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

by Dane C. Ortlund

In the one place in the Bible where the Son of God pulls back the veil and lets us peer way down into the core of who he is, we are not told that he is “austere and demanding in heart.” We are not told that he is “exalted and dignified in heart.” We are not even told that he is “joyful and generous in heart.” Letting Jesus set the terms, his surprising claim is that he is “gentle and lowly in heart.”

One thing to get straight right from the start is that 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.

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.

The point in saying that Jesus is lowly is that he is accessible. For all his resplendent glory and dazzling holiness, his supreme uniqueness and otherness, no one in human history has ever been more approachable than Jesus Christ. No prerequisites. No hoops to jump through.

Jesus Christ’s desire that you find rest, that you come in out of the storm, outstrips even your own.

This is not who he is to everyone, indiscriminately. This is who he is for those who come to him, who take his yoke upon them, who cry to him for help.

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.

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.

ineffably magnificent that all language dies away before his splendor.

What we see Jesus claim with his words in Matthew 11:29, we see him prove with his actions time and again in all four Gospels. What he is, he does. He cannot act any other way. His life proves his heart.

Yes, he is one whose holiness causes even his friends to fall down in fear, aware of their sinfulness (Luke 5:8). Yes, he is a mighty teacher, one whose

way the Holy Son of God moves toward, touches, heals, embraces, and forgives those who least deserve it yet truly desire it.

The Jesus given to us in the Gospels is not simply one who loves, but one who is love; merciful affections stream from his innermost heart as rays from the sun.

Others of us may have grown up in a chaotic free-for-all, and the structure and order of a morally circumscribed life flowing from the commands of Christ may be especially attractive.

We cannot fathom the sheer purity, holiness, cleanness, of his mind and heart. The simplicity, the innocence, the loveliness.

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 it.

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.

“For the joy.” What joy? What was waiting for Jesus on the other side of the cross? The joy of seeing his people forgiven.

It was the joyous anticipation of seeing his people made invincibly clean that sent him through his arrest, death, burial, and resurrection.

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.

Our difficulties draw out a depth of feeling in Christ beyond what we know.

The reason we feel as if divine wrath can easily be overstated is that we do not feel the true weight of sin.

The guilt and shame of those in Christ is ever outstripped by his abounding grace.

when we sin, the very heart of Christ is drawn out to us.

His holiness finds evil revolting, more revolting than any of us ever could feel. But it is that very holiness that also draws his heart out to help and relieve and protect and comfort.

In the key text on divine holiness (Isa. 6:1–8), that holiness (6:3) flows naturally and immediately into forgiveness and mercy (6:7).

He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin.

Let’s not dishonor God by so emphasizing his transcendence that we lose a sense of the emotional life of God of which our own emotions are an echo, even if a fallen and distorted echo.

It is not our loveliness that wins his love. It is our unloveliness.

But we bow in humble submission, letting God set the terms by which he will love us.

The Son’s intercession does not reflect the coolness of the Father but the sheer warmth of the Son.

The intercession of Christ is his heart connecting our heart to the Father’s heart.

Jesus saves us. But consider how your heart works. Do you not find within yourself an unceasing low-grade impulse to strengthen his saving work through your own contribution?

Whereas the doctrine of the atonement reassures us with what Christ has done in the past, the doctrine of his intercession reassures us with what he is doing in the present.

Yes, we fail Christ as his disciples. But his advocacy on our behalf rises higher than our sins. His advocacy speaks louder than our failures. All is taken care of.

When you sin, his strength of resolve rises all the higher. When his brothers and sisters fail and stumble, he advocates on their behalf because it is who he is. He cannot bear to leave us alone to fend for ourselves.

We are called to mature into deeper levels of personal holiness as we walk with the Lord, truer consecration, new vistas of obedience.

In other words, when we come to Christ, we are startled by the beauty of his welcoming heart. The surprise is itself what draws us in.

It is a heart that drew the despised and forsaken to his feet in self-abandoning hope. It is a heart of perfect balance and proportion, never overreacting, never excusing, never lashing out. It is a heart that throbs with desire for the destitute. It is a heart that floods the suffering with the deep solace of shared solidarity in that suffering. It is a heart that is gentle and lowly.

Throughout, he is trying to help us see that Jesus did not simply operate in deeds of compassion but actually felt the inner turmoils and roiling emotions of pity toward the unfortunate.

What he helps us see is that Christ’s emotions outstrip our own in depth of feeling, because he was truly human (as opposed to a divine-human blend) and because he was a perfect

The emotions of indignation and anger belong therefore to the very self-expression of a moral being as such and cannot be lacking to him in the presence of wrong.

A compassion-less Christ could never have gotten angry at the injustices all around him, the severity and human barbarity, even that flowing from the religious elite. No, “compassion and indignation rise together in his soul.”7 It is the father who loves his daughter most whose anger rises most fiercely if she is mistreated.

As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion for you. The indignation he felt when he came upon mistreatment of others in the Gospels is the same indignation he feels now in heaven upon mistreatments of you.