Dane Ortlund has written a great book, Gentle and Lowly, that helps us live in constant awareness of Christ’s affections and love for his people. It’s one thing to know what Christ accomplished on the cross. But do you know how he feels about you now? Dane and I explore this topic for our ongoing spiritual growth in this conversation.

Christians know what Jesus Christ has done—but who is he? What is his deepest heart for his people, weary and faltering on their journey toward heaven? Jesus said he is “gentle and lowly in heart.” In Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund reflects on these words, opening up a neglected yet central truth about who Jesus is for sinners and sufferers today.

Recommended Reading:

Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers, by Dane Ortlund. | Christian Book Distributors

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and I'm delighted to have with me today as my conversation partner, Dane Ortlund. Dane is a publisher with Crossway. He's also an editor for them and is also a writer, so he knows the writing process from many different angles, publishing, editing, and writing. He also has a heart as a pastor. He's an elder at Naperville Presbyterian Church. And Dane has recently written a great book that will be the topic of our discussion today: Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers. Dane, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Thanks, Randy.

Great to talk to you today.

Dane's Amazing Book

Well, Dane, this book really is such a great blessing for me personally and for many people that I know. I want to tell our listeners it begins with a seemingly simple question. Dane writes at the very, very beginning, “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 towards sinners and sufferers? What flows out most freely, most instinctively? Who is He?” Now, I started reading that, and who is Christ? Well, of course, obviously the first things that surface are theological answers. He's the second Person of the Trinity. He's the Messiah, the one who fulfilled Messianic prophecy, the one who died for my sins.

But then, just a few pages later, you get to this point: “The Gospel offers us not only legal exoneration, it also sweeps us into Christ's very heart. I thought, “Oh, this is a book that I desperately need to read, probably several times,” and then you write, “You might know that Christ died and rose again on your behalf to rinse you clean from all your sin, but do you know His deepest heart for you?” And I thought, “I don't think so. ”And then, “Do you live with an awareness not only of His atoning work for your sinfulness, but also of His longing heart amid your sinfulness?” And it was at that point that I thought, “Okay, I'm reading this book at least twice. I’m going to read it through kind of quickly to get the overview, the flow, the main arguments, and then I'm going to go back and read it very, very diligently, highlighting, underlining, journaling.” This has been a great process for me. So Dane, what was it that drew you to this topic? How did you come to write this book?

Well, I didn't know of Christ’s heart for me either, Randy, as you just put it so well. And it was reading a little Puritan paperback—Banner of Truth publishes these little Puritan paperbacks, they call them, by Thomas Goodwin. I didn't know anything about Thomas Goodwin who lived 400 years ago in England. The title of the book was The Heart of Christ, a little longer title, The Heart of Christ Who is in Heaven for Sinners who Are on Earth. And though I had had classes in seminary on the person of Christ and on the work of Christ, vital, wonderful classes, I never had a class on the heart of Christ. And yet Goodwin showed me, actually it's right there in the Bible. And His heart for me is something deeper and more wondrous and more steady than what I realized. So I was just trying to pass on to 21stcentury fellow stragglers what Goodwin has been coaching me into over the last about seven years or so.

And then, since reading Goodwin, reading some other Puritans, in the process of writing this book, how has this played out in your life? If I can put it that way.

Yeah, that's a great question, Randy. And if it isn't playing out in my life, then what's the point? The point here is not simply to add doctrinal knowledge or awareness or grow intellectually or something like that, though that matters, but actually for the truths that we confess to seep into our heart and to make a difference. And I just have not known that the Savior was so irresistible. I am so glad, and I have been for decades, that the risen Lord Jesus came into this world, lived the life that I couldn't live, died the death I deserved to die, rose again triumphantly, that I am rinsed clean of all my sin, justified, acquitted, adopted, reconciled, redeemed. All of that is gloriously true. But that's all objective, that's all black and white. Subjectively, what does He actually feel? How does He actually feel towards me? In my deepest dark nesses, in the parts of my life where I feel most shame and regret, what about that? And what Goodwin and the Puritans and the Bible have shown me in recent years is that actually it's in my deepest regions of regret, shame, and anguish, that is where the heart of Christ is drawn out to me the most. And I did not know that about the Lord Jesus. So this has been really a paradigm shift for me in my own life of discipleship.

