The Heart of Jesus: How He Really Feels About You, with Dane Ortlund

I want to be the kind of dad where my kids grow up and they look back and they say, you know, dad got a lot of things wrong, but I got a glimpse of what Jesus is actually like. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com.

This is Family Life Today. So Sunday at church, our pastor quoted A.W. Tozer and I thought it's so appropriate as we talk about this topic today. Do you remember what he said? Well, you have it in our notes and I could read it. Yeah, why don't you read it? OK, this is a great quote.

It says, What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. Now that's deep. You have to let that sink in for a minute. Yeah. And even ask yourself, let me ask you, like, what do you think about God?

Well, we're going to find out today. We've got Dane Ortlund with us. Dane, I'm sure you've heard that quote many times.

Love it. Yeah, you probably use it as a preacher up in Chicagoland, right? I first heard it from my dad. From your dad? Yes.

What do you mean? You were a little boy or what? Oh, I was not paying attention when I was a little boy, Dave. But later, later as a grown man, I know I've heard my dad. That's one of his favorite quotes.

I mean, I've heard him quoted in sermons and that kind of thing. And I love that statement. It's so true.

What comes into my mind when I hear G.O.D.? That is deep. And I agree. Well, hey, are you excited to have Dane?

We're so excited to have Dane Ortlund. You two are fun to talk to. You two are easy and fun to talk to. We love having you with us.

Yeah. I mean, you're one of these guests where like, if you're even in the sky above Orlando, you better come down. And we will walk in here and talk about anything you want to talk about. Cause you're always thinking new thoughts. I mean, this one is the heart of Jesus, how he really feels about you.

And even that subtitle right away grabs people. Cause it's like, how does he feel about me? And how we perceive he feels about us is deeply related to how we view him.

Well, and let me add Dane. I feel like you have been groundbreaking in terms of how we think about God, but more importantly, what he thinks about us. That part, you're shifting a generation of people and me that can feel like, oh, he's mad at me, or I've done something wrong to this God of grace and the gospel that is so compelling. Every time you've been here, I just weep because you do such a great job of painting the picture of his love for us.

And when we had you on for Gentle and lowly, I mean, didn't I just cry the whole time? Oh yeah. So thank you. Thank you.

It's a message for our generation, every generation. Thank you for doing that. You are welcome. It is my pleasure and honor you two. Thank you for being a part of the ministry of that glorious message with me.

Talk about Gentle and lowly. I mean, I know a lot of people on, I'm guessing the whole world's read it, you know, just like they've all read our books. Not quite. Not quite.

We had a load if that was the case, Dave. Yeah, it's a book on what Ann just said. What comes into our mind when we think about God, but wouldn't you agree? We can easily sort of depersonalize or dehumanize Jesus Christ and not even have a category, at least a thick category, for how he thinks about us, how he feels about us. Like looking at the rich young ruler, looking at him, the text says he loved him. Yeah. And in episode after episode, encounter after encounter, Jesus is a real person.

That's one of the layers to this, to gentle and lowly, to this concise edition for a younger readership. How does he feel about you without in any way detracting from his divinity? He is God in all kinds of ways. He's not like us, but he's also 100 percent a human, was and is. He's in a body now in heaven looking at the three of us and anyone listening in right now with a certain heart.

And so that's just worth spending a lifetime reflecting on. Oh, I've never thought of Jesus in a human body in heaven. But of course he was. He was. He is, I should say.

He is. Most of my life I thought, OK, he didn't have a body. Then he came to earth in the incarnation.

We celebrated at Christmas. He had a body. And then he said, OK, enough of that. And after 30 some years, shed it and went up to heaven.

No. Calvin is really clear on this in the institutes. He took on our human flesh perpetually. In other words, he took on our human flesh and he's never going to take it off. So he has sort of condescended.

He's come down. It's like when you have a four year old at your church and you walk up to them, you know, they're way down there and you crouch down. Yeah. And it's a great way to look them in the eye and dignify them and get on their level. That's, in a sense, what God did in Jesus taking on our flesh. That's a great way to look at it. Well, I know this is written for a younger reader. Right. Help the person that's never, and I don't know who they are, but they don't even understand gentle and lowly.

OK. Give us that concept real quick. Matthew 11. In one place in all four gospels, Spurgeon points this out.

My dad read it and pointed it out to me. In one place, Jesus says, here's what my heart is. Now, in the Bible, the heart isn't just what you feel. It's not only your emotions.

