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Podcast: Becoming Better or Going Deeper? How Real Change Happens (Dane Ortlund)

September 20, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Hope for Children of God

In this episode, Dane Ortlund discusses why we, as children of God, can remain hopeful—even when our journey toward Christlikeness is painfully slow—and encourages us to wake up every morning confident in God’s love and grace.

Deeper

Deeper

Dane Ortlund

Pastor and best-selling author Dane Ortlund offers words of encouragement to those seeking to grow deeper in their faith, making the case that sanctification is not accomplished by doing more or becoming better, but by going deeper into Christ himself.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:07 - Misconceptions about Growing in Christ

Matt Tully
Dane, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast today.

Dane Ortlund
Always a joy to do so.

Matt Tully
It really is. Today we’re going to talk about a new book that you’ve written called Deeper. It’s all about what it is to grow in Christ, to grow in our experience and love of Jesus, to grow as Christians. That’s obviously a topic that is pretty well-trod in Christian circles. We all feel that need and we all know that we want to be growing in Christ, and yet it’s often somewhat elusive. It feels like we’re maybe not making the progress that we wish we were making. What are some of the misconceptions about what it means to grow in Christ that you’ve encountered over the years?

Dane Ortlund
You’re right, Matt. There is so much good stuff out there, both contemporary stuff and historical, but we’re never going to have too much of it. Elusive is a great word. It can be so elusive, evasive, slippery—how do I begin to get traction here? I do think there are many common—not 180 degree wrong views of it—but views that are off a little bit and do not cleanly map onto what the New Testament and the whole Scripture gives us. The way I open up the book, and actually the whole point of the title Deeper, is that we don’t grow mainly by adding doctrinally or by behaving differently, externally or by feeling something different emotionally, though all three of those are vital parts of how we grow. But none of them is like the engine, the motor, the center, the bullseye. Rather, we grow by going deeper, way down deep into what we already have and enjoying that more profoundly and truly. So that’s sort of the presenting premise of the book.

Matt Tully
Unpack that first bit about how it’s not necessarily about knowing more or having a better theological understanding of what it is that we believe. It seems like that’s often promoted as the fuel for our devotional life, the fuel for our love of God and our faith is knowledge of God. How is that different from what you’re saying right now?

Dane Ortlund
Great question. It is true that growing intellectually—growing in the acute sharpness of our precision about truth—we’re not going to grow if we impune that or neglect that or don’t care about that. But the point is, that’s not the driver; it’s more of a steering wheel than an engine. Maybe that’s not quite the right metaphor, but the Pharisees were theologically precise. What was wrong that they not only didn’t receive Christ but are the ones who drove his execution—those theologically precise religious PhDs of the day? Something was not happening in their hearts. There wasn’t a fundamental heart softening. I was in school until I was thirty-one because I believe in the importance of truth and knowing it, growing in it.

Matt Tully
For those who aren’t familiar with your story, what did you study in school?

Dane Ortlund
Bible degree undergrad at Wheaton College, two masters degrees in seminary, and then a New Testament PhD thereafter. I love reading! Actually, I like books more than people! Let’s all keep growing intellectually in whatever way comports with the way God has wired us. I understand that. But growing doctrinally, we need to grow doctrinally and read theology in a way that is cautiously self-reflective and does not allow there to be that slowly creeping overconfidence or arrogance or condescension or smugness that can so easily come. It’s just who we are; it’s the flesh. This applies in any domain of life, no less theology.

05:26 - Be Who You Are

Matt Tully
I want to unpack something that you’ve already alluded to. There’s this great line from the opening of the book. You write, “Christian growth is bringing what you do and say and even feel into line with what, in fact, you already are.” Unpack that. What are you actually saying there? Then, why would you say that’s such an important place to start?

