Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

by Dane C. Ortlund

Meek. Humble. Gentle. Jesus is not trigger-happy. Not harsh, reactionary, easily exasperated. He is the most understanding person in the universe. The posture most natural to him is not a pointed finger but open arms.

“Gentle and lowly.” This, according to his own testimony, is Christ’s very heart. This is who he is. Tender. Open. Welcoming. Accommodating. Understanding. Willing. If we are asked to say only one thing about who Jesus is, we would be honoring Jesus’s own teaching if our answer is, gentle and lowly.

Only as we drink down the kindness of the heart of Christ will we leave in our wake, everywhere we go, the aroma of heaven, and die one day having startled the world with glimpses of a divine kindness too great to be boxed in by what we deserve.

That notion of kindness is right here in our passage. The word translated “easy” in his statement, “My yoke is easy,” needs to be carefully understood. Jesus is not saying life is free of pain or hardship. This is the same word elsewhere translated “kind”—as in, for example, Ephesians 4:32: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted” (also Rom. 2:4).

Jesus is using a kind of irony, saying that the yoke laid on his disciples is a nonyoke. For it is a yoke of kindness. Who could resist this? It’s like telling a drowning man that he must put on the burden of a life preserver only to hear him shout back, sputtering, “No way! Not me! This is hard enough, drowning here in these stormy waters. The last thing I need is the added burden of a life preserver around my body!” That’s what we all are like, confessing Christ with our lips but generally avoiding deep fellowship with him, out of a muted understanding of his heart.

He doesn’t simply meet us at our place of need; he lives in our place of need. He never tires of sweeping us into his tender embrace. It is his very heart. It is what gets him out of bed in the morning.

We project onto Jesus our skewed instincts about how the world works. Human nature dictates that the wealthier a person, the more they tend to look down on the poor. The more beautiful a person, the more they are put off by the ugly. And without realizing what we are doing, we quietly assume that one so high and exalted has corresponding difficulty drawing near to the despicable and unclean.

When you come to Christ for mercy and love and help in your anguish and perplexity and sinfulness, you are going with the flow of his own deepest wishes, not against them.

Jesus surprises us in “exercising acts of grace, and from his continual doing good unto and for his members . . . from his filling them with all mercy, grace, comfort, and felicity, himself becoming yet more full, by filling them.”

As truly God, Christ cannot become any more full; he shares in his Father’s immortal, eternal, unchangeable fullness.

To put it the other way around: when we hold back, lurking in the shadows, fearful and failing, we miss out not only on our own increased comfort but on Christ’s increased comfort. He lives for this. This is what he loves to do. His joy and ours rise and fall together.

Consider Hebrews 12. There Jesus is called “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2). “For the joy.” What joy? What was waiting for Jesus on the other side of the cross? The joy of seeing his people forgiven. Remember the whole point of Hebrews—Jesus is the high priest to end all high priests, who has made the final atoning sacrifice to completely cover the sins of his people so that they are provided for “to the uttermost” (7:25).

He wants us to draw strength from his love, but the only ones qualified to do that are sinners in need of undeserved love. And he doesn’t just want us to be forgiven. He wants us.

Our trouble is that we do not take the Scripture seriously when it speaks of us as Christ’s body. Christ is the head; we are his own body parts. How does a head feel about his own flesh? The apostle Paul tells us: “He nourishes and cherishes it” (Eph. 5:29). And then Paul makes the explicit connection to Christ: “just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body” (5:29–30). How do we care for a wounded body part? We nurse it, bandage it, protect it, give it time to heal. For that body part isn’t just a close friend; it is part of us. So with Christ and believers. We are part of him.

Jesus Christ is comforted when you draw from the riches of his atoning work, because his own body is getting healed.

Goodwin wants to surprise readers with the biblical evidence that the risen Lord alive and well in heaven today is not somehow less approachable and less compassionate than he was when he walked the earth.

What would it be like for a friend to take our two hands and place them on the chest of the risen Lord Jesus Christ so that, like a stethoscope letting us hear the vigorous strength of a beating heart physically, our hands let us feel the vigorous strength of Christ’s deepest affections and longings? Goodwin is saying: We don’t have to wonder. Hebrews 4:15 is that friend.

It is not only that Jesus can relieve us from our troubles, like a doctor prescribing medicine; it is also that, before any relief comes, he is with us in our troubles, like a doctor who has endured the same disease.

He knows what it is to be lonely. His friends abandoned him when he needed them most; had he lived today, every last Twitter follower and Facebook friend would have un-friended him when he turned thirty-three—he who will never un-friend us.

He had no sin. He was “holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners” (Heb. 7:26–27). But we must ponder the phrase “in every respect” in a way that maintains Jesus’s sinlessness without diluting what that phrase means. That enticing temptation, that sore trial, that bewildering perplexity—he has been there.

Our tendency is to feel intuitively that the more difficult life gets, the more alone we are. As we sink further into pain, we sink further into felt isolation.