Not too long ago, I was speaking on Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3, where he says that he prays that the Ephesians and us would be rooted and grounded in love. And as I was reflecting on that, I thought, “You know, if I'm honest, I'm rooted and grounded in truth more than rooted and grounded in love.” Now, both you and I—you say this in your book. I say it. I don't want to downplay truth, not at all. No. But for me, I came from a Jewish background, and for a Jewish person to believe in Jesus, we have to be really, really, really convinced that Jesus really was the Messiah, that He really did fulfill those verses in the Old Testament, because we knew right from the start we’re going to get a whole lot of difficulty because of this. So I was deeply rooted in truth, and I gravitated toward arguments of truth and theology of truth, which is great, but what you point out is the Bible teaches very, very strongly, not just in a few little isolated places, very, very strongly about the emotional compassion that our Savior has for us.

Exactly. I'm right there with you, Randy. I have always, in my life, gravitated more towards truth than love. It's my own defect. And of course, as you just said, truth is supremely important. I mean falsehood sends us to hell. We need truth. But if we have truth and truth only—I mean the Pharisees had a lot of truth. And I think what is often so ugly to the world in the church is loveless truth. The Lord Jesus, of course He was not only... He said, “I am the truth,” to be sure, but also He was a living picture. Thomas Goodwin said, “Christ is love covered over in flesh.” So just as you can imagine the terminator being a machine covered over in flesh, Jesus is love walking around on two legs on this planet. We actually have seen that in world history. Never was He sacrificing truth. No moral compromise. No theological funniness or fuzziness. And that is what... We need truth, but love is actually the beauty of the Christian life. Truth is the skeleton, but love is the flesh, it’s the beauty. And it is that part of Jesus most centrally that this book is trying to dive into.

Jesus Gives Rest

Well, I want to explore this a little bit biblically, theologically. I also want to explore it maybe a little bit historically. You say, very early on, that the heart of your whole thesis of this book is from Matthew 11, where Jesus says, “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.” And you return to that verse throughout your book. So speak to us a little bit about... I mean you can't unpack the whole thing for us, but just what are some of the things that surfaced most strongly for you as you were meditating on this verse and writing about it?

Thanks, Randy. You're so right. You can't unpack it in a couple of minutes. We can't unpack that with a lifetime of reflection on it. That is what... Randy, you and I, on our deathbeds, we will still be scratching the surface, unable to plumb Matthew 11:28, 29, and 30. And we can say that about so many texts, but this text, it is so wondrous! My dad pointed out to me something that Charles Spurgeon, the old British preacher, had pointed out to him, namely in only one place in all four gospels—I don't know how many chapters it is, 90 or so chapters of the Bible, it's a big chunk of the Bible. In only one place does Jesus Christ tell us what His own heart is. That's an astonishing thing, because we learn a lot from the Lord Jesus about who He liked to hang out with, who He ate lunch with, His theology, how He understood himself to fulfill the Old Testament, what He thought about the Law, how He interacted with the Pharisees and Sadducees.

So much! But in only one place does He stop, as Spurgeon points out, and sort of open Himself up and say, “Hey, do you all want to know what really most deeply and centrally gets Me out of bed in the morning?” Because, of course, when He says gentle and lowly in heart, as you know, the heart in the Bible is not just the emotion. It's not less than that. But the heart, in Old Testament and New, is the animating center to everything you do. It's what motivates you through life. It's what you're daydreaming about as you drift off to sleep. It's why you do what you do, why you are who you are. And Jesus said that the central animating headquarters to His own inner life was gentleness and lowliness.

If I didn't have that passage in the Bible, and someone asked me, “Hey, what do you think? Take two words in all the world, two words: What do you think Jesus says his own heart is? “I would not instinctively pick those.

Right. Where would you go instead? I think I know.

Well, I know enough not to say wrathful and vindictive, though Jesus is a God-Man of just wrath, to be sure. I might say something like he's is joyful and magnanimous, or he is loving and merciful, and those things are true, Randy. You and I believe that with all our hearts. But when He says what His heart is, He says this strange thing: “I am gentle and lowly.” That’s just worth a lifetime of reflection. It’s worth a book!

Maybe several books.

That’s right.

So why do you suppose we are resistant to this? Because I don't think it's just that we’re ignorant of it.

Right.