Dane Ortlund
It’s so liberating and freeing, isn’t it? I don’t need to go out and find something to add to what I already have in order to grow in Christ. The message of the New Testament is you have everything you need right now, as someone united to Christ and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, with an open Bible in front of you. You have everything you need. All you need to do is enjoy it, go deeper in it, relish it, spend time with it, and grow thereby. So, as you read the New Testament time and time again, what we find is Paul saying, Hey, when you’re messing up, you’re acting out of accord with who you most deeply are. When you flourish and thrive spiritually and when you are growing, you are simply acting in accord with who you already are. We have been plucked up and placed in the new age, most fundamentally, the dawning new creation—this is a whole biblical theme—and now as we grow, as we enjoy God, we are simply doing what should be normal and what’s natural. It often doesn’t feel that way because sin clings so deeply, and it still does. That’s true. But I think “be who you are” sums up the entire New Testament.

Matt Tully
Help us understand what that looks like in practice and what that feels like in practice. What’s the opposite of that? What does it look like when Chrsitians forget that is fundamentally what we are called to do—be who we already are?

Dane Ortlund
I like the image of an adopted orphan—someone who grew up and whose parents abandoned him or her when they were an infant—and is adopted by a billionaire and grows up in this home and then finds themselves as they grow continuing to wander out the front door down to the line for food stamps. They have been adopted. They have been clothed with wealthy garments. They have an inheritance coming. They’ve been written into the will. They’ve been legally and affectionately adopted (if it’s a good billionaire, and in this analogy it is) and therefore, they are not who they were anymore. For them to live out of the vast resources of the mansion is for them to live in accord with who they are. When I sin, I am forsaking my truest identity, not yielding to my truest identity—if I’m in Christ. I just think so many of us are believers and we’re going through life, but we look at our Christian life and we think for us to act in obedience, for us really to give our financial resources to the church, for us to lay down our life for a spouse, for there to be ordinary (and therefore radical) obedience to God, we have to somehow do something other than pull on resources outside of what we’ve been given. Not true. This is why I started my answer with, “It’s so freeing and liberating.” I have what I need. I was thinking about this on the car drive over here to spend this time with you talking about this book. I have everything. I’m battling my way through life this week. I have everything I need to progress and take steps forward in my Christian life. It doesn’t mean that I put it on autopilot. That’s not what I mean.

Matt Tully
Right. Because that would be a misunderstanding where it would seems you’re saying, I can sit back and relax and I’m going to grow naturally.

Dane Ortlund
Right. “I toil”—Colossians 1—“struggling with all his energy”—his energy—”that he powerfully works within me.” I worked harder than any of them, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. We change on terms of grace and grace alone. It is entirely divinely empowered. That is true. And, God does not, by his grace, change us as an alternative to our struggle, but through our struggle. We are spiritually sweating our way forward, but that itself is manifesting, and it’s what God’s grace looks like. It’s not an alternative to growth.

10:27 - A Domesticated View of Jesus

Matt Tully
One of the early things that you mention as well is that part of the problem that we often face when it comes to how we grow and how we view growing in Christ and our struggles to grow in Christ results from a domesticated view of Jesus. Unpack that for us.

Dane Ortlund
I believe that deeply. I like the image of Columbus hitting the Caribbean thinking he’s in Asia, not realizing there are vast tracts of uncharted, unexplored regions of land—today we call it North America—between him. He mistakenly called it the Indies. That’s what we, without even realizing it, that’s what I do with Jesus Christ. There are vast tracts of unexplored regions to this—“the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8).

Matt Tully
We just read right over that and don’t really think much about it.

Dane Ortlund
That’s right. And the only other place that that word “unsearchable” is used in the New Testament is describing God’s wisdom and infinitude in Romans 11. So, Christ’s riches are unsearchable. There are vast regions to them that we have not tapped into. One of the things I really was burdened to try to communicate in this book is that it’s not like Jesus Christ, the person, the God-man, the Savior, the friend of sinners and sufferers—is a starting point to our Christian life at conversion, beyond which we then move and proceed to other strategies and things in our mental horizon.

Matt Tully
Like, discipline. To start being disciplined in our spiritual efforts.

