to the Pharisees (v. 17). He had come like a “doctor” for those who knew they were “ill”.
If it seems like you are sitting at the “table of sinners” today, feeling miserable or hopeless in any way, be assured that this is the table where Jesus pulls up His own chair. It is to those who know they are lost that Jesus says, “Follow me” (v. 14).