Notes on *Gentle and Lowly*
Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers, Dane Ortlund (Crossway, 2020)
Main Idea/Takeaway
The heart of Jesus, according to his own testimony, is gentle and lowly to all who cry to him for help, which cannot be over-celebrated or too exaggerated.
“Gentle and lowly" This, according to his own testimony, is Christ's very heart. This is who he is. Tender. Open. Welcoming. Accommodating. Understanding. Willing. If we are asked to say only one thing about who Jesus is, we would be honoring Jesus's own teaching if our answer is, gentle and lowly." (21)
“This is the one whose deepest heart is, more than anything else, gentle and lowly.” (24)
Interaction
"Miracles are the only truly natural thing in a world fallen to unnatural, demonized." (31)
"Jesus has felt the full force of our temptation because he endured it unto purity whereas we give in. Jesus endured temptation all the way to purity, thus enduring temptation longer, more fully." (48)
"This truth changes everything in our experience of pain." (50)
"I see the grammatical similarity, but what is the implication? Co-suffer/restrained passion?" (52)
"Our places of most severe brokenness are the places where Jesus is most strongly drawn." (83)
"'Most humble' In what moment was he most humble? The cross. Humility is not a virtue for tranquility, but for chaos." (97)
"We must understand anger as a form of love- a defense of our loves against threats." (109)
"God with us became God in us." (124)
"His anger requires provocation." (148)
"What are the implications here for how to treat fellow Christians who differ on convictions? We may disagree with them, but they are so loved by God. Tread carefully with God's beloved." (173)
"Best page in the book!" (179)
"Oh to see the brethren this way!" (187)
"Good Friday meditation" (200)
"Crucial qualification" (204)
"All good things do not come to an end, because the best of things will last forever and only get better throughout eternity." (213)
"On applying to life." (215)
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. His Very Heart
II. His Heart in Action
III. The Happiness of Christ
IV. Able to Sympathize
V. He Can Deal Gently
VI. I Will Never Cast Out
VII. What Our Sins Evoke
VIII. To the Uttermost
IX. An Advocate
X. The Beauty of the Heart of Christ
XI. The Emotional Life of Christ
XII. A Tender Friend
XIII. Why the Spirit?
XIV. Father of Mercies
XV. His "Natural" Work and His "Strange" Work
XVI. The Lord, the Lord
XVII. His Ways Are Not Our Ways
XVIII. Yearning Bowels
XIX. Rich in Mercy
XX. Our Law-ish Hearts, His Lavish Heart
XXI. He Loved Us Then; He'll Love Us Now
XXII. To the End
XXIII. Buried in His Heart Forevermore
Epilogue
Favorite Quotes by Chapter
Introduction
“This is a book about the heart of Christ. Who is he? Who is he really? What is most natural to him? What ignites within him most immediately as he moves toward sinners and sufferers? What flows out most freely, most instinctively? Who is he?” (13)
“We are not focusing centrally on what Christ has done. We are considering who he is. The two matters are bound up together and indeed interdependent. But they are distinct. The gospel offers us not only legal exoneration--in-violably precious truth! -it also sweeps us into Christ's very heart.” (15)
I. His Very Heart
“One thing to get straight right from the start is that when the Bible speaks of the heart, whether Old Testament or New, it is not speaking of our emotional life only but of the central animating center of all we do.” (18)
“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 prerequisites. No hoops to jump through.” (20)
“You don't need to unburden or collect yourself and then come to Jesus. Your very burden is what qualifies you to come. No payment is required; he says, "I will give you rest." His rest is gift, not transaction.” (21)
“This is not who he is to everyone, indiscriminately. This is who he is for those who come to him, who take his yoke upon them, who cry to him for help.” (21)
II. His Heart in Action
“But the dominant note left ringing in our ears after reading the Gospels, 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.” (27)
“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.” (27)
“This is deeper than saying Jesus is loving or merciful or gracious. 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.” (30)
"When Jesus, the Clean One, touched an unclean sinner, Christ did not become unclean. The sinner became clean." (31)
"We are so used to a fallen world that sickness, disease, pain, and death seem natural. In fact, they are the interruption." (31)
"The New Testament teaches that we are united to Christ, a union so intimate that whatever our own body parts do, Christ's body can be said to do (1 Cor. 6:15-1). Jesus Christ is closer to you today than he was to the sinners and sufferers he spoke with and touched in his earthly ministry." (33)
III. The Happiness of Christ
“He drew near to us in the incarnation so that his joy and ours could rise and fall together-his in giving mercy, ours in receiving it.” (37)
“We tend to think that when we approach Jesus for help in our need and mercy amid our sins, we somehow detract from him, lessen him, impoverish him. Goodwin argues otherwise. Jesus surprises us in "exercising acts of grace, and from his continual doing good unto and for his members ... from his filling them with all mercy, grace, comfort, and felicity, himself becoming yet more full, by filling them."4 As truly God, Christ cannot become any more full; he shares in his Father's immortal, eternal, unchangeable fullness. 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.” (38)
