A Shepherd's Grace

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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