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Yet again, how does Christ’s heart fit with what we find in the Old Testament and its portrait of God?
This book on Christ’s heart would not exist if I had not stumbled upon the Puritans
You might know that Christ died and rose again on your behalf to rinse you clean of all your sin; but do you know his deepest heart for you?
So with Christ. It is one thing to know the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement and a hundred other vital doctrines. It is another, more searching matter to know his heart for you. Who is he?
Greek word refers not to humility as a virtue but to humility in the sense of destitution or being thrust downward by life circumstance (which is also how this Greek word is generally used throughout the Greek versions of the Old Testament, especially in the psalms).
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 impression was left by his life-manifestation more deeply imprinted upon the consciousness of his followers than that of the noble humility of his bearing.”
If Jesus hosted his own personal website, the most prominent line of the “About Me” dropdown would read: Gentle and Lowly in Heart.
The Christian life is inescapably one of toil and labor
That’s what we all are like, confessing Christ with our lips but generally avoiding deep fellowship with him, out of a muted understanding of his heart.
We project onto Jesus our skewed instincts about how the world works.
And without realizing what we are doing, we quietly assume that one so high and exalted has corresponding difficulty drawing near to the despicable and unclean.
Goodwin is saying that this high and holy Christ does not cringe at reaching out and touching dirty sinners and numbed sufferers.
What was his deepest anguish? The anguish of others. What drew his heart out to the point of tears? The tears of others.
the most vivid and arresting element of the portrait, is the way the Holy Son of God moves toward, touches, heals, embraces, and forgives those who least deserve it yet truly desire it.
1 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.
In short: it is impossible for the affectionate heart of Christ to be overcelebrated, made too much of, exaggerated. It cannot be plumbed. But it is easily neglected, forgotten.
And if the actions of Jesus are reflective of who he most deeply is, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is the very fallenness which he came to undo that is most irresistibly attractive to him.
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 it.
refer not to physical hygiene but to moral purity.
Moral dirtiness is contagious.
We cannot fathom the sheer purity, holiness, cleanness, of his mind and heart. The simplicity, the innocence, the loveliness.
Yet German theologian Jürgen Moltmann points out that miracles are not an interruption of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order.
Jesus walked the earth rehumanizing the dehumanized and cleansing the unclean.
Pull back the flesh on the Stepford Wives or the Terminator and you find machine; pull back the flesh on Christ and you find love.
The Jesus who reached out and cleansed messy sinners reaches into our souls and answers our half-hearted plea for mercy with the mighty invincible cleansing of one who cannot bear to do otherwise.
For now we simply note that through the Spirit, Christ himself not only touches us but lives within us.
Through his Spirit, Christ’s own heart envelops his people with an embrace nearer and tighter than any physical embrace could ever achieve.
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.
To put it the other way around: when we hold back, lurking in the shadows, fearful and failing, we miss out not only on our own increased comfort but on Christ’s increased comfort. He lives for this. This is what he loves to do. His joy and ours rise and fall together.
In
He wants us. How does Jesus speak of his own deepest desires? Like this: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me” (John
Jesus Christ is comforted when you draw from the riches of his atoning work, because his own body is getting healed.
His human nature engages our troubles comprehensively.
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.
Indeed, his utter purity suggests that he has felt these pains more acutely than we sinners ever could.
When
With us. Solidarity.
Our pain never outstrips what he himself shares in. We are never alone. That sorrow that feels so isolating, so unique, was endured by him in the past and is now shouldered by him in the present.
Our difficulties draw out a depth of feeling in Christ beyond what we know.
Jesus never lay down; he endured all our temptations and testings without ever giving in. He therefore knows the strength of temptation better than any of us. Only he truly knows the cost.4
If you are in Christ, you have a Friend who, in your sorrow, will never lob down a pep talk from heaven. He cannot bear to hold himself at a distance. Nothing can hold him back. His heart is too bound up with yours.
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.
Gently.
The idea here in 5:2 is that Jesus does not throw his hands up in the air when he engages sinners. He is calm, tender, soothing, restrained. He deals with us gently.
two kinds of sins: unwillful and willful, or accidental and deliberate,
Jesus deals gently and only gently with all sinners who come to him, irrespective of their particular offense and just how heinous it is.
What elicits tenderness from Jesus is not the severity of the sin but whether
the sinner comes...
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