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His Very Heart
In only one place—perhaps the most wonderful words ever uttered by human lips—do we hear Jesus himself open up to us his very heart, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30).
The Greek word translated “gentle” here occurs just three other times in the New Testament:
- Meek: In the first beatitude, that “the meek” will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5);
- Humble: In the prophecy in Matthew 21:5 (quoting Zechariah 9:9) that Jesus the king “is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey”; and
- Gentle: In Peter’s encouragement to wives to nurture more than anything else “the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4).
This specific word lowly is generally translated “humble” in the New Testament, such as in James 4:6: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
In Mary’s song while pregnant with Jesus, for example, this word is used to speak of the way God exalts those who are “of humble estate” (Luke 1:52). Paul uses the word when he tells us to “not be haughty, but associate with the lowly” (Romans 12:16), referring to the socially unimpressive, those who are not the life of the party but rather cause the host to cringe when they show up. The point in saying that Jesus is lowly is that he is accessible.
We project onto Jesus our skewed instincts about how the world works. This is why we need a Bible. Our natural intuition can only give us a God like us. The God revealed in the Scripture deconstructs our intuitive predilections and startles us with one whose infinitude of perfections is matched by his infinitude of gentleness. Indeed, his perfections include his perfect gentleness.
His Heart in Action
And he had compassion on them. Matthew 14:14
“He saw the crowds, [and] he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless” (Matthew 9:36). So he teaches them, and he heals their diseases (Matthew 9:35). Simply seeing the helplessness of the throngs, pity ignites.
The Greek word for “compassion” is the same in all these texts and refers most literally to the bowels or guts of a person—it’s an ancient way of referring to what rises up from one’s innermost core. This compassion reflects the deepest heart of Christ.
The Puritan Richard Sibbes put it this way: “When [Christ] saw the people in misery, his bowels yearned within him; the works of grace and mercy in Christ, they come from his bowels first.”
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.
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?
- The wrath of Christ and the mercy of Christ are not at odds with one another.
- 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.
- We are simply seeking to follow the biblical witness in speaking of Christ’s heart of affection toward sinners and sufferers.
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. It cannot be plumbed. But it is easily neglected, forgotten.
One particularly striking part of this system is that when an unclean person comes into contact with a clean person, that clean person then becomes unclean. Moral dirtiness is contagious. Jesus reversed the Jewish system. When Jesus, the Clean One, touched an unclean sinner, Christ did not become unclean. The sinner became clean. Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry was one of giving back to undeserving sinners their humanity.
Thomas Goodwin said, “Christ is love covered over in flesh.”
Jesus Christ is closer to you today than he was to the sinners and sufferers he spoke with and touched in his earthly ministry.
The Happiness of Christ
Thomas Goodwin wrote that Christ’s “own joy, comfort, happiness, and glory are increased and enlarged by his showing grace and mercy, in pardoning, relieving, and comforting his members here on earth.”
Goodwin even goes on to argue that Christ gets more joy and comfort than we do when we come to him for help and mercy. In the same way that a loving husband gets more relief and comfort in his wife’s healing than in his own, Christ “brings in to himself more comfort…than it procures to them” when he sees our sins being placed under his own blood.
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.
To put it the other way around: when we hold back, lurking in the shadows, fearful and failing, we miss out not only on our own increased comfort but on Christ’s increased comfort.
Jesus Christ is comforted when you draw from the riches of his atoning work, because his own body is getting healed.
Able to Sympathize
In his book The Heart of Christ, Thomas Goodwin explains the word for “sympathize” here is a compound word formed from the prefix meaning “with” (like our English prefix co-) joined with the verb to suffer. “Sympathize” here is not cool and detached pity. It is a depth of felt solidarity such as is echoed in our own lives most closely only as parents to children. Indeed, it is deeper even than that.
The writer to the Hebrews is taking us by the hand and leading us deep into the heart of Christ, showing us the unrestrained with-ness of Jesus regarding his people.
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.”
He Can Deal Gently
He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward. Hebrews 5:2
In ancient Israel the king represented God to the people, while the priest represented the people to God. The book of Hebrews is in the Bible to tell us what it means for Jesus to be our priest, the true priest, the priest of whom every other is a shadow and to whom every other is a pointer.
When Hebrews 5:2 says that Jesus “can deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward,” the point is that Jesus deals gently and only gently with all sinners who come to him, irrespective of their particular offense and just how heinous it is.1 What elicits tenderness from Jesus is not the severity of the sin but whether the sinner comes to him.