“When we today partake of that atoning work, coming to Christ for forgiveness, communing with him despite our sinfulness, we are laying hold of Christ's own deepest longing and joy.” (40)
IV. Able to Sympathize
“The reason that Jesus is in such close solidarity with us is that the difficult path we are on is not unique to us.” (47)
“That enticing * temptation, that sore trial, that bewildering perplexity- he has been there. Indeed, his utter purity suggests that he has felt these pains more acutely than we sinners ever could.” (48)
“One is that 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. Only he truly knows the cost." (49)
“He himself is not trapped in the hole of sin with us; he alone can pull us out. His sinlessness is our salvation.” (49)
“Not only can he alone pull us out of the hole of sin; he alone desires to climb in and bear our burdens. Jesus is able to sympathize.” (49)
“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.” (50)
V. He Can Deal Gently
“What elicits tenderness from Jesus is not the severity of the sin but whether the sinner comes to him. Whatever our offense, he deals gently with us. If we never come to him, we will experience a judgment so fierce it will be like a double-edged sword coming out of his mouth at us (Rev. 1:16; 2:12; 19:15, 21). If we do come to him, as fierce as his lion-like judgment would have been against us, so deep will be his lamb-like tenderness for us (cf. Rev. 5:5-6; Isa. 40:10-11). We will be enveloped in one or the other. To no one will Jesus be neutral.” (54)
“This very care, this gentle dealing with all kinds of sinners, is what is most natural to him. Owen goes on to say that Christ "does not, in his dealings with us, more properly or more fully set out any property of his nature than he does his compassion, long-suffering, and forbearance."4 In other words, when Jesus "deals gently" with us, he is doing what is most fitting and natural to him.” (56)
“Our sinfulness runs so deep that a tepid measure of gentleness from Jesus would not be enough; but as deep our sinfulness runs, ever deeper runs his gentleness.” (56)
“Contrary to what we expect to be the case, therefore, the deeper into weakness and suffering and testing we go, the deeper Christ's solidarity with us. As we go down into pain and anguish, we are descending ever deeper into Christ's very heart, not away from it.” (57)
VI. I Will Never Cast Out
“So with Christ. We cling to him, to be sure. But our grip is that of a two-year-old amid the stormy waves of life. His sure grasp never falters. Psalm 63:8 expresses the double-sided truth: "My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” (65)
“We have come, more deeply, to the doctrine of the perseverance of the heart of Christ. Yes, professing Christians can fall away, proving that they were never truly in Christ. Yes, once a sinner is united to Christ, there is nothing that can dis-unite them. But within the skeletal structure of these doctrines, what is the beating heart of God, made tangible in Christ? What is most deeply instinctive to him as our sins and sufferings pile up? What keeps him from growing cold? The answer is, his heart.” (66)
VII. What Our Sins Evoke
“But the grace of God comes to us no more and no less than Jesus Christ comes to us. In the biblical gospel we are not given a thing; we are given a person.” (69)
“If you are part of Christ's own body, your sins evoke his deepest heart, his compassion and pity. He "takes part with you"-that is, he's on your side. He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin. He hates sin. But he loves you. We understand this, says Goodwin, when we consider the hatred a father has against a terrible disease afflicting his child--the father hates the disease while loving the child. Indeed, at some level the presence of the disease draws out his heart to his child all the more.” (71)
“God is not a platonic ideal, immovably austere, beyond the reach of meaningful human engagement. God is free of all fallen emotion, but not all emotion (or feeling) whatsoever--where do our own emotions come from, we who are made in his image?” (74)
“The Bible says that when God looks at his people's sinfulness, his transcendent holiness-
-his God-ness, his very divinity, that about God which makes him not us--is what makes him unable to come down on his people in wrath.” (74)
“The sins of those who belong to God open the floodgates of his heart of compassion for us. The dam breaks. It is not our loveliness that wins his love. It is our unloveliness.” (75)
VIII. To the Uttermost
“It is the most counterintuitive aspect of Christianity, that we are declared right with God not once we begin to get our act together but once we collapse into honest acknowledgment that we never will.” (78)
“And the present manifestation of his heart for his people is his constant interceding on their behalf.” (79)
