Gentle And Lowly Book Quotes

Then I felt his breath on my ear as he said, voice barely audible, “‘I am alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make each hour holy. I am lowly in this world, and yet not lowly enough for me to be just a thing to you, dark and shrewd. I want my will and I want to go with my will as it moves towards action.’” He paused, long, the only sound his breath, a little ragged, before he went on, “‘And I want, in those silent, somehow faltering times, to be with someone who knows, or else alone. I want to reflect everything about you, and I never want to be too blind or too ancient to keep your profound wavering image with me. I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because there, where I’m folded, I am a lie.’” I turned my face toward his voice, eyes still fast shut, and he put his mouth on mine. I felt his lips pull from mine slightly, just for a moment, and heard the rustle of the book laid gently on the floor, and then he wrapped his arms around me.

Isaiah 55:8 The message of this book is that we tend to project our natural expectations about who God is onto him instead of fighting to let the Bible surprise us into what God himself says. Perhaps nowhere in the Bible is that point made more clearly than in Isaiah 55. “There is nothing that troubles our consciences more,” said John Calvin on this passage, “than when we think that God is like ourselves.”1

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” So begins A. W. Tozer’s book The Knowledge of the Holy.1 One way to understand the purpose of this study of Christ’s heart is that it is an attempt to make our mental image of who God is more accurate.

our only hope is that the one who shares in all our pain shares in it as the pure and holy one. Our sinless high priest is not one who needs rescue but who provides it. This is why we can go to him to “receive mercy and find grace” (4:16). He himself is not trapped in the hole of sin with us; he alone can pull us out. His sinlessness is our salvation. But here we are beginning to move over into the work of Christ. The burden of Hebrews 4:15, and of Thomas Goodwin’s book on it, is the heart of Christ. Yes, verse 16 speaks of “the throne of grace.” But verse 15 is opening up to us the heart of grace. 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. He “co-suffers” with us. As Goodwin’s contemporary John Owen put it, Christ “is inclined from his own heart and affections to give . . . us help and relief . . . and he is inwardly moved during our sufferings and trials with a sense and fellow-feeling of them.”5 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. 1

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?