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

Dane: 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.”

That will be a life that matters forever, and it’s doable.

Shelby: Welcome to FamilyLife 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.

Ann: This is FamilyLife Today!

Dave: Sunday at church our pastor quoted A.W. Tozer. I thought it was so appropriate as we talk about this topic today. Remember what he said?

Ann: Well, you have it in our notes, and I could read it.

Dave: Yes, why don’t you read it?

Ann: Okay. 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.

Dave: Yes.

Ann: And even ask yourself, let me ask you, what do you think about God?

Dave: Well, we are going to find out today. We have Dane Ortlund with us.

Ann: Are you excited about Dane?

Dave: I’m excited.

Ann: We are so excited to have Dane Ortlund.

Dane: You two are fun to talk to. You two are easy and fun to talk to.

Ann: Well, we love having you with us.

Dave: Yes. You are one of these guests that if you are even in the sky above Orlando, you better come down and we’ll walk in here and talk about anything you want to talk about, because you are always thinking new thoughts. This one is The Heart of Jesus:  How He Really Feels about You.

Dane: Yes.

Dave: That subtitle right away grabs people because we think, “How does He feel about me?” How we perceive how He feels about us is deeply related to how we view Him.

Ann: Let me add, Dane, I feel like you have been ground-breaking 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.

When we had you on for Gentle and Lowly, didn’t I just cry the whole time?

Dave: Oh, yes.

Ann: So, thank you.

Dave: Yes, it’s a message for our generation, every generation. Thank you for doing that.

Dane: 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.

Dave: Talk about Gentle and Lowly. I know a lot of people—I’m guessing the whole world has read it. Just like they’ve all read our books, right?

Dane: Not quite. I’d love it if that were the case, Dave. It’s a book on what Ann just said—what comes to our mind when we think about God. But wouldn’t you agree, we can easily de-personalize 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.

Look at the rich, young ruler. Looking at him, the text says, He loved him. [Mark 10:21]

In one place in all four gospels, Spurgeon points this out. My dad read it and pointed it out to me. Matthew 11—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 Him.

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 those blanks left to ourselves.

We probably would have picked some good words, some true words. But who of us would have ever said, His heart, His deepest innermost being if we peer way down into what He is most deeply like is He is tender, non-abrasive and He is lowly, and that means He is accessible.

He’s not like a really, really good politician, one operating in total integrity with all the right policies but you have to wait in lines of security to get to Him. Like when you get on a Zoom^® call, and it says, “The host will let you in.” There’s none of that with Jesus Christ because He is accessible is the point. He’s right there.

The Revelation 1 Christ before John fell down into the fetal position because He saw the risen Christ—that One, not a junior varsity version of that—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.

Ann: What words would you have put in? What two words as a kid growing up?

Dane: Right.

Ann: What would you have put in about Jesus?

Dane: Probably I would have chosen different words based on what point in my development I was at. So, it’s good to say, as a kid.

Ann: Yes.

Dane: 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.

Ann: Right.

Dane: I’m still getting used to the surprise. A journey of a lifetime with the Bible is a journey in ten-thousand surprises—

Ann: Yes.

Dane: —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.

Ann: Hmm. Go back to that discovery. As you were writing this, what was that like? How did you discover that? What did that look like?

Dane: There was an old Puritan. Puritan does not mean grouchy. A lot of people think that it does. [Laughter] He was a very 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 was kind of a weirdo.

He was a pastor. He was a theologian and an author. He wrote a book based on Hebrews 4:15. What the Puritans would do is take one verse or a part of a verse and wring it dry, and out comes two hundred pages. One verse, guys!

Dave: Wow.

Dane: 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. He called it, The Heart of Christ who is in Heaven for Sinners who are on Earth. And the reason he called it that was because he said, “I know,” and I’m paraphrasing in the preface. He said, “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 have to wave to get his attention. You’ve got to take a ticket and get in line.”

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 is in us with His Spirit. We could put it like this, guys. In John 13, the Last Supper, they are sitting around a table. Peter says to John, who is leaning up against Christ’s chest, “Hey, John, could you ask Jesus a question for me?” That’s pretty close to Jesus.