I think we're resistant to it. Why do you think that is?

Wow. Well, who knows? Maybe some reasons are the battles of church history have taught us to be very vigilant and to be orthodox Christo logically with a high and glorious and lofty and supreme Christ who is the ruler, the King God Overall. We believe all that. But I think there’s something more intuitive, actually, about subscribing to that same One, the resplendent One, the Revelation 1 Christ, who has a double-edged sword coming out of His mouth, and His hair is like white wool, and His face is like the blazing sun, and so on. That Christ, that His heart is gentle and lowly. That's surprising. I think another reason could be it might not feel sufficiently morally serious to us for Him to be gentle and lowly towards sinners and sufferers. We might say, “Hang on a second here. Is there something kind of morally flabby going on here?” And I think another reason is we just, way down deep in our hearts, Randy... I think we harbor dark thoughts of God, and it takes a lifetime and more to root them out. And so we just have bad theology proper. We don't think right thoughts of God and of Christ, and so we need to be corrected by texts such as this.

Yeah, I think also... You’ve mentioned some things about history. In the early 20thcentury, there’s this big split between fundamentalists and modernists. And the modernists didn't just downplay God's wrath, they denied it. They said that that's not really biblical teaching. And so they denied that, and they only emphasized Christ's love and His compassion. And so I think the fundamentalists and evangelicals and those of us who are orthodox in our theology, we have this cloud hanging over of, “I don't want to fall into that trap that the 1920s liberals fell into. So if anything, I want to overemphasize holiness and truth.

“Right.

But what you point out in your book is scripture teaches both of those, and if anything, it might be weighted on the side of this gentleness and lowly. Is that right? Am I reading you correctly?

I love what you're saying, and I think it's a great insight about what was happening 100 years ago in the church, Randy. Really well said. And yeah, exactly. And what I would want to say is, let’s push really hard on the texts about divine wrath. Let's not avoid those or ignore those or dilute those. But I think what the Puritans would say, what I would want to say is, if you dilute divine wrath, actually you are undermining the divine love which you think you are thereby highlighting. It’s both or neither. In other words, it's not like wrath is going off of one end of the spectrum and gentleness and mercy and love off the other end, and we want to split the difference, but rather we want to push hard in both directions.

And I can't escape, as I read the Bible, just what you just said, namely that, while there is this snowballing tension throughout the Old Testament of wrath, mercy, wrath, mercy, at the cross, mercy won out. Wrath was fully vindicated, 100%. Sin was judged. This is not morally unserious, but actually mercy won out and actually is true even to the Old Testament in a place where God says that he does not afflict from His heart or grieve the children of men. In other words, if we talk about God's heart, His innermost core, what pours out most naturally from Him is compassion and pity. That is who He most deeply is.

We'll return to my conversation in just a moment. I do want to invite you to take a look at our website, cslewisinstitute.org, and avail yourself to the many resources that we have there. We have over 40 years’ worth of articles and recordings and events that can be tremendously helpful. Check out the different ways that we can help you share your faith or grow deeply in your faith. And consider also supporting the institute. If you click on the button that says donate, we would love to have you as a ministry partner. Now let's return to the conversation.

Better to Be Biblical than Artificially ‘Balanced’

I love what you wrote at one point about this whole thing, about getting sort of both of those. You said, “If there appears to be some sense of disproportion in the Bible’s portrait of Christ, then let us be accordingly disproportionate. Better to be biblical than artificially ‘balanced,’” and you put balanced in quotes. And that is such a challenging thought. We don't want to just be balanced. We don't want to say this and say this. We want to have the proportion right, as well as the different component parts.

Yeah, exactly right. I think as born-again believers, there's something in us, and maybe this is overgeneralizing, brother, I think there's something in us where we understand that we are sinners, not as deeply as we should, but we feel that. We feel our guilt and shame, but there’s something in us that resists the flood-like nature of God's mercy. Abounding, the Bible says, not being doled out, but abounding to us. So I think the Bible just wants us to take our conscience by the scruff of the neck and say, “Do you not realize most deeply who I am? And yes, you are sinful, but let the Bible emphasize what it is emphasizing,” for the penitent, for those who come to God by faith, “and let yourself be enveloped in this love.” That's really, really hard to do, but I think we're free to do that in the Scripture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does strike me, and I thought this a number of times reading in your book, we get a lot of commandments and exhortations in scripture to shape the way we think. We're told in a lot of places, set your mind on, fix your mind on. There’s so many places where, in the Psalms, the psalmist is talking to himself. We’re told to consider yourself dead to sin. Consider yourself this way, think about this way. If there’s anything that is true or honorable or right, let your mind think on these things. We’re not naturally prone to think these things, so we really have to work at re-channeling the very ways we think.  Not just what we think, but the very ways we think.