“What then does it mean for Christ to intercede? Who are the parties involved? God the Father, on the one hand, and we believers, on the other. But why would Jesus need to intercede for us? After all, haven't we been completely justified already? What is there for Christ to plead on our behalf? Hasn't he already done all that is needed to fully acquit us? In other words, does the doctrine of Christ's heavenly intercession mean that something was left incomplete in his atoning work on the cross? If we speak of the finished work of Christ on the cross, does the doctrine of intercession suggest that the cross was actually left unfinished? The answer is that intercession applies what the atonement accomplished. Christ's present heavenly intercession on our behalf is a reflection of the fullness and victory and completeness of his earthly work, not a reflection of anything lacking in his earthly work. The atonement accomplished our salvation; intercession is the moment-by-moment application of that atoning work.” (79)
“Intercession is the constant hitting "refresh" of our justification in the court of heaven.” (80)
“The Son's intercession does not reflect the coolness of the Father but the sheer warmth of the Son.” (80)
“But the Father's own deepest delight is to say yes to the Son's pleading on our behalf.” (80)
“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. His heart willingly goes there. His heart is most strongly drawn there.” (83)
“This is the explicit acknowledgment that we Christians are ongoing sinners. Christ continues to intercede on our behalf in heaven because we continue to fail here on earth. He does not forgive us through his work on the cross and then hope we make it the rest of the way.” (84)
IX. An Advocate
“To come to the Father without an advocate is hopeless. To be allied with an advocate, one who came and sought me out rather than waiting for me to come to him, one who is righteous in all the ways I am not--this is calm and confidence before the Father.” (89)
“Your salvation is not merely a matter of a saving formula, but of a saving person. When you sin, his strength of resolve rises all the higher. When his brothers and sisters fail and stumble, he advocates on their behalf because it is who he is. He cannot bear to leave us alone to fend for ourselves.” (91)
X. The Beauty of the Heart of Christ
"Everything that is lovely in God is in Christ, and everything that 15 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." (97)
“In our churches today we often refer to the glory of God and the glory of Christ. But what is it about God's glory that draws us in and causes us to conquer our sins and makes us radiant people? Is it the sheer size of God, a consideration of the immensity of the universe and thus of the Creator, a sense of God's transcendent greatness, that pulls us toward him? No, Edwards would say; it is the loveliness of his heart. It is, he says, a "sight of the divine beauty of Christ, that bows the wills, and draws the hearts of men. A sight of the greatness of God in his attributes, may overwhelm men.” (97)
“Seeing only his greatness, "the enmity and opposition of the heart, may remain in its full strength, and the will remain inflexible; whereas, one glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God, and supreme amiableness of Jesus Christ, shining into the heart, overcomes and abolishes this opposition, and inclines the soul to Christ, as it were, by an omnipotent power." (98)
“In other words, when we come to Christ, we are startled by the beauty of his welcoming heart. The surprise is itself what draws us in.” (98)
"There is no love so great and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ." How might we, in our own way and time, do the same?” (100)
“But at the center, our job is to show our kids that even our best love is a shadow of a greater love. To put a sharper edge on it: to make the tender heart of Christ irresistible and unforgettable. Our goal is that our kids would leave the house at eighteen and be unable to live the rest of their lives believing that their sins and sufferings repel Christ." (100)
“But there's something he has shown me that runs even deeper than truth about God, and that is the heart of God, proven in Christ, the friend of sinners. Dad made that heart beautiful to me He didn't crowbar me into that; he drew me in.” (101)
XI. The Emotional Life of Christ
“The Son of God clothed himself with humanity and will never unclothe him-self. He became a man and always will be. This is the significance of the doctrine of Christ's ascension: he went into heaven with the very body, reflecting his full humanity, that was raised out of the tomb.” (103)
“One implication of this truth of Christ's permanent humanity is that when we see the feeling and passions and affections of the incarnate Christ toward sinners and sufferers as given to us in the four Gospels, we are seeing who Jesus is for us today.” (104)
“Our emotions are diseased by the fall, of course, just as every part of fallen humanity is affected by the fall. But emotions are not themselves a result of the fall. Jesus experienced the full range of emotions that we do (Heb. 2:17; 4:15).” (104)
“Yes, Jesus pronounced searing denunciations on those who cause children to sin, saying it would be a better fate if they were drowned (Matt. 18:6), not because he gleefully enjoys torturing the wicked but most deeply because he loves little children. It is his heart of love, not a gleeful exacting of justice, that rises up from his soul to elicit such a fearsome pronouncement of woe.” (109)
