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

Holy Spirit role, is the turn our postcard apprehensions of Christ great heart of longing affection for us into an experience of sitting on the beach, in a lawnchair, drinking hand, enjoying the actual actual experience.

Holy Spirit’s role:
- Regeneration
- Conviction
- Empower us with his gifts
- Testify in our hearts that we are God’s children
- Lead Us
- Make Us
- Grants/Nurtures resurrection life
- Helps us kill sin
- Intercedes for us
- Guides us into truth
- Transforms us into the image of Christ
- Causes us to actually feel Christ’s heart for us

Friendship is a two-way relationship of joy, comfort, and openness, that appears, as distinct from a one-way relationship, such as in that of King, the subject or parent to child.

In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence.

What does it mean that Chris is a friend of sinners? At the very least, it means that he enjoy spending time with them. It also means that they feel welcomed and comfortable around him.

It is not his disciples, but his antagonist who most clearly perceive who Christ is. Though the crowds call him the friend of sinners as an indictment, the label is one of unspeakable comfort for those who know themselves to be sinners. That Jesus is friend to sinners is only contemptible to those who feel themselves not to be in that category.

Jesus quotes, his accusers as contemptibly calling him “ a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (that is, a friend of the most despicable kinds of sinners known, and that culture). And as is often the case in the gospels — such as when the demons say, “ I know who you are –– the holy one of God” (Mk 1:24), or when Satan himself acknowledge his Christ to be, the son of God.

Falling emotions, not only symphony, over react; they also simply Under react.