Oh, I so agree. It's not as if, in other words, we hear the gospel once, or we read Matthew11:29 once, and then it's downloaded, and now we just have it. It's there, and it's just coming along at 100% in our mind and heart. No. Rather we go through, like, up and down, all over the place. We're doing well. We're doing awful. This is why, every morning, we're getting up and reading the Bible again, to remember this again, in a sense, almost become a Christian all over again. That's why we go to church on Sunday mornings, to hear it again, to be immersed in it again, and, shape our mind and our heart in this direction. Because otherwise, Randy, if I leave my heart and mind in neutral, then I will slide inevitably, even if imperceptibly, towards dark thoughts of God. So I strongly agree with you.

I do have to tell you, when you just said we download the information, and it's in there. I really wish that was true. That just sounds a whole lot better. It’s like, okay, just kind of like, get it onto the front screen or something. I don't know.

Let me tell you a story about this verse that you're building your whole book on. You may know I did a whole lot of research on how people become Christians, and Interviewed 40 or 50 college students and listened to their testimonies pretty extensively to listen: What are the things that they report in how they became a Christian? And there was this one young woman who told me, when she was in high school, she realized she didn't have the kind of grades that were going to get her into the colleges that she wanted to. So her guidance counselor said, “You really need to join a lot of clubs and get a lot of extracurricular activities on your college application,” so she joined everything she could think of. She was a cheerleader. She was on this team. She was in this club. She just joined everything. And it worked. She got into her first choice college, which was great.

And then she got to college, and she thought, “Well, in four years, I'm going to need a resume. I'm going to need to get a job, so I probably need to join a lot of these same activities, because I'm going to need more than good grades.” So she joined this club and this club and this team, and she was in so many different clubs, and she was not a Christian. She didn't come from any kind of religious home. She said she didn’t remember ever going to church, maybe only once her whole entire life before coming to college. Somebody down the hall from where she lived invited her to a Christian organization meeting on campus, and she thought, “Well, that would look good on the resume. Sure, I'll go.” And so she goes. And she just thinks it's the weirdest thing in the world. People are raising their hands, closing their eyes, singing these weird songs, and some guy got up front and talked for 30 minutes about... she doesn't even remember. I mean, it just was weird.

But at the end of the meeting, they were having announcements about different kinds of events, and somebody got up and made an announcement. And again, she doesn’t remember what the announcement was for, but the person who was making the announcement—I guess it was an announcement for some sort of social activity. And the selling point was you all need to take a break from studying. And so this person announced, because as you know, in the Bible it says, come to me all who are labor and heavy laden, I will give you rest. And she hears the word rest and she said, “Did someone just say rest? I'm exhausted! How do you get this rest stuff?” And so they passed around a sign-up sheet for people who wanted to join a Bible study, and she thought, “Well, maybe that's where I learn about this rest stuff.

Oh, wow. Wow!

Isn’t that great?

Oh, I love it!

And she became a Christian like a month later. So what drew her to the gospel was this offer of rest.

Wow! I love that! I love that, Randy. And she was doubtless not just talking about physical rest, though that is an element of it, an important side of it, but something inside of us, the RPMs needing to come to a standstill, so we can be human again. I just love that.

Well, there's a whole lot more to the story, and I don't necessarily want to go into it, but the more I heard about her background, the more she was desperate for rest on a deep, deep, spiritual, emotional level. So that's what the gospel brings to people. It brings salvation and forgiveness and all those many, many blessings. But it also brings people a kind of an exhale of a rest, because Jesus is gentle towards us.

Right, right, right. And not only just a gospel that gets us into Christianity at conversion and then gets us into heaven at death, but all the way in between, a Savior who's walking with us and actually providing moment-by-moment rest. I'm constantly going through my life stiff-arming it, ignoring it sidelining it, saying, “No, I want to go my own way,” but Jesus offers us rest all through lifelong, just what that young lady was so deeply desiring, which we all in our own way are. That is a wondrous reality of the gospel.