Dane Ortlund
Exactly right. It may sound reductionistic to some, but actually I deeply believe it (again, it’s deeper)—we grow as we go deeper into our apprehension of who Christ is and what he is like. We’re going to die one day. I’m forty-two. Maybe I’m about halfway done. I will die one day not having plumbed those vast regions of the unsearchable Christ. I will grow as I continue to dive into those regions. He’s a bigger Savior than I realize, and we do domesticate him, we dilute him, we decaffeinate him—pick your metaphor. Growing fits with not doing that.

Matt Tully
Are there a few examples of that? In the book you mention coming to understand Jesus better as one who rules, who saves, who befriends, who perseveres—unpack a couple of those for us, ways in which we can tend to domesticate him, and then what it looks like to see him for all of his glory.

Dane Ortlund
We create Christ in our image. We think that he’s a bigger, better version of us. I picked out seven things—fifty or five hundred could have been chosen—that as I look at the evangelical landscape of the church, and as I look at my own heart, are not robustly enjoyed all the way down. You mention a couple of them there. One is befriending. Do we really believe, way down deep, that we have in Christ an unfailing friend who’s never going to say, My patience has run out. It’s over. Interceding was another one. Do we understand that Jesus is as engaged right now in heaven on our behalf as he was when he was on the cross for us? He is as engaged right now, interceding, pleading, advocating for us before the hosts of heaven in the court of God. It is the Father’s own heart to receive and agree with that advocacy. Ruling. When we read what a foreign ruler is doing today and the nerves start to go a little big agitated as we’re watching the news headlines, do we really believe what Psalm 2 says, “the Lord holds them in derision” (Ps. 2:4). He is the real ruler over everything. No molecule can enter my lungs but through the ruler of the cosmos. So I just wanted to take a few of those and start the book, there in chapter one, with seven ways we can underplay who Christ is so that we’re starting with as rich an apprehension as possible of who he is.

Matt Tully
Why do you think it is that we are given such beautiful truths about Jesus—the Bible clearly teaches these things about who he is, not just in himself and to himself, but to us—why do we struggle to believe these things?

Dane Ortlund
Because we are sinners. Because our evil really is quite big and awful. We sense it and feel it. We are so deeply ashamed of ourselves and guilt-ridden. It feels wrong to allow ourselves to feel that loved and forgiven and embraced, so we are tepid; we hold back. We create Christ in our own image. It’s just what it is to be a fallen human being. But even that is forgiven and atoned for and cared for. So I do believe the Christian life is one of peeling back those acretians, those layers, of unbelief that hold us back from really collapsing into the open arms of Jesus Christ where we find real freedom.

16:26 - Conviction vs. Guilt

Matt Tully
Let’s talk a little bit about the ongoing shame and guilt that many of us can feel. Even if we believe that we have been saved there still can be this paralyzing problem of guilt in our lives (you use that metaphor in the book). How do we think about that—the sadness that we feel, the despair at times that we feel over our sin or lack of growth as Christians? Is there a good amount of that we should be feeling that then becomes bad if it goes too far? How would you think about that distinction?

Dane Ortlund
That’s a very penetrating and perceptive question. I think that there is salutary conviction and there is paralyzing guilt. The two can feel very similar, but one comes from hell and one comes from heaven. The Puritans would say it rejoices the heart of the devil for us to feel guilty in our sins. The devil wants us to feel weighed down and burdened. That might feel quite morally serious and right of us to do that. But we are free to feel totally forgiven. Salutary conviction comes from the Holy Spirit. The difference between salutary conviction and paralyzing guilt is one pulls you toward Christ, the other pulls you away from him. If you are feeling convicted of your sin and it is bringing you towards the Savior, towards health, towards refreshed, reopened communion and fellowship with him, that’s the Holy Spirit doing that. The devil does not want any of that to happen in your life. To get at the core of your question, we must keep feeling free. We must keep preaching the gospel to ourselves and letting ourselves feel it’s audacity. Here’s how Lovelace, author of Dynamics of Spiritual Life, puts it in a book that I quote a couple of times in Deeper—he says, “Start each day on the platform of your justified status before God.” You’re not mostly justified; you are justified. It’s black and white. The gavel has come down. You are totally acquitted. You have left the courtroom. Stop trying to get back in! Let yourself feel forgiven. That’s not wrong. That actually honors the work of Christ and the triune God to let you—guilty you—have that verdict wash over you everyday, even as you keep sinning, if you’re in Christ.

