I am poor and needy!

By Robert Hawker, 1845

(You will find it helpful to Listen to the Audio, as you read the text below.)

"As for me, I am poor and needy—yet the Lord thinks upon me!" Psalm 40:17

O my soul, sit down and reckon up your unsearchable riches in Christ!

By nature and practice, I am a child of a bankrupt father, Adam, who lived insolvent and died wretchedly poor in himself, having left only an inheritance of sin, misery, and death, with the loss of divine favor, upon the whole race of his children!

By nature and by practice, I am poor in the sight of God, despised by Him because of my loathsome disease of sin! In myself,
  my understanding is darkened,
  my will is depraved,
  my passions are corrupt.
  I am proud and rebellious against God.
  I am a slave of Satan, a willing captive in his drudgery!
  I am daily hastening to deserved damnation!

Such, my soul, was my state by nature; and such, and far worse, would have been my state forever—had not Jesus intervened, looked upon me, and loved me when I was cast out to perish, with no eye to pity me or rescue me from eternal ruin.

O my soul, I can now say: "Though I am poor and needy—yet the Lord thinks upon me!"

Oh, blessed Jesus! You do indeed think upon me, provide for me, and have given me the grace to see and to feel my spiritual poverty, need, and misery—and to live wholly upon You and Your alms, from day to day.

Lord Jesus! I would be poor, I would be needy. I would feel more and more my nothingness, worthlessness, poverty, and wretchedness—that You may be increasingly precious, and Your salvation increasingly dear.

Oh for grace, as a poor needy debtor, daily to increase the awareness of my sin—so that my conscious need of You and Your fullness, may be increasingly blessed.

Let my daily motto be: "As for me, I am poor and needy—yet the Lord thinks upon me!"

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ!" Ephesians 1:3