Well, and let me bring in... One of your chapters was just focusing in on that Jesus is now interceding for us in heaven. And I think we all learn that fairly early on. We know that. We know those verses, but you drew it out, so that I've started thinking in terms of, at various moments in my day, “Jesus is praying for me right now.” When I was sitting and having a conversation with a friend not too long ago, I told him that. I said, “This is really fun. We're having a fun conversation. We're talking about serious things. We’re talking about funny things. We're laughing. We’re interacting, but there's a whole new sense of, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that our Savior is interceding for us right here, right now, about this conversation?’”

Wow!

It just adds a beauty to every single moment. I don't want to say it adds a heaviness, a weightiness. I mean, to a certain extent it does, but it's more of a, “This is a beautiful, love-infused moment.

I love that! Reflecting His ongoing care for us. Yeah. For most of my life, I've tended to think about the work of Christ as something in the past, and that's gloriously true. The work of His birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and even ascension, though we don't talk much about that. But everything He was doing back then, what is He doing right now? Actually, as you just said, the New Testament tells us in Romans 8 and Hebrews 7 and 1 John 2, He’s interceding for us. That's a neglected doctrine, Randy. We don't talk about it, and we are the poorer for it. We can draw strength from this. This is a comforting and consoling thing, and as you just said, it does infuse life with beauty and fullness. So yeah. Amen.

Well, I want to touch upon the Puritans, because you mentioned them quite a few times in your book. You quote from quite a few, but particularly this Thomas Goodwin. I have to be honest, when you were quoting them, I thought, “Oh, this is Dane Ortlund, the Puritan lover. He must just read the Puritans all the time.” But you just told me, earlier on in this interview, that you had never even heard of Thomas Goodwin or hadn’t read his stuff, so which is true? Do you read tons of Puritans? Is this a new thing?

And you probably can tell in my voice. I think some people are scared off by this. “Read the Puritans. Sounds like, I don't know, strong medication or something.

“Well, let me tell you, brother. They are strong medication, but they're not the bad tasting kind. No, I did not really read the Puritans at all until about seven or eight years ago, and a friend of mine put me on to Thomas Goodwin. And the pattern I've sort of fallen into here is, in the morning I read my Bible, a little Old Testament, a little New Testament, and then I read a page or two of a Puritan, whatever I happen to be working through at the moment, Bunyan or Sibbes or Owen or Goodwin or whomever. And it's just been a nice little... very, very, very small doses of that strong medicine. And I was talking to someone at church a few weeks ago, and they made a comment about how the Puritans are so off-putting because they're all about judgment. I wanted to pull my hair out. Yes, they believe in judgment, and judgment is in the Bible, but the Puritans understood that the Bible has something most deeply to tell us about God’s heart. Goodwin and Bunyan and Sibbes in particular got that, and it pervades their writing, especially Goodwin.

And we should be intimidated by 28 year olds today writing dissertations for a PhD on the Puritans. We should not be intimidated by the Puritans themselves. If you just crack it open, most of their works, they're just sermons to farmers and merchants and to ordinary people like us. So there's riches there.

Have you ever wondered what heaven is going to be like? What will it look like? What will we do there? We all have questions about heaven, and we, the C.S. Lewis Institute, are delighted to invite Dr. Randy Alcorn, who has spent decades literally researching the topic. He's written award-winning books on the topic, and he's going to be presenting a live stream event for us through the C.S. Lewis website on January 22 at8:00 p.m. Please check out the website, www.cslewisinstitute.org, and find out the details about the Randy Alcorn event. I think it'll be really great.

Okay, that's good. So where would you suggest people begin? You just mentioned Sibbes and Bunyan and Goodwin. Do you have any specific works you'd recommend? Well, let me start there.

