Gentle And Lowly
This will be a book that you will go to every year…every season of discouragement…every moment of doubt. I can’t express how important this book is, especially us Reformed peeps! With our robust theology and Scripture packed sermons you would think that we would understand how much Christ loves us, but most of us don’t even scratch the surface on understanding God’s love. There is a huge difference to know God doctrinally and to know him personally.
In this book, Dane Ortlund draws from various passages in Scripture and from Puritan works that help explain the heart of Christ toward sinners. Be prepared to learn, to be comforted, and cry like a little baby. God loves you way more than you know!
There so many parts in this book that I would love to share, but you just need to buy it and read it for yourself. Here is one quote that I found very helpful.
The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger.” The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan‘s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that caused you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.
This will definitely be a book that I read every year. Probably alongside J.C. Ryle’s Holiness. I need to be reminded of God’s love towards me (which Gentle and Lowly provides) and also reminded in how to respond to that love (which Holiness provides).
Here is link to my review of Holiness by J.C. Ryle.
