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

by Dane C. Ortlund

We couldn’t have cared less. We were weak. Sinners. Enemies. It was only after the fact, only once the Holy Spirit came flooding into our hearts, that the realization swept over us: he walked through my death. And he didn’t simply die. He was condemned. He didn’t simply leave heaven for me; he endured hell for me. He, not deserving to be condemned, absorbed it in my place—I, who alone deserved it. That is his heart. And into our empty souls, like a glass of cold water to a thirsty mouth, God poured his Holy Spirit to internalize the actual experience of God’s love

Christ loved his own all the way through death itself. What must that mean for you? It means, first, that your future is secure. If you are his, heaven and relief is coming, for you cannot be made un-his. He himself made you his own, and you can’t squirm out of his grasp. And it means, second, that he will love you to the end. Not only is your future secure, on the basis of his death; your present is secure, proven in his heart. He will love you to the end because he cannot bear to do otherwise. No exit strategy. No prenup. He’ll love to the end—“to the end of their lives, to the end of their sins, to the end of their temptations, to the end of their fears.”

What’s the meaning of everything? What’s the telos, the aim, the macro reason and goal, for our small, ordinary lives? We are on solid footing, both biblically and historically, if we answer: “To glorify God.”

The creation of the world seems to have been especially for this end, that the eternal Son of God might obtain a spouse, towards whom he might fully exercise the infinite benevolence of his nature, and to whom he might, as it were, open and pour forth all that immense fountain of condescension, love, and grace that was in his heart, and that in this way God might be glorified.

The creation of the world was to give vent to the gracious heart of Christ. And the joy of heaven is that we will enjoy that unfettered and undiluted heart forevermore.

If his grace in kindness is “immeasurable,” then our failures can never outstrip his grace. Our moments of feeling utterly overwhelmed by life are where God’s heart lives. Our most haunted pockets of failure and regret are where his heart is drawn most unswervingly.

His grace in kindness is “toward us.” You could translate this “to us” or even “over us” or “on us.” This is personal. Not abstract. His heart, his thoughts, now and on into eternity, are toward us. His grace is not a blob out there that we have to figure out how to get into. He sends his grace to us, personally, individually, eternally. Indeed, he sends himself—there’s no such “thing” as grace (remembering that such a view is Roman Catholic teaching). He sends not grace in the abstract but Christ himself. That’s why Paul immediately adds “in Christ Jesus.”

If you are in Christ, you have been eternally invincibilized.

The Christian life boils down to two steps: 1. Go to Jesus. 2. See #1.

Whatever is crumbling all around you in your life, wherever you feel stuck, this remains, un-deflectable: his heart for you, the real you, is gentle and lowly. So go to him. That place in your life where you feel most defeated, he is there; he lives there, right there, and his heart for you, not on the other side of it but in that darkness, is gentle and lowly.