Gentle and Lowly, Chapter 7 - “What Our Sins Evoke”

This reflection is by Visio Dei member Emily Barraclough.

A loved one being constantly sick is heartbreaking. You hate that your loved one or child is constantly battling sickness and disease. In chapter 7 of Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund explains how our sins evoke (bring or recall to the conscious mind) God’s grace and compassion for us. In the same way a parent “hates the disease while loving the child…at some level the presence of the disease draws out his heart to his child all the more.” God reacts in the same way to the sins of His children.

I had never thought about what our sin evokes for God, except that it saddens Him, causes His righteous wrath, and creates a separation between us. Hosea 11:8 says “my heart recoils within me” to describe how our sin impacts God’s heart. Just as our hearts long to heal a loved one’s sickness, God is not only sad about our sin but is compassionate and merciful to us.

We are determined and bound as slaves to sin without Christ, “bent on turning away from” God (Hosea 11:7). We see this sin nature even in the young children, like when my son tries to blame the dog for his actions—telling the dog “No, No, No” instead of acknowledging that I told him to stop throwing food on the floor. Ortlund calls this posture settled “recalcitrance.” Recalcitrance is the quality of being determined not to do what other people, especially people in authority, want or expect to be done. I had never heard that word prior to this book, but I have definitely seen evidence of that posture in my life. Thankfully God’s “heart is inflamed with pity and compassion for his people. He simply cannot give them up.” God is aware of our struggles and is empathetic.

His grace is unfathomable. It isn’t like any other relationship we see in the world. Despite our screw-ups, messy, fickle faithfulness, His steadfast love and His heart towards us never changes. Remembering what our sin evokes, encourages us not to “live with a diminished view of the compassionate heart of God sweeping over those in Christ.”