“What we are saying is that, yes, Christ got angry and still gets angry, for he is the perfect human, who loves too much to remain indifferent. And this righteous anger reflects his heart, his tender compassion. But because his deepest heart is tender compassion, he is the quickest to get angry and feels anger most furiously- and all without a hint of sin tainting that anger.” (110)
“While Christ is a lion to the impenitent, he is a lamb to the penitent--the reduced, the open, the hungry, the desiring, the confessing, the self-effacing. He hates with righteous hatred all that plagues you.” (111)
“As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion for you. The indignation he felt when he came upon mistreatment of others in the Gospels is the same indignation he feels now in heaven upon mistreatments of you.” (112)
XII. A Tender Friend
“The very two groups of people whom Jesus is accused of befriending in Matthew 11 are those who can't stay away from him in Luke 15. They are at ease around him. They sense something different about him.” (114)
“In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence.” (115)
“To be sure, Christ is indeed our ruler, our authority, the one to whom all allegiance and obedience are reverently due. Sibbes reminds us of that explicitly as he reflects on the friendship of Christ ("As he is our friend, so he is our king."). But equally, and perhaps less obvious or intuitive to us, the condescension of God in the person of his Son means that he approaches us on our own terms and befriends us for both his and our mutual delight.” (119)
XIII. Why the Spirit?
“The Spirit takes what we read in the Bible and believe on paper about Jesus's heart and moves it from theory to reality, from doctrine to experience.” (122)
“What is the advantage of the Spirit coming? The natural reading is that he will rectify something that is wrong. And what is wrong? "Sorrow has filled your heart" John 16:6). Apparently the coming of the Spirit will do the opposite: fill their hearts with joy. The Spirit replaces sorrow with joy.” (123)
“The Spirit is the continuation of the heart of Christ for his people after the departure of Jesus to heaven.” (123)
“All that we see and hear of the gracious heart of Jesus in his earthly life will, during his ascended state, enter into the consciousness of his people as experiential reality.” (125)
XIV. Father of Mercies
“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. Objectively, the Father was the one needing to be placated; subjectively, his heart was one with the Son. We err when we draw conclusions about who he is subjectively based on what needed to happen objectively.” (128)
“What should come into our mind when we think about God The triune God is three in one, a fountain of endless mercies extending to, meeting, and over-flowingly providing for us in all our many needs and failures and wanderings. This is who he is, Father no less than Son, Son no less than Father.” (132)
“He is the tangible epitomization of God. Jesus Christ is the visible manifestation of the invisible God (2 Cor. 4:4, 6).” (133)
“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.” (133)
XV. His "Natural" Work and His "Strange" Work
“Jesus provides new sharpness to who God is, but not fundamentally new content.” (135)
“But when he comes to show mercy, to manifest that it is his nature and disposition, it is said that he does it with his whole heart. There is nothing at all in him that is against it. The act itself pleases him for itself. There is no reluctance in him.” (139)
“Theologians speak of God's simplicity, by which we mean that God is not the sum total of a number of attributes, like pieces of a pie making a whole pie; rather, God is every attribute perfectly. God does not have parts. He is just. He is wrathful. He is good. And so on, each in endless perfection.” (140)
“God is unswervingly just. But what is his disposition? What is he on the edge of his seat eager to do? Ir you catch me off guard, what will leap out of me before I have time to regain composure will likely be grouchiness. If you catch God off guard, what leaps out most freely is blessing. The impulse to do good. The desire to swallow us up in joy." (140)
“For God to be merciful is for God to be God. Left to our own natural intuitions about God, we will conclude that mercy is his strange work and judgment his natural work. Rewiring our vision of God as we study the Scripture, we see, helped by the great teachers of the past, that judgment is his strange work and mercy his natural work.” (144)
XVI. The Lord, the Lord
“When we speak of God's glory, we are speaking of who God is, what he is like, his distinctive resplendence, what makes God God. And when God himself sets the terms on what his glory is, he surprises us into wonder.” (147)
“The bent of God's heart is mercy. His glory is his goodness. His glory is his lowliness. "Great is the glory of the LoRD. For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly" (Ps. 138:5-6).” (147)
“But 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.” (148)
"Keeping steadfast love for thousands." This could equally be translated "keeping steadfast love to a thousand generations," as is explicitly stated in 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." 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.” (149)
XVII. His Ways Are Not Our Ways
