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March 14, 2023 - March 17, 2024
This is profound consolation for us as we find ourselves time and again wandering away from the Father, looking for soul calm anywhere but in his embrace and instruction. Returning to God in fresh contrition, however ashamed and disgusted with ourselves, he will not tepidly pardon. He will abundantly pardon. He does not merely accept us. He sweeps us up in his arms again.
Even the most intense of human love is but the faintest echo of heaven’s cascading abundance. His heartful thoughts for you outstrip what you can conceive. He intends to restore you into the radiant resplendence for which you were created. And that is dependent not on you keeping yourself clean but on you taking your mess to him.
He doesn’t limit himself to working with the unspoiled parts of us that remain after a lifetime of sinning. His power runs so deep that he is able to redeem the very worst parts of our past into the most radiant parts of our future. But we need to take those dark miseries to him.
Whom do you perceive him to be, in your sin and your suffering? Who do you think God is—not just on paper but in the kind of person you believe is hearing you when you pray? How does he feel about you? His saving of us is not cool and calculating. It is a matter of yearning—not yearning for the Facebook you, the you that you project to everyone around you. Not the you that you wish you were. Yearning for the real you. The you underneath everything you present to others.
we have a perverse resistance to this. Out of his heart flows mercy; out of ours, reluctance to receive it. We are the cool and calculating ones, not he. He is open-armed. We stiff-arm. Our naturally decaffeinated views of God’s heart might feel right because we’re being stern with ourselves, not letting ourselves off the hook too easily. Such sternness feels appropriately morally serious. But this deflecting of God’s yearning heart does not reflect Scripture’s testimony about how God feels toward his own. God is of course morally serious, far more than we are. But the Bible takes us by the
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The world is starving for a yearning love, a love that remembers instead of forsakes. A love that isn’t tied to our loveliness. A love that gets down underneath our messiness. A love that is bigger than the enveloping darkness we might be walking through even today. A love of which even the very best human romance is the faintest of whispers.
If Jeremiah 31:20—“my heart yearns for him”—if those words were to get dressed in flesh, what might those words look like? We need not wonder. It looks like a Middle Eastern carpenter restoring men’s and women’s dignity and humanity and health and conscience through healings and exorcisms and teaching and hugging and forgiving.
Repent of your small thoughts of God’s heart. Repent and let him love you.
This is why he delights in mercy (Mic. 7:18). This is why David acknowledged in prayer to God that the mercy shown him was “according to your own heart” (1 Chron. 17:19). He is a fountain of mercy.
mercy is who he is. If mercy was something he simply had, while his deepest nature was something different, there would be a limit on how much mercy he could dole out.
His love is great because it surges forward all the more when the beloved is threatened, even if threatened as a result of its own folly.
And as love rises, mercy descends. Great love fills his heart; rich mercy flows out of his heart.
Christ was sent not to mend wounded people or wake sleepy people or advise confused people or inspire bored people or spur on lazy people or educate ignorant people, but to raise dead people.
We didn’t just occasionally slip into the passions of our flesh; we “lived in” those passions. It was the air we breathed. What water is to fish, inordinate ugliness of desire was to us.
Beneath our smiles at the grocery store and cheerful greetings to the mailman we were quietly enthroning Self and eviscerating our souls of the beauty and dignity and worship for which they were made. Sin was not something we lapsed into; it defined our moment-by-moment existence at the level of deed, word, thought, and, yes, even desire—“carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.” We not only lived in sin; we enjoyed living in sin.
we can vent our fleshly passions by breaking all the rules, or we can vent our fleshly passions by keeping all the rules, but both ways of venting the flesh still need resurrection.
The mercy of God reaches down and rinses clean not only obviously bad people but fraudulently good people, both of whom equally stand in need of resurrection.
see that the river of mercy flowing out of God’s heart took shape as
It means the things about you that make you cringe most, make him hug hardest. It means his mercy is not calculating and cautious, like ours. It is unrestrained, flood-like, sweeping, magnanimous.