Why does Christ deal gently with us? The text tells us: “since he himself is beset with weakness.” Look to Christ. He deals gently with you.
I Will Never Cast Out
Whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. John 6:37
John Bunyan is most famous for The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is, besides the Bible, history’s best-selling book. But he also authored fifty-seven other books. In typical Puritan style, Bunyan took a single verse and wrote a whole book on it, reflecting on it at length. That verse, for Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ, was John 6:37. In the course of pronouncing himself the bread of life given to the spiritually hungry (John 6:32–40), Jesus declares: All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.
What Our Sins Evoke
My heart recoils within me. Hosea 11:8
Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “You will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner, because there is a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good terms with ourselves, and we can always put up a good case for ourselves.”
Carry the analogy a little further. Just as the purer a heart, the more horrified at evil, so also the purer a heart, the more it is naturally drawn out to help and relieve and protect and comfort, whereas a corrupt heart sits still, indifferent. So with Christ. His holiness finds evil revolting, more revolting than any of us ever could feel. But it is that very holiness that also draws his heart out to help and relieve and protect and comfort.
To the Uttermost
One of the more neglected doctrines in the church today is the heavenly intercession of Christ.
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.
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?
Atonement accomplished our salvation; intercession is the moment-by-moment application of that atoning work.
Think of an older brother cheering on his younger brother in a track meet. Even if, in that final stretch, the younger brother is well out ahead and will certainly win the race, does the older brother sit back, quiet, complacently satisfied? Not at all—he’s yelling at the top of his lungs exclamations of encouragement, of affirmation, of celebration, of victory, of solidarity. He cannot be quieted. So with our own older brother. John Bunyan wrote a whole book on Christ’s heavenly intercession called Christ a Complete Savior. At one point he explains how the doctrine of intercession is a matter of Christ’s heart.
“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. He knows us to the uttermost, and he saves us to the uttermost, because his heart is drawn out to us to the uttermost. We cannot sin our way out of his tender care.
“It is a consoling thought,” wrote theologian Louis Berkhof, “that Christ is praying for us, even when we are negligent in our prayer life.” Our prayer life stinks most of the time. But what if you heard Jesus praying aloud for you in the next room? Few things would calm us more deeply.
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.
An Advocate
We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 1 John 2:1
Intercession has the idea of mediating between two parties, bringing them together. Advocacy is similar but has the idea of aligning oneself with another.
1 John 2:1, the key text for Christ’s heavenly advocacy, which reads: My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
It’s difficult to capture the meaning of parakletos with just one English word. The difficulty is reflected in the diversity of translations, including “Helper”; “Advocate”; “Counselor”; “Comforter”; and “Companion.”
Early theologians such as Tertullian and Augustine writing in Latin frequently translated parakletos in the New Testament with advocatus. When will we receive this advocacy? The text tells us: it does not say “we will have an advocate” but “we have an advocate.” All those in Christ have, right now, someone speaking on their behalf.
Fallen humans are natural self-advocates. It flows out of us. Self-exonerating, self-defending. The fall is manifested not only in our sinning but in our response to our sinning. We minimize, we excuse, we explain away. In short, we speak, even if only in our hearts, in our defense. We advocate for ourselves.
The Beauty of the Heart of Christ
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Matthew 10:37
In the summer of 1740 Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon exclusively to the children in his congregation, those from ages one through fourteen. The top of the first page simply read: “To the children, Aug. 1740.”
Edwards’s main point: “Children ought to love the Lord Jesus Christ above all things in the world.” His text was Matthew 10:37, which in his King James Version read, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”
Edwards says: “There is no love so great and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ.”
The Emotional Life of Christ
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. John 11:33
The Son of God clothed himself with humanity and will never unclothe himself. He became a man and always will be.
As Calvin put it, “the Son of God having clothed himself with our flesh, of his own accord clothed himself also with human feelings, so that he did not differ at all from his brethren, sin only excepted.”
The great Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield (1851–1921) wrote a famous essay in 1912 called “On the Emotional Life of Our Lord.” Warfield did not mean what we often mean by the word emotional—imbalanced, reactionary, driven by our feelings in an unhealthy way. He simply is noticing what Jesus felt. And as he reflects on Christ’s emotions, Warfield notes repeatedly the way his emotions flow from his deepest heart.
