Gentle and Lowly, Chapter 2 - “His Heart in Action”
In chapter 2 of Gentle and Lowly, we see that the heart of Jesus towards those He loves is not merely a heart that feels a certain way about us. That Jesus loves us deeply is, of course, wonderful. But love without action is not a love that benefits the loved. As the apostle James says, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” (James 2:15-16). Affection without action is not love. It might reflect a desire to love, but, for love to truly be love, it must show itself in action.
Oh, thanks be to God that our Savior has proved His love over and over with a life of love towards us! As Dane Ortlund puts it, the “most vivid and arresting portrait” of Jesus in the Gospels “is the way the Holy Son of God moves toward, touches, heals, embraces, and forgives those who least deserve it yet truly desire it.” The love of Christ streams from his “innermost heart” and shows that He not only loves but is love. His whole life, both in His earthly ministry and His heavenly reign, is rooted in loving His people well.
This chapter points to several of the stories that we see in the Gospels that prove Jesus’s love for those who need him: the paralyzed man brought by his friends, the leper wanting to be made clean, the rejected, the marginalized. I love how Ortlund describes the needy as those “to whom Christ most naturally gravitates.” He loves those who need that love the most. And the best news of all we see here is that “Jesus Christ is closer to you today than He was to the sinners and suffers he spoke with and touched in His earthly ministry.” The stories of Jesus’s loving care for the needy around Him isn’t just a story about them, it’s a story about me and about us. That Jesus is loving us in the same way today. He loves us through His provision and sustaining of our lives. He loves us through the presence of His Spirit in us, as close to us as anyone could be. He loves us through His very body, the life we have with each other in His church. And He loves us by making the truth of His gospel known to us, how He died for us to give us eternal life in Him.
My prayer today is that we all will know the love of Christ is not just something we talk about in church or know on an intellectual level. Instead, may we all know, so very deeply, that Christ loves us and is loving us at this very moment with the fullness of His heart and His actions towards us.