I am often surprised and dismayed when I hear Christians speak about the way God feels about them. So many believers live with the conviction that God is generally displeased with them, that he regards them with a sense of disappointment. They may even believe he has a sense of regret that he reached out to them and saved them. While they believe they are forgiven and will someday be accepted into heaven, they carry the sense that God will welcome them reluctantly and more out of a sense of obligation than delight.
A few years ago Dane Ortlund wrote Gentle and Lowly and I suspect both he and his publisher were as surprised as anyone to see it become nothing short of a phenomenon. It has already sold more than half a million copies and become a fixture on the list of bestselling Christian books. (And, frankly, if there is a single book out of the 50 on that list you’d want people to read, it would be the one!)
In Gentle and Lowly, Ortlund wrote about how God feels about his people. Sharing the best of the wisdom of the Puritans, he insisted that God’s deepest heart for his people is one of love, joy, gentleness, and mercy. God is tender toward his people, and caring, loving, affectionate, and compassionate. In other words, God is not at all the way so many imagine him to be. This was the message that resonated so deeply with so many Christians.
Ortlund’s new book, The Heart of Jesus: How He Really Feels about You is the same but different. It is essentially a concise version of Gentle and Lowly that is meant to make for faster and easier reading and perhaps to introduce the book’s concepts to a new audience. As it happens, it also serves as a refresher for those of us who read the fuller work and would like to be reminded of its highlights. It carries the best of the previous book but in a much more concise format.
As with its predecessor, The Heart of Jesus chooses not to focus on what God has done (as beautiful and wonderful as that is) and more on who he is. It describes him as a God who loves us deeply even when we are at our worst, a God who has only love for us and no regrets. It describes him as he describes himself—gentle and lowly and always and forever inclined toward us with a heart of love. That’s a message we need to hear again and again and I’m thankful for this new way of communicating it.