Matt Tully
Is there a ditch on that other side, perhaps? Or maybe you wouldn’t say it’s on the other side necessarily, but is there another ditch that we can fall into of being too complacent and just too casual about our ongoing struggle with sin where we very readily will console ourselves by saying, Hey, I’m justified. It’s not a big deal?

Dane Ortlund
Absolutely. Many, many believers are doing that right now. Antinomianism is the theological word for what you’re talking about and it is all over the place.

Matt Tully
How is that different from what you’re saying?

Dane Ortlund
What does Paul do at the end of Romans 5 when he says, Dare to let yourself feel forgiven in your justified status? He doesn’t say, But don’t go too far lest you fall into complacency, as he opens chapter 6. He says, “because you’re united to Christ.” The person who says, I’m going to believe the gospel so radically that yes, I don’t care if I’m going to sin. I will allow myself to become complacent—that actually is not treating Christ as a person, but as a formula. It’s not treating him as someone with whom you are in relationship. You’ve been united to him. That’s where Paul goes in Romans 6. Dare to feel forgiven, but it’s not a license to sin (Rom. 6) because you’re united to him. You were pulled with him down into death and up into resurrection existence. How could you treat his saving work as a license to sin? So, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel and of Christ for us to view the gospel in Christ as encouraging and allowing us to sin all the more.

20:58 - Why Is Confession So Difficult

Matt Tully
Another facet of our growth in Christ that I think many of us struggle with at times is confession. This idea of really being honest and transparent with another Christian, sharing what we’re struggling with, asking for prayer. For some reason that can be just so difficult for many of us. Why do you think that is?

Dane Ortlund
It feels like death. Actually, in some sense (not literally), we are dying. The self that we have created and that we’re walking around presenting and parading to everyone else—maybe even to God and to ourselves—is getting imploded, going into meltdown, disappearing. It’s dying and going away when we are honest. What all of us are doing all the time—including me—is we’re walking around and I’ve got the real Dane and I’ve got the presented Dane. There are two Danes, therefore. I’m not integrated. That’s not integrity. It’s duplicitous. It’s double-minded and double-tongued. So, all we’re doing when we confess things to another is we’re bringing those two selves to overlap; we’re bringing that together. It’s integration and honesty. “If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). Walking in the light is the Bible’s name for bringing those two circles to overlap, rather than walking in darkness where I’ve got two selves—one with sin festering and growing (in the darkness is where it grows), and the other one that I am presenting. That is actually a miserable and exhausting way to live. In the death of confession, life blossoms. Right then and there with a safe person, a safe brother or sister (someone of the same gender is wisest) who really knows what I am most in anguish about. That’s where the back of sin is broken and we begin to get fresh traction.

Matt Tully
You said something a few minutes ago that was really interesting. You said that sometimes even this false self that we present, we might even be presenting it to ourselves. Is that something that you’ve seen in your own life where you have constructed this image of yourself that you have started to believe in some way?

Dane Ortlund
I don’t know if I would put it exactly that way, but for sure I know what it feels like and is to be so disgusted with myself that I actually, apart from the resources of the gospel, I cannot face myself. I can only distract myself with something in life. We can, in Christ, truly face who we really are. That’s the powerful resource of the gospel. So that’s why I said we can try to deceive ourselves. Counselors—or good friends—will testify to what it’s like to be speaking to someone and they are actually not being honest with who they are. They know who they really are, but they will not see themselves that way. We are complicated, dark, messy sinners, and the gospel begins to bring that integration.

Matt Tully
You also write that “honesty fuels feeling forgiven.” That’s a struggle that we often have. We might know intellectually that we’re forgiven, and yet we don’t feel that; but you’re saying that honesty and confession can help with that.

Dane Ortlund
It’s very strange and maybe counterintuitive, but when I don’t confess my sins, I don’t feel forgiven. When I do, it might sound intuitively like, The more you are honest about your sins, the more you’re going to feel guilty and weighed down. Actually, the reverse is true. And I think that’s part of the genius of that text I read a moment ago from 1 John: “If we walk in the light as he is in the light”—if we are open and honest about our struggles with another brother or sister—“we have fellowship with one another”—the walls come crashing down horizontally, but then something vertical happens too—“the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin.” It doesn’t mean that God won’t forgive you until you start getting honest horizontally. It can’t mean that because of the rest of the testimony of Scripture. What it must mean is you start feeling forgiven. It goes from 2D to 3D. You actually get reality with the gospel when you’re honest about your sins. It moves from being theoretical to actual.

25:36 - Can I Give Myself Grace?

Matt Tully
What do you think about the oft-heard phrase, You just need to give yourself some grace?

Dane Ortlund
Yes and no. God is the one who gives us grace. We don’t give ourselves grace, first of all. Second, I can understand it. I say yes because I can understand it in that we are hard on ourselves as believers in a way that is out of accord with the gospel. I understand that. I do that. But no because “give yourself more grace” seems to imply that the resources for being and feeling forgiven reside within us, but it is wholly an alien matter. It’s an external, outside-in matter for us to be forgiven. So I don’t need to give myself any grace. I just need to be honest with myself, open up the vents in my heart and receive grace from heaven.

Matt Tully
Yes, enjoy the grace you’ve already been given. How does that fit with something else you say in the book—you talk about the need to be patient with ourselves when it comes to our growth.

Dane Ortlund
I am thinking right now of a friend of mine at my church. He is in his late seventies and he is a godly man. He has told me more than once he feels himself to be more sinful today than ever. He’s not. He’s godlier than ever, but he feels that way. It is so easy to go through life and we expect ourselves to be growing faster, actually, than is realistic. It’s like if you plant a flower seed in your garden and you water it and it gets some rain and sun and so on, and then you get frustrated with it that it doesn’t grow faster than is realistic for it. You get out there and you’re berating it and giving it pep talks and trying to pull it up. Well, that’s only going to damage it more. We really must be patient.

Matt Tully
Do you think that’s a problem in the evangelical church broadly, we aren’t patient in our growth?

Dane Ortlund
I don’t know. It’s a problem for me, and maybe it is for others too. I don’t want others to hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying relax and lose a sense of urgency about your growth in Christ. This is all that matters at the end of the day in our lives! But don’t throw in the towel because you seem to be taking two steps forward and three steps backward one week. Just keep going forward. Lewis has this beautiful place in one of his letters where he says, We’re going to arrive home tattered children one day, but the clothes are laid out in the cupboard and the bath is hot and steaming, and we will be cleansed finally. We are going to get to heaven muddy and tattered, but let’s not throw in the towel. Let’s keep growing doggedly, ruggedly moving forward in honesty with God, ourselves, and one another. We will be growing. We won’t feel it week to week, but year to year, we are. We’re becoming more solid, more radiant men and women.

Matt Tully
So the encouragement to be patient is to forestall someone giving into the devil’s lie that we should just throw in the towel.

Dane Ortlund
Yes, and I think a false view of growing (or sanctification) in which you think it’s merely behavioral conformity so that last week you didn’t have any time in the Scripture and this week you had an hour each day—that might feel like, Wow! You have really grown a lot in this week! It may be healthy; it may be Phariseeism. Real growth is slow because real growth is by looking at Christ over a lifetime and melting—becoming aglow slowly as we ponder him and walk with him. So, it’s slow.

Matt Tully
That’s an encouraging thing, but it often does (in my own experience at least) seem a little bit at odds with the way we often talk about sanctification and growth. I think we all acknowledge it’s often slow, but then we also love those big stories of life change and God working in really profound, big ways in someone’s life and then everything changing for them. Those are kind of held up as these examples to us.