“So God tells us in plain terms how tiny our natural views of his heart are. His thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. And not because we're just a few degrees off. No, "as high as the heavens are above the earth"-a Hebrew way of expressing spatial infinitude-_-"so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (v. 9). In verse 8 God says his ways and ours are different; in verse 9 he gets more specific and says his thoughts are higher. 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.” (158)
“There is indeed a great distance between God and us; we think small thoughts of God's heart, but he knows his heart is inviolably, expansively, invincibly set on us.”(159)
“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. He doesn't limit himself to working with the unspoiled parts of us that remain after a lifetime of sinning. 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.” (161)
XVIII. Yearning Bowels
“Whom do you perceive him to be, in your sin and your suffer-ing? Who do you think God is-_-not just on paper but in the kind of person you believe is hearing you when you pray? How does he feel about you? His saving of us is not cool and calculating. It is a matter of yearning not yearning for the Facebook you, the you that you project to everyone around you. Not the you that you wish you were. Yearning for the real you. The you underneath everything you present to others.” (166)
“Out of his heart flows mercy; out of ours, reluctance to receive it.” (166)
“If the intensity of love maps onto the intensity of misery in the one beloved, and if our greatest misery is our sinfulness, then God's most intense love flows down to us in our sinfulness. Yes, God has hatred, Goodwin says--toward sin. And the combination of love for us plus hatred for sin equals the most omnipotent certainty possible that he will see us through to final liberation from sin and unfiltered basking in his own joyous heart for us one day.” (168)
XIX. Rich in Mercy
“It means the Christian life is a lifelong shedding of tepid thoughts of the goodness of God. In his justice, God is exacting; in his mercy, God is overflowing.” (172)
“But if he is essentially merciful, then for him to pour out mercy is for him to act in accord with who he is. It is simply for him to be God. When God shows mercy, he is acting in a way that is true to himself.” (173)
“Perhaps you carry a pain that will never heal till you are dead. If my life is any evidence of the mercy of God in Christ, you might think, I'm not impressed. 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. If God sent his own Son to walk through the valley of condemnation, rejection, and hell, you can trust him as you walk through your own valleys on your way to heaven.” (179)
“To you I say, do you know what Jesus does with those who squander his mercy? He pours out more mercy. God is rich in mercy. That's the whole point.” (179)
“That God is rich in mercy means that your regions of deepest shame and regret are not hotels through which divine mercy passes but homes in which divine mercy abides. It means the things about you that make you cringe most, make him hug hardest.” (179)
XX. Our Lawish Hearts, His Lavish Heart
“There are two ways to live the Christian life. You can live it either for the heart of Christ or from the heart of Christ. You can live for the smile of God or from it.” (181)
“A healthy Christian life is built on both the objective and the subjective sides of the gospel--the justification that flows from the work of Christ, and the love that flows from the heart of Christ.” (183)
“As the gospel sinks in more deeply over time, and we wade ever deeper into the heart of Christ, one of the first outer shells of our old life that the gospel pierces is the doing of works unto approval.” (185)
“There is an entire psychological substructure that, due to the fall, is a near-constant manufacturing of relational leveraging, fear-stuffing, nervousness, score-keeping, neurotic controlling, anxiety-festering silliness that is not something we say or even think so much as something we exhale.” (185)
“The felt love of Christ really is what brings rest, wholeness, flourishing, shalom-that existential calm that for brief, gospel-sane moments settles over you and lets you step in out of the storm of of-works-ness.” (186)
“And the Christian life is simply the process of bringing my sense of self, my Identity with a capital "I," the ego, my swirling internal world of fretful panicky-ness arising out of that gospel deficit, into alignment with the more fundamental truth. The gospel is the invitation to let the heart of Christ calm us into joy, for we've already been discovered, included, brought in. We can bring our up-and-down moral performance into subjection to the settled fixedness of what Jesus feels about us.” (187)
“In the gospel, we are free to receive the comforts that are due us. Don't turn them off. Open the vent of your heart to the love of Christ, who loved you and gave himself for you.” (188)
XXI. He Loved Us Then; He'll Love Us Now
“Perhaps, as believers today, we know God loves us. We really believe that. But if we were to more closely examine how we actually relate to the Father moment by moment-_-which reveals our actual theology, whatever we say we believe on paper--many of us tend to believe it is a love infected with disappointment.” (189)
