The Best Quotes from Gentle and Lowly

Sometimes you just need to be reminded that Jesus loves you. As the stresses of life and opposition from others mount, we can forget this simple truth. We think that we need something more, something deeper to help us grow spiritually. Often, we just need to remember the heart of Christ towards us.

This is what I loved about Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly. It is a long meditation on the love of Christ for us and the heart of Christ towards us. Page after page bathes us in the best news we could ever hear. This important work is water for our weary souls.

These are my favorite quotes from Gentle and Lowly:

It is one thing to describe what your husband says and does and looks like. It is something else, something deeper and more real, to describe his heart for you. So with Christ. It is one thing to know the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement and a hundred other vital doctrines. It is another, more searching matter to know his heart for you. (Location: 188)

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. (Location: 215)

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. (Location: 240)

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. (Location: 251)

This high and holy Christ does not cringe at reaching out and touching dirty sinners and numbed sufferers. (Location: 294)

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. (Location: 342)

It is impossible for the affectionate heart of Christ to be overcelebrated, made too much of, exaggerated. (Location: 372)

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. (Location: 378)

Jesus Christ is closer to you today than he was to the sinners and sufferers he spoke with and touched in his earthly ministry. Through his Spirit, Christ’s own heart envelops his people with an embrace nearer and tighter than any physical embrace could ever achieve. His actions on earth in a body reflected his heart; the same heart now acts in the same ways toward us, for we are now his body. (Location: 415)

When you come to Christ for mercy and love and help in your anguish and perplexity and sinfulness, you are going with the flow of his own deepest wishes, not against them. (Location: 463)

Jesus Christ is comforted when you draw from the riches of his atoning work, because his own body is getting healed. (Location: 502)

The risen Lord alive and well in heaven today is not somehow less approachable and less compassionate than he was when he walked the earth. (Location: 5360

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. (Location: 703)

Our redemption is not a matter of a gracious Son trying to calm down an uncontrollably angry Father. The Father himself ordains our deliverance. He takes the loving initiative. (Location: 734)

Have you considered what is true of you if you are in Christ? In order for you to fall short of loving embrace into the heart of Christ both now and into eternity, Christ himself would have to be pulled down out of heaven and put back in the grave. His death and resurrection make it just for Christ never to cast out his own, no matter how often they fall. But animating this work of Christ is the heart of Christ. He cannot bear to part with his own, even when they most deserve to be forsaken. (Location: 821)

His heart is as drawn to his people now as ever it was in his incarnate state. And the present manifestation of his heart for his people is his constant interceding on their behalf. (Location: 979)

Our sinning goes to the uttermost. But his saving goes to the uttermost. And his saving always outpaces and overwhelms our sinning, because he always lives to intercede for us. (Location: 1,065)

Though the crowds call him the friend of sinners as an indictment, the label is one of unspeakable comfort for those who know themselves to be sinners. That Jesus is friend to sinners is only contemptible to those who feel themselves not to be in that category. (Location: 1,421)

It is one thing, as a child, to be told your father loves you. You believe him. You take him at his word. But it is another thing, unutterably more real, to be swept up in his embrace, to feel the warmth, to hear his beating heart within his chest, to instantly know the protective grip of his arms. It’s one thing to hear he loves you; it’s another thing to feel his love. This is the glorious work of the Spirit. (Location: 1,542)

The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. (Location: 1,925)

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. (Location: 2,026)

The mercy of God reaches down and rinses clean not only obviously bad people but fraudulently good people, both of whom equally stand in need of resurrection. (Location: 2,258)

When you sin, do a thorough job of repenting. Re-hate sin all over again. Consecrate yourself afresh to the Holy Spirit and his pure ways. But reject the devil’s whisper that God’s tender heart for you has grown a little colder, a little stiffer. He is not flustered by your sinfulness. His deepest disappointment is with your tepid thoughts of his heart. Christ died, placarding before you the love of God. (Location: 2,477)

The point of all human history and eternity itself is to show what cannot be fully shown. To demonstrate what cannot be adequately demonstrated. In the coming age we will descend ever deeper into God’s grace in kindness, into his very heart, and the more we understand of it, the more we will see it to be beyond understanding. It is immeasurable. (Location: 2,710)