A Tender Friend
…a friend of tax collectors and sinners! Matthew 11:19
Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence
With a good friend, you don’t need to constantly fill in all gaps of silence with words. You can just be warmly present together, quietly relishing each other’s company. “Mutual communion is the soul of all true friendship,” wrote Goodwin, “and a familiar converse with a friend has the greatest sweetness in it.”
Why the Spirit?
What is the role of the Holy Spirit?
The Spirit:
- Regenerates us (John 3:6–7)
- Convicts us (John 16:8)
- Empowers us with gifts (1 Corinthians 12:4–7)
- Testifies in our hearts that we are God’s children (Galatians 4:6)
- Leads us (Galatians 5:18, 25)
- Makes us fruitful (Galatians 5:22–23)
- Grants and nurtures in us resurrection life (Romans 8:11)
- Enables us to kill sin (Romans 8:13)
- Intercedes for us when we don’t know what to pray (Romans 8:26–27)
- Guides us into truth (John 16:13)
- Transforms us into the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18)
The Spirit causes us to actually feel Christ’s heart for us. The Spirit makes the heart of Christ real to us: not just heard, but seen; not just seen, but felt; not just felt, but enjoyed.
Father of Mercies
“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.
“The Father of mercies.” As Paul opens Second Corinthians he gives us a window into what came into his mind when he thought about God.
To speak of God the Father as “the Father of mercies” is to say that he is the one who multiplies compassionate mercies to his needful, wayward, messy, fallen, wandering people.
A correct understanding of the triune God is not that of a Father whose central disposition is judgment and a Son whose central disposition is love. The heart of both is one and the same; this is, after all, one God, not two. Theirs is a heart of redeeming love, not compromising justice and wrath but beautifully satisfying justice and wrath.
His “Natural” Work and His “Strange” Work
He does not afflict from his heart. Lamentations 3:33
When we see Christ unveil his deepest heart as gentle and lowly, he is continuing on the natural trajectory of what God had already been revealing about himself throughout the Old Testament. Jesus provides new sharpness to who God is, but not fundamentally new content.
In Lamentations 3:33, when he speaks of punishing, he says, “He does not from his heart afflict nor grieve the children of men.” But when he comes to speak of showing mercy, he says he does it “with his whole heart, and with his whole soul,” as the expression is in Jeremiah 32:41.
He does afflict and grieve the children of men. But not from his heart.
The Lord, the Lord
“A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger…” Exodus 34:6
In Exodus 34, God is revealing himself to Moses, causing his glory to pass by Moses, whom God has put in a cleft in the rock (33:22). At the critical moment we read: The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6–7) Short of the incarnation itself, this is perhaps the high point of divine revelation in all the Bible.
What do you think of when you hear the phrase “the glory of God”? Do you picture the immense size of the universe? A thundering, terrifying voice from the clouds?
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.
Consider the words of Exodus 34:6–7. “Merciful and gracious.” These are the first words out of God’s own mouth after proclaiming his name (“the Lord,” or “I am”). The first words. The only two words Jesus will use to describe his own heart are gentle and lowly (Matthew 11:29).
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. This is hard work.
His Ways Are Not Our Ways
“There is nothing that troubles our consciences more,” said John Calvin on this passage, “than when we think that God is like ourselves.”
God knows that even when we hear of his compassionate pardon, we latch on to that promise with a diminished view of the heart from which that compassionate pardon flows.
“I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.” (Isaiah 57:15) Where is the heart of God, the unspeakably exalted one, naturally drawn? To the lowly. When Jesus showed up seven hundred years after Isaiah prophesied and revealed his deepest heart as “gentle and lowly,” he was proving once and for all that gentle lowliness is indeed where God loves to dwell. It is what he does. It is who he is. His ways are not our ways.
Yearning Bowels
My heart yearns for him. Jeremiah 31:20
The high point of the key verse of the four-chapter center of the book of Jeremiah: “Therefore my heart yearns for him.”
“My heart.” There is another Hebrew word for “heart,” lev (pronounced lāve), which is the typical underlying Hebrew word for “heart” in the Old Testament (such as in Lamentations 3:33: “he does not afflict from his heart”). But here in Jeremiah 31 the word is meah. It literally refers to the insides of a person, the guts. This is why older translations such as the King James Version render it “My heart yearns for him.” What is it to yearn? It is something different than to bless or to save or even to love. The Hebrew word here (hamah) at its root has a denotation of being restless or agitated, or even growling or roaring or being boisterous or turbulent.