“God didn't meet us halfway. He refused to hold back, cautious, assessing our worth. That is not his heart. He and his Son took the initiative. On terms of grace and grace alone. In defiance of what we deserved. When we, despite our smiles and civility, were running from God as fast as we could, building our own kingdoms and loving our own glory, lapping up the fraudulent pleasures of the world, repulsed by the beauty of God and shutting up our ears at his calls to come home--it was then, in the hollowed-out horror of that revolting existence, that the prince of heaven bade his adoring angels farewell. It was then that he put himself into the murderous hands of these very rebels in a divine strategy planned from eternity past to rinse muddy sinners clean and hug them into his own heart despite their squirmy attempt to get free and scrub themselves clean on their own.” (191)
“In Christ's death, God is confronting our dark thoughts of him and our chronic insistence that divine love must have an endpoint, a limit, a point at which it finally runs dry/Christ died to confound our intuitive assumptions that divine love has an expiration date. He died to prove that God's love is, as Jonathan Edwards put it, "an ocean without shores or bottom. God's love is as boundless as God himself. This is why the apostle Paul speaks of divine love as a reality that stretches to an immeasurable "breadth and length and height and depth" (Eph. 3:18)-the only thing in the universe as immeasurable as that is God himself. God's love is as expansive as God himself.” (192)
“What's the ultimate point Paul is driving at in Romans 5:6-11? Not God's past work, mainly. Paul's deepest burden is our present security, given that past work.” (193)
“Conversion isn't a fresh start. Conversion, authentic regeneration, is the invincibilizing of our future.” (193)
“We will be less sinful in the next life than we are now, but we will not be any more secure in the next life than we are now.” (195)
XXII. To the End
“This is not who Christ is indiscriminately. The text says it is "his own" whom he loves to the end.” (203)
“To those who are not his own, Jesus is a fearful judge, one whose wrath cannot be assuaged or dampened; the Bible teaches that Jesus will one day be "revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus" (2 Thess. 1:7-8)." (204)
"That passage goes on to say those who do not belong to Christ "will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction" (1:9). But for his own, Jesus himself endured that punishment. He set his heart on his own. They are his. "There is not the meanest, the weakest, the poorest believer on the earth," wrote Owen, "but Christ prizes him more than all the world." (204)
XXIII. Buried in His Heart Forevermore
“When we live to glorify God, we step into the only truly humanizing way of living.”(205)
“The creation of the world, and the ruinous fall into sin that called for a re-creative work, un-dammed the heart of Chris, And Christs heart food is how God's glory surges forth further and brighter than it ever could otherwise.” (207)
“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.” (208)
“The point of unending eternal life in the new heavens and the new earth is that God "might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” (209)
“The very point of heaven and eternity is to enjoy his "grace in kindness." (209)
“That thing we've done that sent our life into meltdown-that is where God in Christ becomes more real than ever in this life and more wonderful to us in the next. (And those of us who have been pretty squeaky clean will get there one day and realize more than ever how deeply sin and self-righteousness and pride and all kinds of willful subconscious rebellions were way down deep inside us, and how all that sends God's grace in kindness soaring, and we too will stand, astonished, at how great his heart is for us.” (210)
“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." (211)
“If are in Christ, you have been eternally invincibilized.” (211)
“For those in Christ, for whom Ephesians 2:7 is the eternal vista just around the next bend in the road, this life is the worst it will ever get.” (212)
Epilogue
"The Christian life boils down to two steps: (216)
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.” (216)
Notable Content
“As we zero in on the affectionate heart of Christ, how do we ensure that we are growing in a healthy understanding of the whole counsel of God and a comprehensive and therefore proportionate vision of who Christ is?" (29)
First, the wrath of Christ and the mercy of Christ are not at odds with one another, like a see-saw, one diminishing to the degree that the other is held up.Rather, the two rise and fall together.
Second, in speaking specifically of the heart of Christ (and the heart of God in the Old Testament), we are not really on the wrath-mercy spectrum anyway. His heart is his heart.
Third, we are simply seeking to follow the biblical witness in speaking of Christ's heart of affection toward sinners and sufferers.
In other words, if there appears to be some sense of disproportion in the Bible's portrait of Christ, then let us be accordingly disproportionate. Better to be biblical than artificially "balanced."
In short: it is impossible for the affectionate heart of Christ to be over-celebrated, made too much of, exaggerated.