It's not less than that. In the Old Testament and the New, your heart is what you think with. It's what you will with. It's what you feel with, what you believe with. The heart is your motivation headquarters. It's the very core of who you are. And when Jesus in the one place where he says, I want to tell you what my heart is, I want to tell you what gets me out of bed in the morning, what is most animating to me, what fires me up the most if we can talk like that about it.

I want you to know none of us, if we had blanks in our Bible in those two places in Matthew 11, 29, none of us would have picked the words gentle and lowly to fill in those blanks left to ourselves. We probably would have picked some good words, some true words, but who of us would ever say his heart, his deepest innermost being, if he opens himself up and we peer way down into what he's most deeply like, is he is tender, non-abrasive, and he's lowly. That means he's accessible. He's not like a really, really good politician, one operating in total integrity, all the right policies, but you have to go through lines of security to get to him.

You're never put on, like when you get on a Zoom call and says, the host will let you in. There's none of that with Jesus Christ because he's accessible is the point. He's right there. The Revelation 1 Christ, before whom John fell down into the fetal position because he saw the risen Christ. That one, that one, not a junior varsity version of that, is in his deepest heart gentle and lowly. It's not the only thing he says about himself, so it's not the only thing we should say about him, but it's the first thing. It's the first thing.

It's his heart. What words would you have put in, like what two words as a kid growing up would you have put in about Jesus? Probably I'd choose different words based on what point in my development I was at. So it's good to say, you know, as a kid, nice and kind, good and loving, as I grew, gracious and merciful, joyful.

At some points in my life, perhaps austere and demanding, judging and assessing, at least this is what we very easily reflexively believe. I'm still getting used to the surprise. I mean, a journey of a lifetime with the Bible is a journey in 10,000 surprises about what God is like.

I would never have picked gentle and lowly, though it's totally consistent with everything we have throughout the entire Scripture. Like, go back to that discovery as you were writing this. Like, what was that like?

How did you discover that and what did that look like? There was an old Puritan. Puritan does not mean grouchy.

A lot of people think that it does. He was a very kind of idiosyncratic guy. He would wear around, his name was Thomas Goodwin, he would wear his nightcap around campus when he was ministering and teaching at Cambridge.

He's kind of a weirdo. He was a pastor and he was a theologian and an author. And he wrote a book based on Hebrews 4.15. What the Puritans would do is they would take one verse or a part of a verse and wring it dry.

And out comes 200 pages. One verse, guys. And he took Hebrews 4.15 where it says, Jesus is not unable to sympathize with us in our weaknesses. And he wrote a book on it and he called it the heart of Christ who is in heaven for sinners who are on earth. And the reason he called it that is he said, I know, I'm paraphrasing in the preface, he goes, I know all you Christians out there think that Jesus is way, way, way up high. He used to be down low. He was on earth for a while. Now he's up in heaven. Therefore, you kind of got a wave to get his attention.

You got to, you know, take a ticket, get in line. And the burden of the book is Jesus is closer and more available and more in touch with you now, his people now, than he ever could have been. Part of the theology that he's in us by his spirit.

But we could put it like this, guys. In John 13, Last Supper, they're sitting around a table. Peter says to John, who's leaning up against Christ's chest. He says, hey, John, could you ask Jesus a question for me? That's pretty close to Jesus.

He's physically like resting on him. The burden of Goodwin's book in part is we are closer to Christ now than John was that evening. And he's closer to us now than he was to John that evening.

That's why I said it's better for you all that I go away. John 15 or 16. So Thomas Goodwin wrote this book and that book I read and I thought I did.

This was about 11 years ago. I didn't know you could talk about Jesus like that without being a raging liberal. I thought it was only people who just had a bad theology that disbelieved in things like justice and wrath. Yeah. So let's talk about the love of God and so on in effusive ways.

No, Goodwin believed all of the harder doctrines, too. That's the guy who wrote the heart of Christ who is in heaven for sinners who are on earth. One last thing. He says that what Hebrews 4 15 is doing is it is taking our hand and it is placing it on the chest of Jesus Christ to feel how his heart beats and yearns. That's a biblical word to yearns for his people. That's what the verse is doing. And it's not the only verse doing that. Like, hey, Dane, take your hand.

You can place it on the beating heart of the God man, Jesus Christ, and feel how much he loves you. Wow. That's what the Bible is there for.

I started my crying session. I mean, how is it that we've missed that? I mean, preachers, churches, individuals. I don't think that's been communicated very well. It hasn't, has it? Yeah, it hasn't. Guys, I agree.