Therefore: “I will surely have mercy on him.” If you were to translate that literally, it would awkwardly be something like: “Having mercy I will have mercy on him.” Sometimes Hebrew doubles up a verb to be emphatic.
The world is starving for a yearning love, a love that remembers instead of forsakes. A love that isn’t tied to our loveliness. A love that gets down underneath our messiness. A love that is bigger than the enveloping darkness we might be walking through even today. A love of which even the very best human romance is the faintest of whispers.
On the cross, we see what God did to satisfy his yearning for us. He went that far. He went all the way. The blushing effusiveness of heaven’s bowels funneled down into the crucifixion of Christ.
Rich in Mercy
Nowhere else in the Bible is God described as rich in anything. The only thing he is called rich in is: mercy. In his justice, God is exacting; in his mercy, God is overflowing.
Just as the Old Testament doubles up the verb “to have mercy” in Jeremiah 31:20, the New Testament calls God “rich in mercy.”
Ephesians 2:4 says, “God, being rich in mercy…” Being, not becoming.
As love rises, mercy descends. Great love fills his heart; rich mercy flows out of his heart.
We can vent our fleshly passions by breaking all the rules, or we can vent our fleshly passions by keeping all the rules, but both ways of venting the flesh still need resurrection. We can be immoral dead people, or we can be moral dead people. Either way, we’re dead. 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.
On that day when we stand before him, quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had.
Our Law-ish 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.
The battle of the Christian life is to bring your own heart into alignment with Christ’s.
Galatians teaches that we are made right with God based on what Christ has done rather than on what we do. The central message of Galatians is that the freeness of God’s grace and love is not only the gateway but also the pathway of the Christian life.
In the course of the letter Paul explains the doctrine of justification by faith in order to help the Galatians live healthy Christian lives.
Paul also speaks of the subjective side of salvation, the love of Christ, such as when he speaks of “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
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. He loves us; but it’s a flustered love.
No less than three times in this second paragraph in Romans 5, Paul says roughly the same thing: While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. (5:6) While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (5:8) If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son…
To say the same truth backward: Jesus didn’t die for us once we became strong (5:6); he didn’t die for us once we started to overcome our sinfulness (5:8); God did not reconcile us to himself once we became friendly toward him (5:10).
To the End
Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. John 13:1
“Love in Christ decays not,” wrote Bunyan, “nor can be tempted so to do by anything that happens, or that shall happen hereafter, in the object so beloved.”
Jesus came to the cliff of the cross and didn’t change his mind. He walked over the edge.
We love until we are betrayed. Jesus continued to the cross despite betrayal. We love until we are forsaken. Jesus loved through forsakenness. We love up to a limit. Jesus loves to the end.
Loving to the end meant passing through the horror of the cross and drinking down the flood of filth, the centuries of sin, all that is revolting even in our eyes.
Buried in His Heart Forevermore
…so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us. Ephesians 2:7
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.”
If we can agree on the “why” of our lives, can we also agree on the “how”? In what ways do we glorify God? And off into eternity, how will God be glorified forevermore? One way we glorify God is by our obedience to him, our refusing to believe we know best and instead trusting that his way is the way of life. The Bible calls us to live in an “honorable” way among unbelievers “so that…they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12).
In a sermon late in life Jonathan Edwards preached: “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.” He wrote a treatise called The End for Which God Created the World in which he argued this single point, that the world exists for the glory of God.
Speaking of “in Christ Jesus,” do you realize what is true of you if you are in Christ? Those in union with him are promised that all the haunted brokenness that infects everything—every relationship, every conversation, every family, every email, every wakening to consciousness in the morning, every job, every vacation—everything—will one day be rewound and reversed.
“He loves life into us,” according to John Owen. His resurrection power that flows into corpses is love itself. Ephesians 2:7 is telling you that your death is not an end but a beginning. Not a wall, but a door. Not an exit, but an entrance.
Epilogue
“Now how do I apply this to my life?”
There is one thing for us to do. Jesus says it in Matthew 11:28. “Come to me.” Go to him. All that means is, open yourself up to him. Let him love you. The Christian life boils down to two steps:
- Go to Jesus.
- See #1.
Your anguish is his home. Go to him. “If you knew his heart, you would.”