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

by Dane C. Ortlund

The Greek word is splanchnizo, which is often rendered as “to have compassion.” But the word denotes more than passing pity; it refers to a depth of feeling in which

And not only compassion. What would perfect anger look like?

A compassion-less Christ could never have gotten angry at the injustices all around him,

Perhaps you have reason to be angry. Perhaps you have been sinned against, and the only appropriate response is anger. Be comforted by this: Jesus is angry alongside you. He joins you in your anger. Indeed, he is angrier than you could ever be about the wrong done to you.

Your just anger is a shadow of his. And his anger, unlike yours, has zero taint of sin in

As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. H...

For it is an anger that springs from his comp...

In that knowledge, release your debtor

That Jesus is friend to sinners is only contemptible to those who feel

themselves not to be in that category.

What does it mean that Christ is a friend to sinners? At the very least, it means that he enj...

It also means that they feel welcome and comfort...

“Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing ...

They are at ease around him.

What he is really doing, at bottom, is pulling them into his heart.

Some of us are forced to acknowledge that we do not have one true friend, someone we could go to with any problem knowing we would not be turned away. Who in our lives do we feel safe with—really safe, safe enough to open up about everything?

Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence.

This is a companion whose embrace of us does not strengthen or weaken depending on how clean or unclean, how attractive or revolting, how...

The friendliness of his heart for us subjectively is as fixed and stable as is the declaration of his ju...

Won’t most of us admit that even with our best friends, we don’t feel fully comfortable divulging...

Even in many of our marriages, we are friends of a sort, but we haven’t gotten naked in soul the way we have in body.

All our human friendships have a limit to what they can withstand. But what if there were a friend with no limit?

But not only does a true friend pursue you; he allows you to pursue him, and he opens himself up to you without holding anything back.

I have called you friends,

for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

There is nothing held back. He lets them completely in.

If we be not ashamed of him, he will never be ashamed of us.

The Spirit: Regenerates us (John 3:6–7)

Convicts us (John 16:8) Empowers us with gifts (1 Cor. 12:4–7) Testifies in our hearts that we are God’s children (Gal. 4:6) Leads us (Gal. 5:18, 25) Makes us fruitful (Gal. 5:22–23) Grants and nurtures in us resurrection life (Rom. 8:11) Enables us to kill sin (Rom. 8:13) Intercedes for us when we don’t know what to pray (Rom. 8:26–27) Guides us into truth (John 16:13) Transforms us into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18)

the Spirit causes us to actually feel Christ’s heart for us.

The Spirit takes what we read in the Bible and believe on paper about Jesus’s heart and moves it from theory to reality, from doctrine to experience.

It’s one thing to hear he loves you; it’s another thing to feel his love.

Paul is saying that the Spirit has been given to us in order that we might know, way down deep, the endless grace of the heart of God.

He is “more the Father of mercies than Satan is said to be the father of sin.”

A correct understanding of the triune God is not that of a Father whose central disposition is judgment and a Son whose central disposition is love. The heart of both is one and the same; this is, after all, one God, not two.

Theirs is a heart of redeeming love,

Some of us had great dads growing up. Others of us were horribly mistreated or abandoned by them. Whatever the case, the good in our earthly dads is a faint pointer to the true goodness of our heavenly Father, and the bad in our earthly dads is the photo negative of who our heavenly Father is.

When we see the heart of Christ, then, throughout the four Gospels, we are seeing the very compassion and tenderness of who God himself most deeply is.

As you consider the Father’s heart for you, remember that he is the Father of mercies. He is not cautious in his tenderness toward you. He multiplies mercies matched to your every need, and there is nothing he would rather do.

Lamentations 3:33

Jeremiah 32:41, where God says of his restoring work that “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul”; and Isaiah 28:21, where God’s judging activity is called his “strange” and “alien” work.

Mercy is natural to him. Punishment is unnatural.

What is he on the edge of his seat eager to do?

The impulse to do good. The desire to swallow us up in joy.

“God has no pleasure in the destruction or calamity of persons or people,”

Left to our own natural intuitions about God, we will conclude that mercy is his strange work and judgment his natural work.

Rewiring our vision of God as we study the Scripture, we see, helped by the great teachers of the past, that judgment is his

strange work and mercy his na...

“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the

children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”