One of the greatest comforting passages of Scripture is
found in Mark 6:34. Jesus saw the
multitude and felt compassion for them for they were like sheep without a
shepherd. We see a stranded kitten and we
feel compassion. We see a wandering lost
puppy and we feel compassion. Jesus saw
the multitude lost and wayward and without a guide or keeper in life and death. Seeing them He felt compassion.
Charlotte Elliot who is most famous as the writer of “Just
as I Am” wrote a number of other hymns as well.
One of them is titled “Jesus, My Savior, Look on Me”. It is taken from this passage in Mark and its
parallel passage in Matthew 9. She
imagines in her hymn a variety of the needs that the multitude had that day and
the needs that we also face in our lives.
The multitudes of yore are not any different than the multitudes of
today. We share the same needs for a
shepherd to care for us, rescue us and guide us.
The first stanza of her hymn reads, “Jesus, my Savior,
look on me, for I am weary and oppressed; I come to cast myself on Thee: Thou
art my rest.” The crowds had come to see
Jesus. He saw their needs as being more
than just that of physical healing, so the first thing He did was to teach
them. Later in the day He fed them, the
whole multitude by a great miracle. The
next day, according to John 6, He challenged them to see what true food and
drink was and to believe in Him. Those that did so cast themselves on Him and
He became their rest.
In the succeeding verses of her hymn Charlotte points
out an ever widening array of our human needs.
At the end of each stanza she lays out another distinct nature of
Christ. She calls Him her strength, her
light, her rock, her peace and her life.
She found Him sufficient in weakness, darkness, danger, fear and
death. In her final stanza she sums up
her needs and His sufficiency with seeing Him as her all. That is who He wanted to be to the crowds
that day on the hillside. That is who
Charlotte Elliot found Him to be in her life.
That is what He wants us to find Him to be in our lives. He wants to fill us with His grace and be our
all in all. That is His compassionate
heart.
The musical score for this hymn was written by the
famous song writer Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan renown.
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