As verse 14 tells us, Jesus has now gone up into heaven. But that does not mean he is distant or aloof from our pains.

C. S. Lewis made this point by speaking of a man walking against the wind. Once the wind of temptation gets strong enough, the man lies down, giving in—and thus not knowing what it would have been like ten minutes later. Jesus never lay down; he endured all our temptations and testings without ever giving in.

When we sin, we are encouraged to bring our mess to Jesus because he will know just how to receive us. He doesn’t handle us roughly. He doesn’t scowl and scold. He doesn’t lash out, the way many of our parents did. And all this restraint on his part is not because he has a diluted view of our sinfulness.

It’s telling us the kind of love he has: rather than dispensing grace to us from on high, he gets down with us, he puts his arm around us, he deals with us in the way that is just what we need. He deals gently with us.

Contrary to what we expect to be the case, therefore, the deeper into weakness and suffering and testing we go, the deeper Christ’s solidarity with us. As we go down into pain and anguish, we are descending ever deeper into Christ’s very heart, not away from it.

Divine grace is so radical that it reaches down and turns around our very desires. Our eyes are opened. Christ becomes beautiful. We come to him. And anyone—“whoever”—is welcome. Come and welcome to Jesus Christ.

We do not come to a set of doctrines. We do not come to a church. We do not even come to the gospel. All these are vital. But most truly, we come to a person, to Christ himself.

They that are coming to Jesus Christ, are often times heartily afraid that Jesus Christ will not receive them.

But I am a great sinner, say you. “I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ. But I am an old sinner, say you. “I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ. But I am a hard-hearted sinner, say you. “I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ. But I am a backsliding sinner, say you. “I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ. But I have served Satan all my days, say you. “I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ. But I have sinned against light, say you. “I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ. But I have sinned against mercy, say you. “I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ. But I have no good thing to bring with me, say you. “I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ.

We are factories of fresh resistances to Christ’s love. Even when we run out of tangible reasons to be cast out, such as specific sins or failures, we tend to retain a vague sense that, given enough time, Jesus will finally grow tired of us and hold us at arm’s length. Bunyan understands us.

“You know most of it, sure. Certainly more than what others see. But there’s perversity down inside me that is hidden from everyone.” I know it all.

Nothing but coming to him is required—first at conversion and a thousand times thereafter until we are with him upon death.

We have come, more deeply, to the doctrine of the perseverance of the heart of Christ.

Yes, once a sinner is united to Christ, there is nothing that can dis-unite them.

His death and resurrection make it just for Christ never to cast out his own, no matter how often they fall.

He cannot bear to part with his own, even when they most deserve to be forsaken.

You will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner, because there is a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good terms with ourselves, and we can always put up a good case for ourselves. Even if we try to make ourselves feel that we are sinners, we will never do it. There is only one way to know that we are sinners, and that is to have some dim, glimmering conception of God.

When we feel as if our thoughts, words, and deeds are diminishing God’s grace toward us, those sins and failures are in fact causing it to surge forward all the more.

But the grace of God comes to us no more and no less than Jesus Christ comes to us. In the biblical gospel we are not given a thing; we are given a person.

What are we given when we are given Christ? More acutely, if we can speak of grace as always being drawn out in our sin but as coming to us only in Christ himself, then we are confronted with a vital aspect of who Christ is—a biblical aspect that the Puritans loved to reflect on: when we sin, the very heart of Christ is drawn out to us.

just as the purer a man’s heart, the more horrified he is at the thought of his neighbors being robbed or abused. Conversely, the more corrupt one’s heart, the less one is affected by the evils all around.

his pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father is to a child that has some loathsome disease, or as one is to a member of his body that has leprosy, he hates not the member, for it is his flesh, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected the more.

If you are part of Christ’s own body, your sins evoke his deepest heart, his compassion and pity.

Here we have all the elements raised so far in this chapter: God’s own people, amid their sinfulness, with reference to God’s heart, and explicit affirmation of God’s holiness.

One of the more neglected doctrines in the church today is the heavenly intercession of Christ. When we talk about Christ’s intercession, we are talking about what Jesus is doing now. There has been a remarkable recovery of the glory of what Christ did back then, in his life, death, and resurrection, to save me.

It is the most counterintuitive aspect of Christianity, that we are declared right with God not once we begin to get our act together but once we collapse into honest acknowledgment that we never will.

What is intercession? In general terms it means that a third party comes between two others and makes a case to one on behalf of the other. Think of a parent interceding to a teacher on behalf of a child or an agent interceding to a sports franchise on behalf of an athlete.

But why would Jesus need to intercede for us? After all, haven’t we been completely justified already? What is there for Christ to plead on our behalf? Hasn’t he already done all that is needed to fully acquit us? In other words, does the doctrine of Christ’s heavenly intercession mean that something was left incomplete in his atoning work on the cross?

Christ’s present heavenly intercession on our behalf is a reflection of the fullness and victory and completeness of his earthly work, not a reflection of anything lacking in his earthly work.