Review: Gently and Lowly

You’ve heard it said that perfect love can cast out fear. When was the last time you felt it?

Maybe it was a long time ago, strong arms that took away the thunder’s bite. Maybe it was more recently, a love that made a loss lose its terror. There are some relationships that slide solid earth under our feet just when we need it.

Has that relationship, for you, ever been with God?

Dane Ortlund wrote a book, Gently and Lowly, wanting to set your feet on the solid ground of God’s love. His argument is simple: Jesus, and therefore God, is more tender towards us than we dare to believe, and it could change everything if we lived like it.

I had a privilege to read Gently and Lowly immediately after reading Union with Christ by Rankin Wilbourne. Union with Christ is a delightful tour through the doctrine of its title, showing historically, biblically, and practically why our being in Christ is so rich and crucial. To then double click on who Christ is in Gently and Lowly was breathtaking, perhaps like a bride in an arranged marriage seeing her groom for the first time and staring open-mouthed at how beautiful he is.

Ortlund’s tactic is to weave Scripture as the warp and selected Puritans as the woof in his tapestry of the lovely Jesus. The call and response between the two sources truly sings. It is easy for the reader to discern that Ortlund has read a lot of Goodwin and Bunyan, and carefully. In fact, he does a great service taking sources that may be too dusty for some and presenting the parts that really shine, acting as their interpreter. But if this were his only task, it wouldn’t be enough. He only works as their interpreter in order to drive to the greater purpose: the heart of Jesus Christ.

Were we to only see it in the Puritans, we may doubt it. Every generation, after all, has its pet themes and glaring blind spots. Instead, Ortlund persuades that these men simply lingered on a theme that is very present in our biblical texts. I’m sure I’m not the only reader who saw many a familiar passage turned in a fresh angle. And the fruit of this turning wasn’t primarily the endorphin hit of new information – it was primarily a heart stirred to wonder at the goodness of God. I can honestly report that I teared up with joy a many points in my reading.

Ortlund has a pastoral heart in his work. He can’t illumine the gentleness, the graciousness, or the patience of Jesus without explaining how precisely opposite this is from the way we normally think of him. We conjure up a Jesus who holds his arms crossed; Ortlund shows us a Jesus with arms already around us.

This is especially evident in how he discusses our sin. When we fail, when we rebel, we easily think of a God who sighs and rolls his eyes. Or we imagine Jesus annoyed, or angry, or standing a little farther often until after we’ve repented. But using his sources, Ortlund argues again and again that in our sin is actually where God’s heart goes out to us the most. It is where the book feels most scandalous, and yet I would be curious to see a good argument against Ortlund’s case as he builds it. He is very careful to explain how much God hates sin and how full he condemns it, even while he reminds us that a father is desperate for his child even and especially when the child is destroying herself. He cannot bear to see the one he loves so treated, even if the wounds are self-inflicted.

The immensity of this love is constantly repeated in Gentle and Lowly. Ortlund shows again and again that it is Jesus’s very character to respond this way. It is a love spanning further than galaxies, holding stronger than steel beams. It is a love unconquered and unconquerable – and it is for us.

This is theology at its most practical. There are truths about God which must force change in our lives. What Ortlund wants to see changed is our fear of coming before God, our shyness in seeking him, even our forgetfulness. He wants us to so believe in how we specifically are loved right this very second that we actually make use of our relationship with God. That we feel the fear of him melt away – if we are in Christ, everything is ours.

Moreover, there is nothing like the loveliness of Jesus to empower us to fight our sin. That is not what this volume is about, and yet I believe it will be a major effect. When our fear drops away, we don’t feel guilt and shame about our sin. Instead there is a proper facing it, calling it by name, and dealing with it. It is common knowledge that much of our sin comes from us trying to plug the holes in our hearts with things which look suitable but always ultimately fail. When we see the worthiness and delight of Jesus, we finally recognize why these other things will never do, and we begin to really crave him instead of our former drugs.

I highly recommend this volume to you. If you’ve ever wanted to obey the command to “taste and see that the Lord is good,” Gently and Lowly will be a trustworthy tool for the task.