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

by Dane C. Ortlund

“Great is the glory of the Lord. For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly” (Ps. 138:5–6).

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.”

It is God’s own way of saying: 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 g...

Isaiah 54:7–8, where the Lord says: For a brief moment I deserted you, but with great compassion I

will gather you. In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you.

When John speaks of the Word becoming flesh he says, “We have seen his glory”—we have seen what Moses asked to see but couldn’t—“full of grace and truth” (John 1:14,

Jesus came to do in flesh and blood what God had done only in wind and voice in the Old Testament.

We are being told of God’s deepest heart in Exodus 34. But we are shown that heart in the

Galilean carpenter, who testified that this was his heart throughout his life and then proved it when he went to a Roman cross, descending into the hell of God-forsakenness in our place.

My thoughts are not your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way,

and the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa. 55:6–9)

In Psalm 103 David prays: “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him” (v. 11). The two passages—Psalm 103:11 and Isaiah 55:9—mutually illumine one another.2 God’s ways and thoughts are not our ways and thoughts in that his are thoughts of love and ways of compassion that stretch to a degree beyond our mental horizon.

His power runs so deep that he is able to redeem the very worst parts of our past into the most radiant parts of our future. But we need to take those dark miseries to him.

Thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place,

and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.” (57:15)

My heart yearns for him. Jeremiah 31:20

“I have loved you with an everlasting love,” he assures them (Jer. 31:3).

Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still.

Therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, declares the Lord.

But God, being rich in mercy . . . Ephesians 2:4

“rich in mercy” looks like—how “rich in mercy” talks, how it conducts itself toward sinners, how it moves toward sufferers. Jesus not only proved that God is rich in mercy by going to the cross and dying in our place to secure that mercy. Jesus also shows us how God’s richness in mercy actually looks and speaks.

To you I say, the evidence of Christ’s mercy toward you is not your life. The evidence of his mercy toward you is his—mistreated, misunderstood, betrayed, abandoned. Eternally. In your place.

The Son of God, who loved me . . . Galatians 2:20

Galatians teaches that we are made right with God based on what Christ has done rather than on what we do.

Think of a vent in your bedroom that’s connected to your furnace. If you keep that vent closed on a cold winter day, the heat will be circulating throughout the ducts in your home, but you will not experience warmth because you’re closing it off. Opening the vent floods your room with warmth. The heat was already there, waiting to be accessed. But you were not benefiting from it.

His heart for me could not sit still in heaven.

God shows his love for us . . . Romans 5:8

For God to cease to love his own, God would need to cease to exist, because God does not simply have love; he is love (1 John 4:16).

“For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son”—and here’s the point again—“much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. John 13:1

We love until we are betrayed. Jesus continued to the cross despite betrayal. We love until we are forsaken. Jesus loved through forsakenness. We love up to a limit. Jesus loves to the end.

Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (John 13:1)

Would it not have been the withdrawal of God’s love from his heart, not the withdrawal of oxygen from his lungs, that killed him?

. . . so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us. Ephesians 2:7

We are pieces of art, designed to be beautiful and thus draw attention to our artist. We are simply made for nothing else.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with

which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.