The battle of the Christian life is to bring your own heart into alignment with Christ’s, that is, getting up each morning and replacing your natural orphan mind-set with a mind-set of full and free adoption into the family of God through the work of Christ your older brother, who loved you and gave himself for you out of the overflowing fullness of his gracious heart.
bring the heart of Christ to bear on our chronic tendency to function out of a subtle belief that our obedience strengthens the love of God.
Our sins are many, but His mercies are more: our sins are great, but His righteousness is greater: we are weak, but He is power.
one reason we have a diminished awareness of the heart of Christ is that we are blindly operating out of a legal spirit.
There is an entire psychological substructure that, due to the fall, is a near-constant manufacturing of relational leveraging, fear-stuffing, nervousness, score-keeping, neurotic controlling, anxiety-festering silliness that is not something we say or even think so much as something we exhale.
You find gospel deficit. You find lack of felt awareness of Christ’s heart. All the worry and dysfunction and resentment are the natural fruit of living in a mental universe of law. The felt love of Christ really is what brings rest, wholeness, flourishing, shalom—that existential calm that for brief, gospel-sane moments settles over you and lets you step in out of the storm of of-works-ness.
Living out of a law-fueled subconscious resistance to Christ’s heart, which we all tend to think we’re successfully avoiding (those silly Galatians!), is deep and subtle and pervasive.
And the Christian life is simply the process of bringing my sense of self, my Identity with a capital “I,” the ego, my swirling internal world of fretful panicky-ness arising out of that gospel deficit, into alignment with the more fundamental truth. The gospel is the invitation to let the heart of Christ calm us into joy, for we’ve already been discovered, included, brought in. We can bring our up-and-down moral performance into subjection to the settled fixedness of what Jesus feels about us.
We are perversely resistant to letting Christ love us. But as Flavel says, “Why should you be such an enemy to your own peace? Why read over the evidences of God’s love to your soul . . . ? Why do you study evasions, and turn off those comforts which are due to you?”3 In the gospel, we are free to receive the comforts that are due us. Don’t turn them off. Open the vent of your heart to the love of Christ, who loved you and gave himself for you.
Perhaps, as believers today, we know God loves us. We really believe that. But if we were to more closely examine how we actually relate to the Father moment by moment—which reveals our actual theology, whatever we say we believe on paper—many of us tend to believe it is a love infected with disappointment.
he walked through my death. And he didn’t simply die. He was condemned. He didn’t simply leave heaven for me; he endured hell for me. He, not deserving to be condemned, absorbed it in my place—I, who alone deserved it. That is his heart.
God’s love is, as Jonathan Edwards put it, “an ocean without shores or bottom.”2 God’s love is as boundless as God himself.
We were enemies when God came to us and justified us; how much more will God care for us now that we are friends—indeed, sons?
The logic of Romans 5 is: Through his Son he drew near to us when we hated him. Will he remain distant now that we hope we can please him?
While we were still . . . He loved us in our mess then. He’ll love us in our mess now. Our very agony in sinning is the fruit of our adoption. A cold heart would not be bothered. We are not who we were.
When you sin, do a thorough job of repenting. Re-hate sin all over again. Consecrate yourself afresh to the Holy Spirit and his pure ways. But reject the devil’s whisper that God’s tender heart for you has grown a little colder, a little stiffer.
Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. John 13:1
“To glorify God.” After all, what else is there? We are pieces of art, designed to be beautiful and thus draw attention to our artist. We are simply made for nothing else. When we live to glorify God, we step into the only truly humanizing way of living. We function properly, like a car running on gasoline rather than orange juice.
On into eternity we will enjoy the glory of God—but (again) how? The answer is: Christ’s glory is preeminently seen and enjoyed in his love to sinners.
one day God is going to walk us through the wardrobe into Narnia, and we will stand there, paralyzed with joy, wonder, astonishment, and relief.
The Greek word for kindness means a desire to do what is in your power to prevent discomfort in another.
On “kindness” in Ephesians 2:7 Goodwin remarks, “the word here implies all sweetness, and all candidness, and all friendliness, and all heartiness, and all goodness, and with his whole heart.”3