Ann: [Laughter]

Dane: He’s physically resting on Him. The burden of Goodwin’s book in part is, we are closer to Christ now than John was that evening.

Ann: Oooh.

Dave: Oh.

Dane: And He’s closer to us now than He was to John that evening. That’s why He said, “It’s better for you that I go away,” in John 15 or 16.

Ann: Yes.

Dane: So, Thomas Goodwin wrote this book, and I read, and I thought, “I didn’t know”—this was about eleven years ago, I didn’t know—that you could talk about Jesus like that without being a raging liberal. I thought it was only people who had a bad theology and disbelieved things about justice and wrath. So, let’s talk about the love of God in some effusive ways.

No, Goodwin believed in the harder doctrines, too. That’s the guy who wrote The Heart of Christ who is in Heaven for Sinners who are on Earth.

Oh! One last thing. He says that what Hebrews 4:15 is doing 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, too—yearns for His people. That’s what the verse is doing and it’s not the only verse doing that.

It’s like He says, “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.

Ann: I just started my crying session.

Dave: Yes. You just started it. How is it that we miss that? Preachers, churches, individuals. I don’t think that has been communicated very well.

Dane: It hasn’t, has it. It hasn’t, guys, I agree. CS Lewis said the reason we need to read books who have been dead a long time is because we can’t go into a time machine and go four hundred years or eight hundred years into the future and see our blind spots and what we’re not talking about but they are talking about then in the church. But you can go four hundred or eight hundred years into the past. It’s called going to the library and reading a book that someone wrote back then and saying, “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 is 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 heart.

And this theme comes up in all twelve volumes of his collective works. He circles back to it again and again. It was not a “one-off” for him. He was not a “one-off” in the Puritans. Richard Sibbs, John Owen, and later generations: Spurgeon, John Bunyan, and Jonathan Edwards. But we have not been singing this tune in the way that apparently past generations have, and we need to.

Ann: We think so. We definitely need to.

Dave: Yes. It’s a little bit like it’s a lost message that’s all over Scripture. Ann and I go through the One-Year Bible together, we’re in it now. You do have to peer deeply into the Old Testament sometimes.

Dane: You do, for sure.

Dave: That 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.

Dane: 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 is rich in mercy. And Goodwin points out, nowhere in Scripture is God called rich in wrath or rich in judgment, though 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 and say, “No thanks,” that He is a God of judgment and justice and wrath.

These doctrines mutually illuminate and heighten one another. And you are right, Dave.

Ann: Okay. For our kids, our listeners could be thinking what does this have to do with marriage and parenting. 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 that we interact with the people we love.

Dane: 100%.

Ann: Has that ever impacted you? Even eleven years ago as you were studying this and learning this. What did that do for you and what did that look like in your family?

Dane: 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—

Ann: Yes.

Dane: —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, that was how he rolled, I would say, among other things, I conclude that Dave thinks that is how God is 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 is what God is like towards you. So, whatever we believe God is like toward us, that is how we will operate towards others.

Ann: That’s deep right there. Just thinking about our culture.

Dane: Yes, that’s right.

Ann: Thinking about people when they call themselves a Christian. Okay, keep going.

Dane: If you see a pastor preaching, and he might be trying to hide it, but he’s angry.

Dave: Yes.

Dane: The tone that maybe bubbles out when he is not as filtered as he wishes he was, “Why don’t you people get it together?” It’s sort of a scolding tone, Spurgeon called it. That’s a preacher who believes that’s how God is towards him, who believes that God is up there tapping His foot wondering, “When are you going to preach a really 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—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 are doing this but actually what their preacher is doing is giving them their Christology, what they think Jesus is actually like for good or for ill.

Your question wasn’t about any of that. You were asking about eleven years ago.

Ann: Yes, but you kind of just answered the question. But keep going, go back to eleven years ago because all of that’s impacted you. And, from what you just said, that’s totally impacted your marriage and your parenting. It has to.

Dane: I sure wish that it would have more. Yes. I think it is. I believe it is.

Ann: Yes.

Dane: 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 (we’re talking about Dane) I got a glimpse in an actual, concrete human body tucking me in at night of what Jesus is like. I’d like to grow in that. Absolutely. This is urgently and universally, this theme of what is Jesus actually like—urgently and universally, in other words, in every domain of home life and family life and marital life—

Ann: It hits everything.

