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March 19 - April 1, 2025
It is for that increasing suspicion that God’s patience with us is wearing thin. For those of us who know God loves us but suspect we have deeply disappointed him. Who have told others of the love of Christ yet wonder if—as for us—he harbors mild resentment. Who wonder if we have shipwrecked our lives beyond what can be repaired. Who are convinced we’ve permanently diminished our usefulness to the Lord. Who have been swept off our feet by perplexing pain and are wondering how we can keep living under such numbing darkness. Who look at our lives and know how to interpret the data only by
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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
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.
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.
Your very burden is what qualifies you to come. No payment is required; he says, “I will give you rest.” His rest is gift, not transaction.
The Christian life is inescapably one of toil and labor (1 Cor. 15:10; Phil. 2:12–13; Col. 1:29). Jesus himself made this clear in this very Gospel (Matt. 5:19–20; 18:8–9). His promise here in Matthew 11 is “rest for your souls,” not “rest for your bodies.” But all Christian toil flows from fellowship with a living Christ whose transcending, defining reality is: gentle and lowly. He astounds and sustains us with his endless kindness.
For it is a yoke of kindness.
He doesn’t simply meet us at our place of need; he lives in our place of need.
What was his deepest anguish? The anguish of others.
Time and again it is the morally disgusting, the socially reviled, the inexcusable and undeserving, who do not simply receive Christ’s mercy but to whom Christ most naturally gravitates. He is, by his enemies’ testimony, the “friend of sinners” (Luke 7:34).
the wrath of Christ and the mercy of Christ are not at odds with one another,
We are asking who he most deeply is. What pours out of him most naturally?
if there appears to be some sense of disproportion in the Bible’s portrait of Christ, then let us be accordingly disproportionate. Better to be biblical than artificially “balanced.”
it is easily neglected, forgotten. We draw too little strength from it. We are not leaving behind the harsher side to Jesus as we speak of his very heart.
But there is something deeper in Christ’s touch of compassion. He was reversing the Jewish system. When Jesus, the Clean One, touched an unclean sinner, Christ did not become unclean. The sinner became clean.
The lordship of God to which the healings witness, restores creation to health. Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly “natural” thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.3
He does not get flustered and frustrated when we come to him for fresh forgiveness, for renewed pardon, with distress and need and emptiness.
Goodwin even goes on to argue that Christ gets more joy and comfort than we do when we come to him for help and mercy. In the same way that a loving husband gets more relief and comfort in his wife’s healing than in his own, Christ “brings in to himself more comfort . . . than it procures to them” when he sees our sins being placed under his own blood.
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).
. He wants us to draw strength from his love, but the only ones qualified to do that are sinners in need of undeserved love.
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?
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.
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.
The word for “sympathize” here is a compound word formed from the prefix meaning “with” (like our English prefix co-) joined with the verb to suffer. “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.
we are told about why Jesus is so close and with his people in their pain. He has been “tempted” (or “tested,” as the word can also denote) “as we are”—not only that, but “in every respect” as we are.
the difficult path we are on is not unique to us. He has journeyed on it himself.
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;
Hebrews 4:15 is to push equally hard on the two phrases “in every respect” and “yet without sin.” All our weakness—indeed, all of our life—is tainted with sin.
That enticing temptation, that sore trial, that bewildering perplexity—he has been there. Indeed, his utter purity suggests that he has felt these pains more acutely than we sinners ever could.
That sorrow that feels so isolating, so unique, was endured by him in the past and is now shouldered by him in the present.
the heart of grace. Not only can he alone pull us out of the hole of sin; he alone desires to climb in and bear our burdens. Jesus is able to sympathize. He “co-suffers” with us.
But if our priest himself knew what our weakness felt like so that he was in deepest sympathy with us, yet had never himself sinned, and so his heart had never turned in on himself in self-pity or self-absorption—that would be a priest truly able to deal gently with us.
dunamenon, which means “one who is able to” or “one who has the capability to,”
What elicits tenderness from Jesus is not the severity of the sin but whether the sinner comes to him. Whatever our offense, he deals gently with us. If we never come to him, we will experience a judgment so fierce it will be like a double-edged sword coming out of his mouth at us (Rev. 1:16; 2:12; 19:15, 21). If we do come to him, as fierce as his lion-like judgment would have been against us, so deep will be his lamb-like tenderness for us (cf. Rev. 5:5–6; Isa. 40:10–11). We will be enveloped in one or the other. To no one will Jesus be neutral.
More than this, Christ’s “meekness and gentleness,” his “patience and moderation,” is not peripheral or accidental to who Christ is, as if his truest delights lie elsewhere. This very care, this gentle dealing with all kinds of sinners, is what is most natural to him.
But why? Why does Christ deal gently with us? The text tells us: “since he himself is beset with weakness.”
The various high priests through Israel’s history were sinfully weak; Jesus the high priest was sinlessly weak (cf. 2 Cor. 13:4).
the deeper into weakness and suffering and testing we go, the deeper Christ’s solidarity with us.
As long as you fix your attention on your sin, you will fail to see how you can be safe. But as long as you look to this high priest, you will fail to see how you can be in danger.
The Father himself ordains our deliverance. He takes the loving initiative
never frustrated. He never runs out of resources.
Divine grace is so radical that it reaches down and turns around our very desires.
we come to a person, to Christ himself.
For this word, “in no wise,” cuts the throat of all objections; and it was dropped by the Lord Jesus for that very end; and to help the faith that is mixed with unbelief. And it is, as it were, the sum of all promises; neither can any objection be made upon the unworthiness that you find in yourself, that this promise will not assoil.
The text literally reads, “the one coming to me I will not—not—cast out.”
“I will most certainly never, ever cast out.” It is this emphatic negation that Christ will ever cast us out that Bunyan calls “this great and strange expression.”
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. He knows we tend to deflect Christ’s assurances.
