Mark 2:13-17

13 Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. 14 As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow me,’ Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him. 15 While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. 16 When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ 17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but those who are ill. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’

 

I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Mark 2:17

“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 a mental health hospital, 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).

Sadly, Cowper still struggled at times with suicidal thoughts, even after becoming a Christian.

How does Jesus’ description of Himself as our Doctor encourage you if you are struggling similarly? When could you pull up a chair with Jesus today?

Dear Jesus, thank You for pulling up Your chair to sit with me. Your compassion and grace never fail.