Dane: Yes.

Ann: Everything.

Dave: I would say, Dane, that is the goal of the Christian life. Every sphere I’m in—neighborhood, family room, work—I start laughing—driving the car—

Dane: You, too, Dave?

Dave: I do not do a very good job there. [Laughter] Go ahead; you can tell them.

That should be our goal, right? That people would get a sense of the heart of God by the way we live, speak, act.

Dane: There’s something different about this person.

Dave: Right.

Dane: I’m detecting something, they might not use the word heavenly, but this is nothing that the sort of thing that the world can manufacture. This is out of this world. I just want to give people just a little glimpse of that.

Dave: Can you imagine somebody saying about me, he’s gentle and lowly?

Ann: I think that’s true about you.

Dave: No, I’m not asking for a compliment.

Ann: No.

Dave: I’m just thinking that is beyond imaginable for me. That’s a father’s heart to his kids, our Father’s heart toward us, if we can capture that and live that out. And we can, with the power of God, we can.

Dane: Dave, can I underscore that? This is doable.

Dave: Yes.

Dane: God is not saying, “Hey Dane, as a dad; Ann, as a mom; Dave, as a dad, train your kids to achieve one hundred conversions of their classmates or friends per year, or some other thing that just feels so impossible.

Gentle, accessible, tender. At one level, I cannot manufacture that. It has to be the power of God, as you said, Dave. But that’s right there. That’s doable. We could walk right out of the studio and do that.

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 how many people have heard of us or who hasn’t. No matter how many Twitter followers we have, whatever.

That will be a life that matters forever, and it’s doable.

Ann: You have quite a legacy, too. Like a family—we just had lunch and talked about your grandparents and your parents. Did they—I’m thinking about your dad and your mom—did they give you a reflection of that?

Dane: 100%. The first two words in Gentle and Lowly are “My dad.”

Ann: Hmmm.

Dane: And that’s fitting. Yes, my dad is the greatest guy I’ve ever known. Here’s why: [for] both my parents, it was nothing surprising or magical or unachievable. They just walked in 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.

Ann: Yes.

Dane: It almost doesn’t matter because “those who look to Him are radiant.” [Psalm 34] My grandparents had that. My parents have that. Everything is 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. Jesus was irresistible and inexhaustible to my dad, whatever else. Whatever of my theology they disagree with or how many hours of video games I’d allow or not allow them to have, you know the sparks fly when it comes to video games. He had communion with God, and it showed in brightness, radiance, glow. That’s my goal.

Dave: Ann, you’re crying again.

Ann: [Laughter] It’s because we complicate it so much as parents, in our marriages. But it’s that. 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. It just happens.

Dane: 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 leading family devotions. Whatever. But none of that is the banner over our parenting.

The banner is: God is there. God is real. Talk to our kids about God who is there and enjoy Him together.

Ann: That right there. Isn’t that what we all want?

Dane: Amen, amen.

Shelby: 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.” Whatever, something like that. I am just bent towards strategy and not as much the heart. This is such an important exhortation to keep the main thing the main thing. I really appreciated that.

I’m Shelby Abbot, and you’ve been listening to Dave and Ann Wilson with Dane Ortlund on FamilyLife Today. Dane has written a book called The Heart of Jesus: How He Really Feels about You.

You can get a copy of Dane’s book by going online right now to FamilyLifeToday.com and clicking on “Today’s Resources.” Or feel free to give us a call at 800-358-6329 to request your copy; again, the number is 800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life and then the word, “TODAY.”

Now I know we are only in the middle of September, but February is just around the corner. Why am I mentioning it? Because the FamilyLife Love Like You Mean It^® marriage cruise is coming February 8-15, for an exclusive journey dedicated to strengthening your marriage.

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It’s a full ship full of like-minded couples who are there for the Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise as well. There are no children on board, so you can focus completely on each other. Whether your marriage could use a boost, and you need a little help with that, or if you just want to go enjoy some time, just you and your spouse away from the kids. This is a great and relaxing opportunity for you to do so.

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Tomorrow, Dane Ortlund 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 Dave and Ann Wilson, I’m Shelby Abbott. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

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