Come, ye sinners, poor and needy,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
Full of pity, love, and power.
I will arise and go to Jesus,
He will embrace me in His arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
O there are ten thousand charms.
Come, ye thirsty, come, and welcome,
God’s free bounty glorify;
True belief and true repentance,
Every grace that brings you nigh.
Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him.
Public domain hymn text (published 1759). Words by Joseph Hart.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Joseph Hart spent much of his early adult life as a passionate and combative theological critic of Wesleyan Arminianism, publishing a series of sharp, aggressively argued theological pamphlets attacking what he viewed as doctrinal errors in the rapidly growing Methodist movement, all while privately experiencing years of genuine, largely hidden spiritual despair and inner turmoil that his own confident public polemics apparently did nothing to actually resolve for him personally.
In 1757, while attending a service at a Moravian chapel in London, Hart underwent a sudden and genuinely dramatic personal conversion experience that permanently transformed both his formal theology and his previously troubled sense of inner spiritual peace, and he was formally called only two years later, in 1759, to serve as pastor of Jireh Chapel, an independent dissenting congregation located in London that he would go on to lead for the remainder of his ministry.
He wrote this hymn's text in that same pivotal year, 1759, specifically for inclusion in his own published collection titled 'Hymns Composed on Various Subjects,' a collection that went on to become one of the single most widely used and reprinted hymnals among English Particular Baptists and various other Calvinistic dissenting congregations across England for several generations following its original publication.
The hymn's repeated, insistent theological claim that no particular degree of personal worthiness or spiritual 'fitness' is genuinely required before coming to Christ — that an honest, unadorned acknowledgment of one's own spiritual need is itself entirely sufficient — directly reflects Hart's own hard-won personal conversion experience, an experience arrived at, by his own later account, only after years of ultimately futile self-directed effort and confident theological argument finally gave way to a considerably more humbling, simple admission of his own genuine spiritual poverty and need.
