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

by Dane C. Ortlund

And the present manifestation of his heart for his people is his constant interceding on their behalf.

“Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.”

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

“To the uttermost” in Hebrews 7:25 means: God’s forgiving, redeeming, restoring touch reaches down into the darkest crevices of our souls, those places where we are most ashamed, most defeated. More than this: those crevices of sin are themselves the places where Christ loves us the most.

But what if you heard Jesus praying aloud for you in the next room?

doing in the present. If you are in Christ, you have an intercessor, a present-day mediator, one who is happily celebrating with his Father the abundant reason for both to embrace you into their deepest heart.

We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 1 John 2:1

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

All those in Christ have, right now, someone speaking on their behalf.

Do not minimize your sin or excuse it away. Raise no defense. Simply take it to the one who is

already at the right hand of the Father, advocating for you on the basis of his own wounds. Let your own unrighteousness, in all your darkness and despair, drive you to Jesus Christ, the righteous, in all his brightness and sufficiency.

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Matthew 10:37

There is no love so great and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ. He is one that delights in mercy; he is ready to pity those that are in suffering and sorrowful circumstances; one that delights in the happiness of his creatures. The love and grace that Christ has manifested does as much exceed all that which is in this world as the sun is brighter than a candle. Parents are often full of kindness towards their children, but that is no kindness like Jesus Christ’s.

“There is no love so great

and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ.”

“Everything that is lovely in God is in Christ, and everything that is or can be lovely in any man is in him: for he is man as well as God, and he is the holiest, meekest, most humble, and every way the most excellent man that ever was.”2 Any possible loveliness is in Jesus, because “he is the holiest, meekest, most humble, and every way the most excellent man that ever was.” This language of Christ’s meekness and humility are the very way Christ himself describes his own heart in Matthew 11:29. In other words, it is Christ’s gentle heart that adorns him with beauty; or put the other way, what most deeply attracts us to Christ is his gentle, tender, humble heart.

We are drawn to God by the beauty of the heart of Jesus.

Allow yourself to be allured. Why not build in to your life unhurried quiet, where, among other disciplines, you consider the radiance of who he actually is, what animates him, what his deepest delight is? Why not give your soul room to be reenchanted with Christ time and again?

But at the center, our job is to show our kids that even our best love is a shadow of a greater love.

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. John 11:33

What then must it mean for a sinless man with fully functioning emotions to lay eyes on that leper? Sin restrained my emotions of compassion; what would unrestrained emotions of compassion be like?

. . . a friend of tax collectors and sinners! Matthew 11:19

Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence.

The point is that he is with us, as one of us, sharing in our life and experience, and the love and comfort that are mutually

enjoyed between friends are likewise enjoyed between Christ and us. In short, he relates to us as a person. Jesus is not the idea of friendship, abstractly; he is an actual friend.

While that pain does not go away, its sting is made fully bearable by the far deeper friendship of Jesus.

I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper. John 14:16

“being manifest in the flesh, expresses and utters but what was in the heart of all the three.”1

The Spirit: Regenerates us (John 3:6–7) Convicts us (John 16:8) Empowers us with gifts (1 Cor. 12:4–7) Testifies in our hearts that we are God’s children (Gal. 4:6) Leads us (Gal. 5:18, 25) Makes us fruitful (Gal. 5:22–23) Grants and nurtures in us resurrection life (Rom. 8:11) Enables us to kill sin (Rom. 8:13) Intercedes for us when we don’t know what to pray (Rom. 8:26–27)

Guides us into truth (John 16:13) Transforms us into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18)

But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, “Where are you going?” But

because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. (John 16:5–7)

When Paul gets personal in Galatians and speaks of “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20), he is saying something that no one could say apart from the Spirit.

Paul is saying that the Spirit has been given to us in order that we might know, way down deep, the endless grace of the heart of God.

. . . the Father of mercies and God of all comfort. 2 Corinthians 1:3

He is the Father of mercies.

If your heart be hard, his mercies are tender. If your heart be dead, he has mercy to liven it. If you be sick, he has mercy to heal you. If you be sinful, he has mercies to sanctify and cleanse you.

He sovereignly ordains the particular angle of the flutter of the leaf that falls from the tree and the breeze that knocked it free (Matt. 10:29–31), and he sovereignly ordains the

bomb that evil minds detonate (Amos 3:6; Luke 13:1–5). But through and underneath and fueling all that washes into our lives, great and small, is the heart of a Father.

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

Jesus is the embodiment of who God is. He is the tangible epitomization of God. Jesus Christ is the visible manifestation of the invisible God (2 Cor. 4:4, 6). In him we see heaven’s eternal heart walking around on two legs in time and space. When we see the heart of Christ, then, throughout the four Gospels, we are seeing the very compassion and tenderness of who God himself most deeply is.

He does not afflict from his heart. Lamentations 3:33

The Gospels themselves show that they understood the Old Testament to be preparing us for a “humble” Savior (Matt. 21:5).

This doctrine gives us unspeakable comfort since it teaches us that nothing can happen to us by chance but only by the arrangement of our gracious heavenly Father, who watches over us with fatherly care, sustaining all creatures under his lordship, so that not one of the hairs on our heads (for they are all numbered) nor even a little bird can fall to the ground without the will of our Father. (Art. 13)

The first two major decisions God makes following creation are both said to be matters of his heart: destroying all flesh except Noah (6:6), and accepting Noah’s sacrifice and determining never to flood the earth again (8:21). Apparently God is also complex enough to make decisions both of judgment and of mercy out of his heart.

“A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger . . .” Exodus 34:6

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and

sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Ex. 34:6–7)

God is described as having “compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love” (3:32),