More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 8 - February 2, 2021
We are not focusing centrally on what Christ has done. We are considering who he is. The two matters are bound up together and indeed interdependent. But they are distinct.
In the four Gospel accounts given to us in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—eighty-nine chapters of biblical text—there’s only one place where Jesus tells us about his own heart.
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matt. 11:28–30)1
when the Bible speaks of the heart, whether Old Testament or New, it is not speaking of our emotional life only but of the central animating center of all we do. It is what gets us out of bed in the morning and what we daydream about as we drift off to sleep. It is our motivation headquarters. The heart, in biblical terms, is not part of who we are but the center of who we are. Our heart is what defines and directs us.
“keep [the] heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life” (Prov. 4:23).2 The heart is a matter of life. It is what makes us the human being each of us is. The heart drives all we do. It is who we are.3
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.
This specific word lowly is generally translated “humble” in the New Testament,
“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
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.
If Jesus hosted his own personal website, the most prominent line of the “About Me” dropdown would read: Gentle and Lowly in Heart.
24). “Gentle and lowly” does not mean “mushy and frothy.” But for the penitent, his heart of gentle embrace is never outmatched by our sins and foibles and insecurities and doubts and anxieties and failures.
Twice in the Gospels we are told that Jesus broke down and wept. And in neither case is it sorrow for himself or his own pains. In both cases it is sorrow over another—in one case, Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), and in the other, his deceased friend, Lazarus (John 11:35). What was his deepest anguish? The anguish of others.
The cumulative testimony of the four Gospels is that when Jesus Christ sees the fallenness of the world all about him, his deepest impulse, his most natural instinct, is to move toward that sin and suffering, not away from it.
Consider Jesus. In Levitical categories, he is the cleanest person to ever walk the face of the earth. He was the Clean One. Whatever horrors cause us to cringe—we who are naturally unclean and fallen—would cause Jesus to cringe all the more. We cannot fathom the sheer purity, holiness, cleanness, of his mind and heart. The simplicity, the innocence, the loveliness. And what did he do when he saw the unclean? What was his first impulse when he came across prostitutes and lepers? He moved toward them. Pity flooded his heart, the longing of true
compassion. He spent time with them.
He touched them. We all can testify to the humaneness of touch. A warm hug does something warm words of greeting alone cannot. But there is something deeper in Christ’s touch of compassion. He was reversing the Jewish system. When Jesus, the Clean One, touched an u...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The same Christ who wept at the tomb of Lazarus weeps with us in our lonely despair.
Jesus Christ is closer to you
today than he was to the sinners and sufferers he spoke with and touched in his earthly ministry.
Through his Spirit, Christ’s own heart envelops his people with an embrace nearer and tighter than any physi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
enlarged by his showing grace and mercy,
in pardoning, relieving, and comforting his members here on earth.”
But as he seeks to provide care, the afflicted refuse. They want to take care of themselves. They want to heal on their own terms. Finally, a few brave young men step forward to receive the care being freely provided. What does the doctor feel? Joy.
His joy increases to the degree that the sick come to him for help and healing. It’s the whole reason he came.
So with us, and so with Christ. He does not get flustered and frustrated when we come to him for fresh forgiveness, for renewed pardon, with distress and need and emptiness.
He drew near to us in the incarnation so that his joy and ours could rise and fall together—his in giving mercy, ours in receiving
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.
What was waiting for Jesus on the other side of the cross? The joy of seeing his people forgiven.
Thomas Goodwin’s The Heart of Christ is no different. And the verse being wrung dry is Hebrews 4:15:
even though Christ is now in heaven, he is just as open and tender in his embrace of
sinners and sufferers as ever he was on earth.
by Christ’s heart, he means Christ’s “gracious disposition and tender affection.”
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.
“Sympathize” here is not cool and detached pity. It is a depth of felt solidarity such as is echoed in our own lives most closely only as parents to children.
The reason that Jesus is in such close solidarity with us is that the difficult path we are on is not unique to us. He has journeyed on it himself. 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 thirsty, hungry, despised, rejected, scorned, shamed, embarrassed, abandoned, misunderstood, falsely accused, suffocated, tortured, and killed. He knows what it is to be lonely. His friends abandoned him when he needed them most;
us, Jesus has now gone up into heaven. But that does not mean he is distant or aloof from our pains.
In ancient Israel the king represented God to the people, while the priest represented the people to God.
The book of Hebrews is in the Bible to tell us what it means for Jesus to be our priest, the true priest, the priest of whom every other is a shadow and to whom every other is a pointer.
The priests of Israel were themselves sinful. So they needed to offer sacrifices not only for the sins of the peo...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
there were basically two kinds of sins: unwillful and willful, or accidental and deliberate, or
as Numbers 15 puts it, unintentional and “with a high hand” (Num. 15:27–31). This is almost certainly what the writer to the Hebrews has in mind, with “ignorant” referring to accidental sins and “wayward” referring to deliberate sins.
Perhaps the most significant commentary yet written on the letter to the Hebrews was the work of John Owen. Of the twenty-three volumes that presently make up Owen’s collected works, seven of these are a verse-by-verse
verse walk-through of Hebrews.
Look to Christ. He deals gently with you. It’s the only way he knows how to be.
Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ,
That verse, for Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ, was John 6:37.
All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.
Once the Father sets his loving gaze on a wandering sinner, that sinner’s rescue is certain.
Our redemption is not a matter of a gracious Son trying to calm down an uncontrollably angry Father. The Father himself ordains our deliverance. He takes the loving initiative (note v. 38).