C.S. Lewis said the reason we need to read books by people who have been dead a long time is because we can't get into a time machine and go 400 years or 800 years into the future and see our blind spots and what we're not talking about, but they're talking about then in the church. But you can get in a time machine and go 400 years or 1500 years into the past. It's called going to the library and reading a book that someone wrote back then and say, whoa, they were talking about this. Thomas Goodwin popped up and gave 357 mini speeches on the floor of the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s, which was where we got our Westminster Confession of Faith, which talks about hell and wrath and God's justice. That guy wrote this book on Christ's art. Oh, and the theme comes up all through with the 12 volumes of his collected works.

He circles back to it again and again. It was not a one off for him and he was not a one off in the Puritans. Richard Sibbes, John Owen and later generations, Spurgeon and Bunyan and Jonathan Edwards. But we have not been singing this tune in the way that apparently past generations have, and we need to. I think so. We definitely need to.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's a lost message that's all over scripture. But I mean, Anne and I go through the one year Bible together and we're in it now and, you know, you do have to peer deeply in the Old Testament sometimes like, OK, this doesn't feel like a loving God. It feels like a judgmental God. And yet it's there.

But you can lose it. And that becomes the dominant message too often. The thing is, God is a God of wrath. He would not be God if he weren't. He is a God of justice, but he's rich in mercy. And Goodham points out nowhere in scripture is God called rich in wrath or rich in judgment, though he is that.

He is that. And we embrace that the full teaching of scripture. The fact that he is a God whose heart is one of outflowing mercy and embrace is all the more wondrous given that he is also to the impenitent, that is, to those who stiff arm him say, no, thanks, that he is a God of judgment and justice and wrath. So these doctrines mutually illuminate and heighten one another.

And you're right, Dave. OK, so for our kids, our listeners could be thinking, what does this have to do with marriage and parenting? But it has a lot to do with it because the way we view God and the way we think he views us impacts the way we interact with the people that we love. Has that impacted you? Oh, even when I'm thinking about you 11 years ago, as you're studying this, as you're learning this, like what did that do for you and what did that look like in your family? I will be obedient to answer that question.

But first, a preface comment. When I see a Christian acting in a certain way, whatever it is toward other Christians, what I am seeing is how they believe, whether they know it or not, how they believe God acts toward them. If Dave is and this is not who he is, if Dave was harsh and critical and impatient as a habit like that was how he rolled. I would say, among other things, I conclude that's what Dave thinks God is like toward him, harsh and impatient.

But actually, what Dave is like is long suffering, kind, accommodating, embracing, welcoming. You both are like that because, you know, in your gut, after walking with God many years, that's what God is like towards you. So whatever we believe God is like towards us, that is how we will operate towards others.

That's deep right there. Just thinking about our culture, thinking about people when they call themselves a Christian. If you see a pastor preaching and he might be trying to hide it, but he's angry. The tone that maybe bubbles out when he's not as filtered as he wishes he was is, why don't you people get it together?

He's sort of a scolding tone, Spurgeon called it. That's a preacher who believes that that's how God is towards him. Who believes that God is kind of up there with his arms crossed, tapping his foot, saying, when are you going to really preach a good sermon?

When are you going to get it together? He's passing along to his people what he believes God is like toward him. Whereas, oh, Sinclair Ferguson, the Scottish theologian, says, now here's the happier flip side of that. When a preacher is showing not only telling, showing his people what Jesus is like. The people sitting there in the pews or in the seats listening to the preacher preach after many years, they won't know they're doing this.

But actually, their preacher is giving them their Christology, what they think Jesus is actually like for good or ill. Your question wasn't about any of that. You were asked about 11 years ago. Yeah, but you just answered the question.

But keep going, go back to 11 years ago, because all of that's impacted you. And from what you just said, that's totally impacted your marriage and your parenting. I sure wish that it would more. Yes, I think it is. I believe it is.

Yeah. And I'm ashamed at how little it is. I want to grow in this.

I want to be the kind of dad where my kids grow up and they look back and they say, you know, Dad got a lot of things wrong. But I got a whiff of what Jesus is actually like in his own weird, imperfect way. Talk about Dane. I got a glimpse in an actual concrete human body tucking me in at night of what Jesus himself is like. So I would like to grow in that. But absolutely, this is urgently and universally, this theme of what Jesus is actually like, urgently and universally, in other words, in every domain of home life and family life and marital life.

It hits everything. Yeah, I mean, I would say what you just said, Dane, is the goal of the Christian life. Yes.

That every sphere I'm in, neighborhood, family room, work, I start laughing, driving the car. Do a very good job there. I mean, anyway, let me go ahead. You can tell.

But I mean, that should be our goal, right? That people would get a sense of the heart of God by the way we live, speak, act. There's something different about this person. I am detecting something. They might not use the word heavenly, but this is nothing that the world can manufacture.