Yeah, definitely. Richard Sibbes was one of the earlier Puritans. He was about a generation older than Goodwin, actually was instrumental in Goodwin coming into learning of the heart of Christ. But Sibbes wrote a little book called The Bruised Reed, and it's picking up Matthew12, I think, which is quoting Isaiah about a bruised reed, He will not break. And that is a text there and a book accordingly written on the text, which is basically telling straggling, pain-experiencing Christians, “Jesus does not come to you and tell you to dig deeper, try harder. He comes to you, and He puts His arm around you, and He lifts your face by the chin, and He looks you in the eye, and He says, ‘Let’s do this together. You belong to Me, ‘and a bruised reed He will not break. That's not a hard book, Randy, for anyone to read. A 16 year old, over a weekend, can work through that book quite easily. So that would be a great place to start.

Good! Oh, this is good. I’ve seen some—I'm embarrassed to admit this: I've seen some collections, like Day by Day with the Puritans, or Select Readings from the Puritans. I’ve bought several of these books when I go to conferences and stuff, and I think I should read these books, and there they are: I'm looking at them right now on my bookshelf. They are in excellent condition, because I've just not really read them. Are there some collections that you think are a good way to go about it, or would you recommend just pick one writer and dig into them?

Those collections have value, and they give us bite-size portions. But I'm with you: Though I think I've purchased one or two over the years, I don't actually stick with them, and I think one reason is I'm not motivated, because I don’t have any context. Day by day, I'm being given this nugget without the broader context. Whereas, if you pick up Sibbes’ The Bruised Reed or Goodwin, The Heart of Christ, or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or John Owen Communion with God, a little longer, but equally warmhearted and devotional, you get a certain building, escalating argument, argument in the positive use of that word, and you get the whole context.

And you don't have to read a lot. As I say, I read like one page a day or two pages. Just take it in small doses. And it's wonderful to do it in that way. So if people want to do the 365 daily readings method, hey, do it. Just do something to get exposed to these guys and deconstruct the stereotype that most of us grow up with of the Puritans.

Now, this is very helpful to me, because I have tried to read those, and I think I suffered exactly what you were saying, in that they don't have the context. And so a good way to get into this more would be pick one book and read it slowly and feel the depth of the argument or the... I find that it's the depth of the meditation. Well, like you said, I mean, The Bruised Reed, it just takes that one theme and dwells on it over and over, which also is a really great model and example for us about how we should meditatively think about God, meditating on God's word.

Oh, I so agree, Randy. Yeah, I so agree. We read so quickly often, don't we? And it just skates over the surface. What the Puritans were doing with these books is they were taking one verse, one verse, and wringing it dry, and 300 pages later, or 200 pages later, off go their results to the publisher, so they're just taking this one diamond of a verse and looking at it from every angle. And I agree, it's a wonderful example and exercise, just meditating on a single truth, a single verse.

Well, and I think you were shaped by them perhaps even more than you realize, because I think your book is an extended meditation on Matthew 11:28-30.

True.

Well, we could talk a whole ton more, but we need to draw this to a close, mostly because I don't want to just keep quoting from your book. I really want people to read this book and read it the way you've said, to read the whole thing. It's not a very long book at all, but when I started reading it, I said, “Okay, I'm going to read this at least twice, and I'm going to read it once through just to get the overall flow,” and I found very quickly, “Oh, I can't read this book quickly.” It's not that kind of book. It's read a chapter and then chew on it for a couple of days and look in different places in your life. What does it mean that Christ is interceding for me right now. What does it mean that He’s my advocate at this very second, in this very moment? So you've provided a great resource for us, and I'm delighted to hear that this wasn't just an academic exercise for you. This was really a report of how these truths have made such a powerful effect on your own life. They have. Is there anything else you want to add before we bring this to a close?

Thank you, brother, for your support and encouragement. I don't think much. I just would love to grow myself, Randy, into this direction of gentleness and tenderness and lowliness, as a father, as a husband, as a Christian, as a colleague, as a worker. Gentleness can feel, can't it, very ineffective and unfruitful and weak? But actually, when we are gentle, we are aligning with the Savior and with His own heart. And when I see gentleness, I find it irrepressibly attractive and magnetic.

So I just would like to be more like that myself. And I think the only way I get there is by communing with, fellowshipping with, being loved by a Savior Who’s like that. So thanks, Randy, for talking with me about it.

Oh, this has been great! Dane Ortlund, thank you so much for being a guest conversation partner here on Questions That Matter. Listeners, I hope that you will check out Dane's book, Gentle and Lowly. And I hope you'll also visit our website, cslewisinstitute.org. Check out our other resources that are very helpful for you as you seek to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman.