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Podcast: How Does Jesus Really Feel about Me? (Dane Ortlund)

August 19, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How Jesus Describes His Heart and What That Means for You

In this episode, Dane Ortlund reflects on what God has continued to teach him about the heart of Jesus and why he's more passionate than ever about this life-changing message.

The Heart of Jesus

The Heart of Jesus

Dane Ortlund

Featuring short, easy-to-read chapters and helpful explanations, this simplified edition of Gentle and Lowly takes readers into the depths of Christ’s tender heart for sinners and sufferers.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:27 - Surprised at What Jesus Is Actually Like

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

Dane Ortlund
It is always my pleasure, Matt.

Matt Tully
Likewise. Dane, you open your new book with a wonderful quote, an excerpt from C. S. Lewis’s book, The Magician’s Nephew. I wonder if you can read that for us first, and then tell us why you wanted to start this new book with that.

Dane Ortlund
You bet. The context is the little boy, Digory, his mother is dying, and he is longing for her to be cured. He has met Aslan, and so he has a glimmer of hope that maybe mom will get cured. And here’s what Lewis writes in The Magician’s Nephew. Digory says, “‘But please, please—won’t you—can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?’ Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself. ’My son, my son,’ said Aslan.” That is such a beautiful, poignant depiction of what Jesus is like to a child. Lewis just nails it, doesn’t he, Matt? He’s too afraid to look up at Aslan in the eyes, and then when he does, Alan’s crying. And the way Lewis puts it is that Digory is wondering, “I wonder if, actually, this is hurting Aslan more than it’s hurting me?”

Matt Tully
Something that he presumably had never considered before.

Dane Ortlund
I’m sure you’re right. And that’s just a brief, in narrative form, piece of true doctrinal teaching about what the Scripture gives us about what Jesus is like. It’s just beautiful.

Matt Tully
You write in the book that your goal with this short book, The Heart of Jesus, is “to help Christians see that Jesus is wonderfully different than what we think.” In your experience—maybe in your own personal experience, but also in your experience as a pastor in counseling other Christians—how do we normally think about what Jesus is like?

Dane Ortlund
This has been new for me the last decade or so, so I feel like I’m still very young in it, and I want to very careful to stick close to the Scripture, which is smarter than me. Most of my life I thought growing in my knowledge of Christ is adding more to what I already know of him in the same direction. And there is that, for sure. We are growing and reading and learning and listening to sermons and discipleship and small group, and we’re growing in learning more about Christ. It is in trajectories that we already saw were there in him. But there’s also a way of you’re going through life and you’re discouraged and beat down, and you sort of look up at Jesus, and you see tears in his eyes. And you’re like, “I think he’s even sorrier about mother than I am.” And there’s a very vital, important element to our growth in sanctification, in our growth in godliness, our growth in our knowledge of the Son of God that is captured by the one word “surprise.” Startled. “Wait a minute. He’s like that? Hang on. He responds to my messiness or my mistake or my failure or my weakness with that?” And it’s not in going in the same direction, only more; it’s actually going in a flowing upstream of what we thought he was like, because we’ve created him in our image. So that’s what I’m trying to do in this book because that’s the journey I’ve been on.

05:49 - Christ’s Person, Christ’s Work, Christ’s Heart

Matt Tully
Those who have read some of your books before, most notably Gentle and Lowly which came out in 2020, they might find that some of what you’re saying sounds a little bit familiar. Gentle and Lowly, like I said, came out about four years ago, and it’s sold nearly 900,000 copies, which is just remarkable. I think it’s beyond what anyone expected, even though we were super excited about this book.

Dane Ortlund
It’s about 895,000 more than any of us thought.

Matt Tully
So what do you make of the response to that book? And then I would love to hear you reflect on how this new book relates to that first one.

Dane Ortlund
I don’t make anything of the response to that book. I don’t know what to make of it. I leave it in God’s hands. I got a sermon to preach this week and I got five kids to disciple and my own heart to care for, so you guys take care of it!

