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But in only one place—perhaps the most wonderful words ever uttered by human lips—do we hear Jesus himself open up to us his very 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
Our heart is what defines and directs us. That is why Solomon tells us to “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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Jesus walked the earth rehumanizing the dehumanized and cleansing the unclean.
Because his heart refused to let him sleep
“Christ is love covered over in flesh.”
Christ “is inclined from his own heart and affections to give . . . us help and relief . . . and he is inwardly moved during our sufferings and trials with a sense and fellow-feeling of them.”5
point is that Jesus deals gently and only gently with all sinners who come to him, irrespective of their particular offense and just how heinous it is.
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.
This very care, this gentle dealing with all kinds of sinners, is what is most natural to him.
“the one coming to me I will not—not—cast out.”
Sometimes, as here, Greek uses two negatives piled on top of each other for literary forcefulness. “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.”
Yes, once a sinner is united to Christ, there is nothing that can dis-unite them.
Romans 5:20: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”
The sins of those who belong to God open the floodgates of his heart of compassion for us. The dam breaks. It is not our loveliness that wins his love. It is our unloveliness.
Intercession is the constant hitting “refresh” of our justification in the court of heaven.
Christ’s intercession reflects how profoundly personal our rescue is.
His interceding for us reflects his heart—the same heart that carried him through life and down into death on behalf of his people is the heart that now manifests itself in constant pleading with and reminding and prevailing upon his Father to always welcome us.
Jesus is praying for you right now.
“that Christ is praying for us, even when we are negligent in our prayer life.”
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.
“There is no love so great and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ.”
We too have the privilege of finding creative ways of drawing in the kids all around us to the heart of Jesus.
Bible positively orders us to be angry when occasion calls for it (Ps. 4:4; Eph. 4:26).
As large and as various as are our wants, so large and various are his mercies.
Mercy is natural to him. Punishment is unnatural.
The only two words Jesus will use to describe his own heart are gentle and lowly (Matt. 11:29). And the first two words God uses to describe who he is are merciful and gracious.
Deuteronomy 7:9: “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.”
There is no termination date on my commitment to you. You can’t get rid of my grace to you. You can’t outrun my mercy. You can’t evade my goodness. My heart is set on you.
On the cross, we see what God did to satisfy his yearning for us. He went that far. He went all the way. The blushing effusiveness of heaven’s bowels funneled down into the crucifixion of Christ. Repent of your small thoughts of God’s heart. Repent and let him love you.
He is rich in mercy. Nowhere else in the Bible is God described as rich in anything. The only thing he is called rich in is: mercy.
If God sent his own Son to walk through the valley of condemnation, rejection, and hell, you can trust him as you walk through your own valleys on your way to heaven.
prove that 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 are not who we were.
One way we glorify God is by our obedience to him, our refusing to believe we know best and instead trusting that his way is the way of life.