This is like out of this world. I just want to give people a little, little glimpse of that. Can you imagine somebody saying about me? He's gentle and lowly. I think that's true about you.

No, I'm not asking for a compliment. I'm just thinking, oh, my goodness, that is beyond imaginable for me. You know, that's a father's heart to his kids is our father's heart to us. If we could capture that and live that out. And we can, with the power of God, we can. Dave, may I underscore that? This is doable. Yeah. God is not saying, hey, Dane, as a dad and as a mom, Dave, as a dad, train your kids to achieve 100 conversions of their classmates or friends per year or some other thing. Just feel so impossible.

Gentle, accessible, tender. At one level, I cannot manufacture. It has to be the power of God, as you just said, Dave. But that's right there. That's doable.

We can walk out of the studio and do that. And what if we died one day and people experienced that in our presence and said that, Dave, gentle and lowly, among other things, at our funeral, that will have been a life of eternal significance, no matter who's ever heard of us or hasn't, no matter how many Twitter followers we have, whatever. That will be a life that matters forever.

And it's doable. Which you have quite a legacy to, like a family. We just had lunch with, talked about your grandparents and then your parents. Did they, like, I'm thinking about your dad and your mom.

Did they give you a reflection of that? A hundred percent. The first two words in gentle and lowly are my dad. And that's fitting. So, yeah, my dad is the greatest guy I've ever known.

Here's why. Both my parents. It was nothing surprising or magical or unachievable. They just walked with reality, with God. They had an actual friendship with God. What I mean is it wasn't like they were angry all week and then said, get in the car.

We're going to church. It almost overstatement alert. It almost doesn't matter what their parenting strategy was. It does matter. It almost doesn't matter because those who look to him are radiant.

Psalm 34. My grandparents had that. My parents have that.

Everything's footnotes to that. If you have that, so much else will fall into place. I want my kids to say that about me. Dad, my weird dad, he had reality with God. Like Jesus was irresistible and inexhaustible to my dad. Whatever else, whatever my theology they disagree with or, you know, how much hours of video games I would allow them to have or not have, you know, the sparks fly when it comes to video games. But he had communion with God and it showed in brightness, radiance, glow.

That's my goal. Yeah, you're crying again. It's because we've complicated so much as parents in our marriages. But it's that like if we're with him, if we understand how compelling and graceful and the gospel, it changes us. We can't be with him and not be changed by him.

No, it just happens. So let's help one another in our parenting with tactics and strategies. Yes, we need that. Let's do classes at our churches. Here are seven things not to do when it comes to leading family devotions or whatever. But none of that is the banner over our parenting. The banner is God is there. God is real. Like talk with our kids about God.

Who's there? And just enjoy him together. That right there. Isn't that what we all want? Amen. You know, as a parent, it's just really difficult to do that. What Dane was just saying to enjoy God together and steer my kids towards God centeredness instead of seven things you should do in order to get your kids to read the Bible more or whatever, something like that.

I am just bent towards strategy and not as much the heart. So this is such an important exhortation to keep the main thing the main thing. And I really appreciated that. I'm Shelby Abbott and you've been listening to Dave and Ann Wilson with Dane Ortlund on Family Life Today. Dane has written a book called The Heart of Jesus, How He Really Feels About You. You can get your copy of Dane's book by going online right now to familylifetoday.com and clicking on today's resources.

Or you could check out the link in the show notes or feel free to give us a call at 800-358-6329 to request your copy. Again, that number is 800 F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now, I know we're only basically in the middle of September right now, but believe it or not, February is just right around the corner. And you're like, February?

Yes. Well, why am I mentioning that? Because the Family Life Love Like You Mean It Marriage Cruise is coming from February 8th to the 15th for an exclusive journey dedicated to strengthening your marriage. Now, on this special cruise that we have just once a year, you get to experience Bible teachings from gifted communicators, Christian entertainment like Danny Gokey and Chris August and Laura Storey, and romantic evenings under the stars. So, it's a full ship full of like-minded couples who are there for the Love Like You Mean It Marriage Cruise as well, and no children on board.

So, you can focus completely on each other. So, whether your marriage could use a boost and you need a little help with that, or if you just want to go and enjoy some time, just you and your spouse away from the kids, this is a great and relaxing opportunity for you to do so. Space is limited, so reserve your spot now at familylifetoday.com.

Just click on the Love Like You Mean It Marriage Cruise banner. Now, coming up tomorrow, Dane Orland is back to talk about how Jesus' heart is often misunderstood as stern and disappointed rather than loving and accepting. He'll steer us in the right direction tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.