Dane Ortlund
Hallelujah! God works that way sometimes. Slow growth is still supernatural growth. We praise God for those instances of overnight transformation and radical change—that’s great! God does that. But for ninety-nine percent of us, it’s just ordinary slow, but still just as much heavenly and divine growth and grace.

30:26 - What Is the Bible’s Role in Christian Growth?

Matt Tully
What is the Bible’s role in our growth? I think many of us have a sense that it should play an important role, but how would you describe that?

Dane Ortlund
Akin to the bowl of multigrain Cheerios I had about an hour ago before coming over to Crossway. It is a staple, it is nourishing, it is breakfast, it is what we need in order to grow and be healthy. We come out of the womb wrong. We have all kinds of weird, messed up ideas about how this world works. And the world itself tends to reinforce a lot of those weird, messed up ideas. The Bible corrects us. It says, Here’s who you are. Here’s how the world began. Here’s how it’s going to end. Here’s who God is. Here’s how you get in on the party. The Bible not only corrects us, it also is—from cover to cover—a book of good news, so it also lifts us. It buoys us along. It oxygenates us. We see that black cover Holy Bible on the shelf and many of us reflexively and intuitively think, That book is just depleting. It’s going to be bland and boring and just give me instruction and I’m going to be even more beat down when I’m done reading it than I was when I began. Not true. We can read it the wrong way and feel that way.

Matt Tully
Some people would say that actually is true and that actually is what I feel. Why do we feel that way?

Dane Ortlund
Because we misread the Bible and we view it more like a cookbook or more like something else than what it is, which is a true story of how God created the world, how we messed it up, and how he—on terms of grace and grace alone—is setting it right. The way in is simply to open ourselves up to it and collapse into the open arms of Christ, not to climb a ladder up into it. That’s very good news. You can plunk down in Leviticus and it is advancing that good news. You can hear the curses at the end of Deuteronomy, and it is actually advancing that good news. The Proverbs, which might sound like just trite aphorisms for life, no, they’re advancing that good news—not only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That is what the whole Bible is.

32:29 - 9 Wrong Ways to Read the Bible

Matt Tully
You talk about how often that view of the Bible is a result of wrong ways of reading it, and one of the most helpful and interesting parts of your book for me is this little section where you talk about nine wrong ways to read the Bible. Could you walk us through that briefly? What are those 9 wrong ways, and how are those different from the right way?

Dane Ortlund
I think there are many wrong ways we can read the Bible, none of them is totally wrong, but they are all misguided. The warm-fuzzies approach is where you’re just reading it for a subjective experience. The grumpy approach: you’re just reading the Bible so that God can tell you to do something and you can get him off your back. The gold mine approach: you’re looking for a verse that could go on a mug—just an inspirational thought for the day. The hero approach: you’re reading the Bible and you’re just looking for someone who really had it together that we should go imitate and emulate. The rules approach: you’re reading the Bible and you’re just saying, What do I need to do to do what is right today? The Indiana Jones approach: the archaeological approach where you’re reading the Bible like an ancient textbook to see what people believed.

Matt Tully
It’s just fascinating.

Dane Ortlund
Exactly, but irrelevant to my life today. The magic 8-ball approach: flop open the Bible, put your finger down, and this is what God wants you to do in whatever circumstantial decision awaits you today. The Aesop's Fable approach where you’re reading the Bible and it’s all these loosely strung together nice, moralistic stories. Or the doctrine approach, which we opened this interview with, where we are reading the Bible as a theological repository for argument ammunition for doctrinal debates. There is some truth to each of those actually. There is truth to each of those.

Matt Tully
The Bible does those things for us.

Dane Ortlund
Yes, it does. But none of those is penetrating to the heart of what it most deeply is, which is good news. Jesus said in Luke 24 and John 5 and the end of John 1—he referred to the Old Testament (and Paul does this as well in Romans 15 and 2 Timothy 3) as good news. It’s given to give hope. It’s given to make us wise for salvation in Jesus Christ. Jesus says the whole Old Testament is about him. So we need to read the Bible for doctrine or for morals or for circumstantial decision-making or whatever, in light of that broader transcending narrative of God’s saving work in Christ.

