The book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund will require little introduction for many of us. It is a book that has taken the Christian world by storm, and rightly so as Ortlund, as it were, opens up the heart of Christ for us to see his ongoing love and grace and compassion towards believing sinners and sufferers.

Getting a flavour for the book

To give you a quick flavour for the tone and content of the book, let me give two quotes:

Gentle and lowly. This, according to his own testimony, is Christ’s very heart. This is who he is. Tender. Open. Welcoming. Accommodating. Understanding. Willing. If we are asked to say only one thing about who Jesus is, we would be honouring Jesus’s own teaching if our answer is, gentle and lowly.

(page 21)

Goodwin completes his sentence like this: Christ’s “own joy, comfort, happiness, and glory are increased and enlarged by his showing grace and mercy, in pardoning, relieving, and comforting his members here on earth.”

(page 36, quoting Thomas Goodwin The heart of Christ)

             

Making use of the book for our own benefit

My purpose here is not to review the book. You can find many helpful reviews online. Rather, I would like to consider with you how we might use it for our own and our church’s benefit.

Some books should be read quickly, straight through, digested and then put back on the shelf. Many books shouldn’t be read at all. Gentle and Lowly is in a different category. It is a book that should be read slowly, over time. The structure of the book fits quite well with such use: It consists of 23 short chapters, with lots of sub-headings. Each chapter considers the heart of Christ from a slightly different angle.

So how might we read it? I recently read through the book for the second time. And I did so slowly. Once I’d got up and made my coffee, and before reading the Bible for my and my church family’s benefit, I read a few pages of Gentle and Lowly. Slowly. And I thought about them. And I allowed the gentle and lowly character of Christ to warm and enliven my cold and waking heart at the start of the day. I used it, in the words of George Muller to “attend to the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day”, which is “to have my soul happy in the Lord.” (Autobiography of George Muller, comp. Fred Bergen (London: J. Nisbet, 1906), 152.)

How else might we use it? If we meet with a group to pray each week, we could read a few pages together in the same way. We could make it our ‘Book of the term’ and encourage our people to savour it as they read it. What other ways can you suggest that we can make use of this wonderful book?