Amazing Pity! Grace Unknown! And Love Beyond Degree!

About this book

He wrote it between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. The church has been answering its question ever since.Isaac Watts titled his hymn "Godly Sorrow Arising from the Sufferings of Christ" - and the title is the program. Not sentimental grief. Not the pleasant melancholy of a religious mood. Godly sorrow: the specific, morally serious response of a soul that has stood at the cross long enough to understand what it is seeing. That the Savior bled. That the Sovereign died. That it was for crimes such as mine. And that the only adequate response is not tears - tears cannot repay the debt - but the giving of the self away.Amazing Pity! Grace Unknown! And Love Beyond Degree! is the twelfth volume in the Songs of the Redeemed series. Moving phrase by phrase through Watts's five-stanza hymn, Elias Hartwell traces the full arc of its movement: from astonishment to self-examination, from the cosmic darkness at Calvary to the dissolved heart and the melted eyes, from the debt that cannot be repaid to the only response the gospel leaves room for. Here is pity that is amazing because it was not owed. Here is grace that is unknown because no human economy operates this way. Here is love that is beyond degree because no scale exists to measure it.For the soul that has sung this hymn since childhood without fully pressing into what it claims. For everyone who has stood at the cross and felt, beneath the familiar words, the full weight of the question -'Tis all that I can do.