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

by Dane C. Ortlund

Rather, the two rise and fall together. The more robust one’s felt understanding of the just wrath of Christ against all that is evil both around us and within us, the more robust our felt understanding of his mercy.

miracles are not an interruption of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order. We are so used to a fallen world that sickness, disease, pain, and death seem natural. In fact, they are the interruption.

They are the only truly “natural” thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.

his heart refused to let him sleep in.

Through his Spirit, Christ’s own heart envelops his people with an embrace nearer and tighter than any physical embrace could ever achieve.

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.

Yet as truly man, Christ’s heart is not drained by our coming to him; his heart is filled up all the more by our coming to him.

If sin were the color blue, we do not occasionally say or do something blue; all that we say, do, and think has some taint of blue.

Our tendency is to feel intuitively that the more difficult life gets, the more alone we are. As we sink further into pain, we sink further into felt isolation. The Bible corrects us. 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.

Jesus’s sinlessness means that he knows temptation better than we ourselves do. C. S. Lewis made this point by speaking of a man walking against the wind. Once the wind of temptation gets strong enough, the man lies down, giving in—and thus not knowing what it would have been like ten minutes later. 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.

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.

What elicits tenderness from Jesus is not the severity of the sin but whether the sinner comes to him.

He knows our sinfulness far more deeply than we do. Indeed, we are aware of just the tip of the iceberg of our depravity, even in our most searching moments of self-knowledge. His restraint simply flows from his tender heart for his people.

It’s telling us the kind of love he has: rather than dispensing grace to us from on high, he gets down with us, he puts his arm around us, he deals with us in the way that is just what we need.

The reason we feel as if divine wrath can easily be overstated is that we do not feel the true weight of sin.

we don’t feel the weight of our sin because of: our sin. If we saw with deeper clarity just how insidious and pervasive and revolting sin is—and, as Lloyd-Jones suggests above, we can see this only as we see the beauty and holiness of God—we would know that human evil calls for an intensity of judgment of divine proportion.

the purer a heart, the more horrified at evil, so also the purer a heart, the more it is naturally drawn out to help and relieve and protect and comfort,

He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin.

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

intercession applies what the atonement accomplished.

Intercession is the constant hitting “refresh” of our justification in the court of heaven.

Christ does not intercede because the Father’s heart is tepid toward us but because the Son’s heart is so full toward us. But the Father’s own deepest delight is to say yes to the Son’s pleading on our behalf.

Christ continues to intercede on our behalf in heaven because we continue to fail here on earth.

it refers to a depth of feeling in which your feelings and longings churn within you. The noun form of this verb means, most literally, one’s guts or intestines.

Sin restrained my emotions of compassion; what would unrestrained emotions of compassion be like? That is what Jesus felt. Perfect, unfiltered compassion.

compassion, an outflowing affection not limited by the sinful self-absorption that restricts our own compassion?

It is the father who loves his daughter most whose anger rises most fiercely if she is mistreated.

That Jesus is friend to sinners is only contemptible to those who feel themselves not to be in that category.

the heart of Christ not only heals our feelings of rejection with his embrace, and not only corrects our sense of his harshness with a view of his gentleness, and not only changes our assumption of his aloofness into an awareness of his sympathy with us, but it also heals our aloneness with his sheer companionship.

He offers us a friendship that gets underneath the pain of our loneliness. While that pain does not go away, its sting is made fully bearable by the far deeper friendship of Jesus.

The key is to understand that at the level of legal acquittal, the Father’s wrath had to be assuaged in order for sinners to be brought back into his favor, but at the level of his own internal desire and affection, he was as eager as the Son for this atonement to take place.

For he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men.

The implicit premise is that God is indeed the one who afflicts. The explicit statement is that he does not do it from his heart.

to the degree that we believe God is sovereign in all our affliction, to that degree we are able to be comforted that he does not afflict us from his heart.

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.

The one who rules and ordains all things brings affliction into our lives with a certain divine reluctance. He is not reluctant about the ultimate good that is going to be brought about through that pain; that indeed is why he is doing it. But something recoils within him in sending that affliction. The pain itself does not reflect his heart.

But when he comes to speak of showing mercy, he says he does it “with his whole heart, and with his whole soul,” as the expression is in Jeremiah 32:41.

“God has no pleasure in the destruction or calamity of persons or people,” writes Edwards. “He had rather they should turn and continue in peace.

not once are we told that God is “provoked to love” or “provoked to mercy.” His anger requires provocation; his mercy is pent up, ready to gush forth.

(For fallen humans, we learn in the New Testament, this is reversed. We are to provoke one another to love, according to Hebrews 10:24.

This does not mean that his goodness shuts off with generation number 1,001. 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 goodness. My heart is set on you.

Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.

Four times in Exodus 33–34 the Lord says he will “pass by” Moses, the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) using the same word (parerchomai) that Mark uses.

God knows that even when we hear of his compassionate pardon, we latch on to that promise with a diminished view of the heart from which that compassionate pardon flows. This is why the Lord continues: 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. What is God saying? He is telling us that we cannot view his expressions of his mercy with our old eyes. Our very view of God must change. What would we say to a seven-year-old who, upon

It’s as if God is saying in verse 8 that he and we think very differently, whereas in verse 9 he is saying precisely how, namely, his “thoughts” (the Hebrew word doesn’t merely mean “passing mental reflection” but “plans,” “devices,” “intentions,” “purposes”) are higher, grander, enveloped in a compassion for which we fallen sinners have no natural category.

There is only one other place in the Bible where we have the exact phrase “as high as the heavens are above the earth.” 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”

He intends to restore you into the radiant resplendence for which you were created. And that is dependent not on you keeping yourself clean but on you taking your mess to him.

your very sins move him to pity more than to anger. . . .

Christ takes part with you, and is far from being provoked against you, as all his anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it; yea, his pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father is to a child that has some loathsome disease, or as one is to a member of his body that has leprosy, he hates not the member, for it is his flesh, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected the more.