Stephen Sorenson’s Reviews > Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers > Status Update

Your anguish is his home. Go to him.
"If you knew his heart, you would."

Whatever is crumbling all around you in your life, wherever you feel stuck, this remains, un-deflectable: his heart for you, the real you, is gentle and lowly. So go to him. That place in your life where you feel most defeated, he is there; he lives there, right there, and his heart for you, not on the other side of it but in that darkness, is gentle and lowly.

WHAT NOW?
This is a book about the heart of Christ and of God. But what are we to do with this?
The main answer is, nothing. To ask, "Now how do I apply this to my life?" would be a trivialization of the point of this study. If an Eskimo wins a vacation to a sunny place, he doesn't arrive in his hotel room, step out onto the balcony, and wonder how to apply that to his life. He just enjoys it. He just basks.

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.

"So that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus" —what does that mean, for those in Christ? It means that one day God is going to walk us through the wardrobe into Narnia, and we will stand there, paralyzed with joy, wonder, astonishment, and relief.

The souls of departed saints with Christ in heaven, shall have Christ as it were unbosomed unto them, manifesting those infinite riches of love towards them, that have been there from eternity.
... They shall eat and drink abundantly, and swim in the ocean of love, and be eternally swallowed up in the infinitely bright, and infinitely mild and sweet beams of divine love.

When communion with God had been one's oxygen, one's meat and drink, throughout ones whole life, without a single moment of interruption by sin—to suddenly bear the unspeakable weight of all our sins? Who could survive that? To lose that depth of communion was to die. The great love at the heart of the universe was being rent in two. The world's Light was going out.

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.

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).
God didn't meet us halfway. He refused to hold back, cautious, assessing our worth. That is not his heart.

The two passages —Psalm 103:11 and Isaiah 55:9—mutually illumine one another. God's ways and thoughts are not our ways and thoughts in that his are thoughts of love and ways of compassion that stretch to a degree beyond our mental horizon.