Matt Tully
Unpack what it looks like to actually read the Bible through that lens primarily.

Dane Ortlund
I love what Bryan Chappell taught us in the Fall of 2002 in my first ever preaching class at Covenant Seminary. He said anytime you read the Bible—and this would be one way to answer that question, Matt—read it answering one of two questions: What do I learn in this passage about the God who provides redemption? Or, what do I learn in this passage about people who need redemption? Those two questions, if you stick to those, prevent you from going to a moralistic or legalistic or weird way because you’re not lifting up the people of the Bible. You’re lifting up the God of the Bible and you’re saying how does that God meet my needs, my need for redemption? That would be one approach.

35:41 - The Gospel Is Our Home

Matt Tully
Dovetailing nicely with that, you write, “the gospel is not a hotel to pass through but a home to live in.” First, what does that mean? Second, why is that important to emphasize as Christians and in a conversation about our growth in Christ?

Dane Ortlund
Luther is so strong on this and my favorite. I can’t help thinking of him and right now, apparently, I can’t help mentioning him when you ask that question. He speaks of the gospel not merely as the gateway to the Christian life but the pathway of the Christian life. It’s the road on which we travel our whole lives, Luther says when he’s preaching on John 14:6 where Jesus says, “I am the way.” Not just the door; he does say that too, but he’s also the way, the road, the whole highway. We are to dwell in the gospel. I believe this way down deep and I know you do too, Matt. We don’t graduate beyond it. We stay settled in it and, it’s the point of the book, go deeper into it our whole lives long. We will stall out if we try to move past the good news.

Matt Tully
Do you think the hotel view is something that many Christians struggle with?

Dane Ortlund
I certainly have in my life. I think probably so, yes, because it can feel like we’ve learned the gospel, the good news. I can state it, I can write it on a 3x5 card. Now, surely, there’s more sophisticated things I need to move onto in my Christian life. The problem is we don’t move on from being sinners. If we became a believer and then we ceased being a sinner, then we could move on and graduate on from the gospel. The gospel got us in, now we’re good to go. I’m going to move on to other thoughts, strategies, and ideas. But actually, we continue to be an idolatrous sinner so we continue to need the gospel. Actually, we’ll have new sins, as Christians, we didn’t have before.

Matt Tully
That’s where I think the picture of deeper is so helpful because there is movement, there is change in the Christian life. There is a real sense of, as I think Paul says, moving on from the milk. But it’s actually going deeper into the things we already know; it’s not moving past the thing we already know.

Dane Ortlund
Exactly right. Hebrews 6 says you're still living on the ABCs when you should have moved on. So we don’t want to deny that. That is true. We do want to grow and develop and keep becoming more profound men and women. Graham Goldsworthy puts it this way, “We grow out with the gospel. We don’t grow out beyond the gospel.” We step out with the gospel as we grow. We take it with us and it is one of the main things helping us to grow.

Matt Tully
Dane, many of our listeners will know that you are also the author of Gentle and Lowly, a book that explores Jesus’s heart, his kind, gracious, gentle heart of sinners and sufferers. How would you describe this new book’s relationship to that one? If someone is familiar with Gentle and Lowly and has read it and benefited from it, how might this book fit with that?

Dane Ortlund
Thank you for that, Matt. The way I think of it is Gentle and Lowly is an introduction to who Jesus is. What is his deepest heart? What is at the core? What pours out of him most naturally? Who is he, in fact? He tells us in Matthew 11, and the whole Scripture testifies to it as well. In Deeper, it’s saying given who Jesus is, how then do we now grow? Gentle and Lowly is looking at Christ; Deeper is saying given who he is, continuing to look at him, but probing how do we now grow, given who he is?

Matt Tully
They’re both so helpful, and right at the very beginning of Deeper, it struck me as a liberating book that helps us to perhaps correct some of the oppressive and discouraging ways that we often think about what it means to grow in our faith and grow in our walk. Thanks so much for taking the time today to talk with us.

Dane Ortlund
A pleasure.

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