Matt Tully
I get that you don’t want to be overly focused on numbers, and we don’t either, but what does that reflect, I guess, about the prevalence of this thinking about Jesus, and then, like you said, the surprise—the wonderful surprise that we can come to when we realize that he’s maybe not like what we thought?

Dane Ortlund
I don’t know the answer to that either, if I’m honest, but I discovered in a handful of 400-year-old, long-dead English pastors and a handful of those who followed in their wake a recurring theme that I’ve tried to communicate in twenty-first century language in these couple of books, Gentle and Lowly and then The Heart of Christ. So I ain’t making this stuff up. And C. S. Lewis said you can figure out the blind spots of your time in one of two ways. You can either get in a time machine and go 400 years into the future (we haven’t figured out how to do that yet) or you can get in a time machine and go 400 years into the past, which we can do, and it is called going to the library and pulling a book off the shelf and reading and getting in the mind of a Richard Sibbes. You’re actually reading what he thought. And you are expanded and deepened and astonished at seeing a Sibbes or a Bunyan or a Goodwin or a Warfield or an Edwards or a Spurgeon reflect on the actual Scripture—the same Bible I’ve been reading—and draw out what is there in ways we have not widely, deeply celebrated today. And I think Christ’s person we’ve got Nicene orthodoxy pretty nailed. Christ’s work, atonement theology—we’ve got a lot of good stuff on that. Christ’s heart, much less.

Matt Tully
So maybe the interest in Gentle and Lowly reflects the relative lack of attention that our generation and even recent generations have paid to the heart of Christ.

Dane Ortlund
I don’t know. What do you think?

Matt Tully
Yeah, that resonates with me. I feel like Christ’s person and work are often the focus and have been the focus of my own theological formation. But spending time meditating on, thinking carefully about the glimpses into Christ’s heart, his feelings, his emotions, his inclinations, as revealed in the Gospels, has not been a focus.

Dane Ortlund
And it can make people uncomfortable, understandably so. Is this progressive? Is this mushy? Is this diluting the deity of Christ, or is this compromising divine simplicity? There are traps laid in everywhere in exploring Christ’s heart according to Scripture, but it is there in the Bible. Actually, in the Old Testament as well, God’s heart, there’s a consistent strand that the Puritans drew out and that we were trying to do as well. So I don’t know, Matt. God had a ministry in mind that none of us were prepared for, so praise be to his name. Now, the project we’re talking about today is four years on. It is one-third the length. In The Heart of Jesus: How He Really Feels About You, I started with the manuscript and started deleting. Painful.

Matt Tully
Very painful. Harder than adding, right?

Dane Ortlund
More painful. Adding is harder in a different way because then it’s a creative discipline rather than just a deleting discipline. So I started deleting, and I probably deleted 80 percent and added 5 to 10 percent of what this project is. It’s short chapters, short sentences, shorter words.

Matt Tully
And the purpose of all that deleting was what?

Dane Ortlund
So that anyone who looks at a 220-page book and has the following thought go through their mind can be encouraged and helped—the thought being, “I think I’d like to read a book on that subject, but I’m never going to get through even a couple hundred pages, because I’m addicted to my phone or because I’m dyslexic or because I’m thirteen or whatever.” And so what Crossway and I together as a team are trying to do is make this theme of Christ heart more accessible, more approachable. I added some illustrations for a younger audience. Matt, it’s not a kid’s book. It’s not a children’s book. There are no pictures. It’s not for eight-year-olds, but I would say twelve and up. It could be for an older audience who is just going to, for one reason or another, struggle through. Or someone for whom English maybe is not their first language. There’s a whole variety of those who would be put off by a typical couple hundred pages.

Matt Tully
I would imagine a lot of people listening right now who have no reading disabilities, they’ve spoken English for their whole life, they’re thinking, “Oh, this is less than 200 pages? That’s appealing to me.”

Dane Ortlund
Thank you. Bingo.

Matt Tully
We’re all busy. We’ve got a lot going on, and some of us struggle to read. And so something that is more accessible would be welcome. So I want to go back to that distinction you made before about understanding Christ’s person—who he is in himself—and his work, and then his heart, which is that third component that you’re really wanting to focus in on. What’s the danger of focusing maybe exclusively on what he’s done for us and on the doctrinal categories for his deity and his humanity? What are we losing if we don’t focus enough on his heart?

Dane Ortlund
The first thing to say is we’ve got to focus and hyper focus on those other buckets as well, those other areas—his person and his work. And in a sense, each of those truths and doctrines needs to be recovered in each generation. So we’re always honing, clarifying, getting more precise, defending, guarding, protecting.

Matt Tully
It’s not an either/or.

Dane Ortlund
It’s not an either/or. What do you think about this, Matt? If we only focus on person, and I mean that in terms of systematic theology (Christology, Nicene orthodoxy) and his work, it could be, and I would say this was true for much of my life, he’s an impersonal force, he’s almost a formula or like a mathematical equation which is the answer to the problem of my guilt and the fact that I deserve hell. So this is pretty great. If that were true and that’s all that he was, an impersonal force or something, this would still be great news. But actually, here’s the thing, Matt, that I think many Christians, perhaps unwittingly, have a diluted appreciation for: he’s a person. He’s a person. An actual person. Thinking, feeling, willing, desiring, longing, yearning. He’s now in heaven, so he’s no longer getting tired. He’s ascended. He’s risen, ruling, and reigning.

Matt Tully
He has a glorified body.

Dane Ortlund
A glorified body. Yes. He has a glorified body. But he is an actual person. And I think maybe it’s easy for us to say he’s fully God and fully human, but actually we think he’s fully God and like 43 percent human. He doesn’t really know what I’m going through. And the answer is, according to the teaching of Hebrews (multiple places throughout Hebrews, as you know), he experienced and endured every single thing that you and I do that reflects human weakness, smallness, and finitude, except for sin. Bracket out sin. Critical. And Hebrews makes that point every time it talks about his weakness and humanity. But bracketing out sin, he experienced, as a person, all of our limitation, temptation. Actually, I think we can argue he experienced more of it than any of us would. So this is deeply comforting. Here’s the word for it: solidarity. He’s not at a distance, lobbing down pep talks. He is one with me. He’s a person. He knows what I’m going through. I like to say I am stumbling my way through life with Jesus Christ’s nail-scarred arm ruggedly around me. And he is walking me through this life to heaven, and he will never let me go. Not even I, in my own folly, can worm my way, squirm my way out of his grip. He’s that with us.

15:31 - What Scripture Says about Who Jesus Is

Matt Tully
You write in the book, “If we are asked to say only one thing about who Jesus is, we would be honoring Jesus’s own teaching about himself if our answer is ’gentle and lowly.’ Tender gentleness is who he is. It is his very heart. Jesus himself said so.” That’s obviously where we get the title for the original book, Gentle and Lowly. Where do you see this in Scripture? Where are you drawing out this core self-identification that you see Jesus making here?

Dane Ortlund
Matthew 11:28–30 is the tip of an iceberg. So that is the one place where he talks about his heart. It’s where he uses this language of gentleness, tenderness, lowliness, and approachability. But there’s a whole submerged iceberg underneath where you see him operating out of that heart throughout Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in just how he interacts with anyone who is open hearted towards him, who wants him. And then you see Paul reflecting on it in the apostles after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and you see it in the entire Old Testament in, among other things, preparing the way for expecting this kind of a Savior, especially in the prophets. So it’s all over the place. We could talk about particular passages, but it’s all over the place. As you were forming that question, what I was thinking was Jesus is way better than a perfect politician. A perfect politician would be someone of absolute integrity who is pitch perfect on every policy. Perfect wisdom. But you still have to go through a bunch of layers of security to get to them. Jesus is way better even than that, because you don’t have to go through any hoops or be put on hold to get to him. That’s what lowly means. So it’s a wondrous thing. In the Old Testament, Isaiah 57 says, “I am the holy one, I dwell in the high and holy place.” In Isaiah 57, God says—and this just maps right onto Matthew 11—he says, “Hey guys! I live in two places.” God is omnipresent, we believe that. But he says, “I dwell in two places. Place number one: way up high. I’m holy. I’m way up there. Place number two: the region immediately below way up high; the second highest place.” No, that’s not what he says. He says, “And the other place is way down at the bottom with people who are just doing terribly. That’s the other place I love to dwell.” So there’s one place Isaiah 57:15, and he comes back to this in Isaiah 66:1–2, one place where we are surprised at actually what attracts God. What is appealing? What draws him in irresistibly is not what we think. It’s not our impressiveness. It’s our need.

Matt Tully
That maybe relates to a natural question someone might have for you. When they hear you describe Jesus as teaching that he is fundamentally gentle and lowly, that that’s the core description that we could pick for him, they might think, “Well, does that suggest then that he’s not fundamentally righteous or not fundamentally just or holy, that those are somehow add ons to his identity in a way that gentle and lowly isn’t?” How would you respond to that?

Dane Ortlund
I’d say no. In Revelation 6, the rulers and kings of the world cry out, asking God that he would cause cliffs and mountains to fall on them and squash them rather than that they have to face the wrath of the the Lamb. The Lamb and his wrath is the one who said in Matthew 11, “Here’s my deepest heart. Come to me. I’m going to give you rest. I am tender and I am so accessible, way more realize.” In Revelation 1, John falls down into a coma. In Revelation 6, that’s unbelievers, unbelieving kings. John’s a believer. He was an apostle. He sees the risen Christ, and he goes, “Oh!” Flops over. He’s like, “I’m toast!”

Matt Tully
Overwhelmed.

Dane Ortlund
Overwhelmed. The sword coming out of the mouth and the hair like wool—

Matt Tully
Revelation 19 is a terrifying passage where we see Jesus clothed in white, riding a white horse, conquering, his robe is dipped in blood. So how do we fit that?

Dane Ortlund
He’s a whole Christ, he’s a full Christ, he’s a complex Christ, but nowhere are we told in the Scripture that righteous wrath is his heart. So we just need to stick very close to Scripture. We love and revere systematic theology, but I think sometimes we can be like, “We’ve got to be so balanced and proportionate here as we’re doing our philosophical theology or systematic theology,” that we can actually stray from the emphases and some of the disproportions of Scripture in how the Old Testament speaks of God’s heart of mercy and in the New Testament, of Christ’s heart. I’m a PCA pastor. I have to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechism, which are hell-affirming, wrath-affirming, justice-affirming, eternal-conscious-torment-in-hell-affirming documents. The little book I did after Gentle and Lowly was Is Hell Real? Answer: Yes. I’m defending what the Bible teaches. So all of that is true. The question is, How does the Bible actually talk about God? When God reveals himself in Exodus 34 to Moses, how does God define himself? And how does Jesus talk about his own heart? So we just must stick close to that and do likewise.

21:37 - Does Jesus’s Unfailing Love Give License to Sin?

Matt Tully
Maybe now more of a pastoral question. As you think about teaching this to people in your church or young Christians who come to you (this book is written with, as you said, younger Christians in mind as one of the potential audiences), how do you think about encouraging them to embrace this understanding of Christ that might be new to them but also encouraging them towards a pursuit of holiness? Because I think someone might read what you’ve said and think that you’re encouraging Christians to be somewhat lax with regard to our holiness, because you’re kind of saying, “Hey, Christ loves to love you. He loves to draw near to you when you are weak and miserable and sinful.” And so how is this not encouragement or license to sin all the more?

Dane Ortlund
The pursuit of holiness is going to be harmed, not helped, if you don’t let people know what Jesus is like when they’re doing a bad job pursuing holiness. That was a little bit of a complicated sentence. Knowing what Jesus is like is not going to be detrimental to the pursuit of godliness; it is only going to be wind in our sails to pursue godliness. And again, we’re not saying it—one of my seminary professors would say, “Don’t hear what I’m not saying.” So we’re saying one thing, but don’t hear me to be denying these other things. This little book for teens and the original one from four years ago is taking one theme of Scripture that has been neglected and seeking to unpack it. And there are many other equally biblical truths to write books about. So that would be a couple of things.

23:23 - The Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Sanctification

Matt Tully
A couple passages that might come to mind as people think about what our heart and posture should be when we are feeling like we are overwhelmed, especially by our own sin, and feeling like we’re unworthy of Christ could be something like Philippians 2:12, where Paul exhorts us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Or we see 1 Peter 1:17–19, where Peter is encouraging his readers to conduct themselves with fear during the time of their exile, because he connects it to the precious blood of Christ that was sacrificed for us. So again, we want to hold all these things to be true because these are all from Scripture, but how do you think about the dual idea that we’re both called to approach Christ—he’s imminently approachable for us and he loves us tenderly, even in the midst of our sin—but we’re also called to live with a sense of fear and even worry that we would defile Christ’s name and blood as we live our lives as Christians?

Dane Ortlund
Ephesians 1–3 is who you now are—called, adopted, grace. Who you now are. Ephesians 4–6 is how you now act. Ephesians 4–6 is as inerrant and as precious and as perfect and as needed as Ephesians 1–3. But here’s the thing. We are wired—and you don’t have to agree with this, but I believe this—we are wired, spring loaded, to think that as I do Ephesians 4–6 the realities of Ephesians 1–3 are stronger in my life. When in fact, Paul gets to the end of chapter three of Ephesians, and he says, “Therefore.” In other words, he starts off with, “Grace to you and peace to you, saints. You’re clean.” It’s not like the Roman Catholics teach where it’s just the top 1 percent most virtuous people are saints. How terrible! Every Christian is a saint if you’re in Christ. So he just irrigates their hearts with what is true of them if they’re in Christ. And then he says, “Now, if that’s who you are, if you’ve been given wings, don’t you want to fly? If you’ve been given lungs, you’re going to breathe.” Now, it’s not that automatic. It is sweaty, spiritually speaking. “Work out,” as you just read from Philippians 2, “your salvation.” That’s true. If you’ve been a Christian longer than like three hours, you know there is blood, sweat, and tears in the process of sanctification. So true. But we’re hardwired to think Ephesians 4–6, “I’m speaking the truth in love, I’m doing this in my marriage, I’m a good employee. Therefore, I am called, adopted. Or at least it’s more certain or something.” But actually, in Ephesians 1–3, Paul gives us that, and then therefore Ephesians 4–6. So I want to disrupt natural, fallen human intuitions about the way the gospel works, the way God works. And, Matt, we’re a couple of sermons into the back half of Ephesians, and I said to the people a few weeks ago as we got into chapter four, the second half of Ephesians, I’m going to be speaking very plainly with you. This will be uncomfortable for you. And we’re going to talk about a number of different things like wives submitting and husbands sacrificing and singing and alcohol and the use of language and employee/employer relations and spiritual warfare and everything that comes up in Ephesians 4–6. Here’s what I’m not going to do: turn every command of Ephesians 4–6 into, “Now, we don’t all do this, but thanks be to God for the gospel. Let’s close in prayer.” No, I’m going to exhort the people with the strength—I’m going to try—with the strength with which Paul is exhorting us in those passages. But I’m going to do so by constantly pressing refresh in the minds of the people that this is “Therefore.” Ephesians 1–3 is who they now are, which is the fuel and the power and the motive for doing Ephesians 4–6. And lest they, as they would if I didn’t remind them, maybe slip back into “Oh, I just got to get on my hamster wheel of Ephesians 4–6 and try to please God.”

27:49 - Inhaling God’s Word, Exhaling Prayer

Matt Tully
What I appreciate about that answer, and you’ve emphasized this throughout our conversation today, is a real commitment to letting Scripture dictate how we think about these things. Not always our systematic categories that we might construct, as helpful and important as that is, but really letting Scripture’s emphases and even the tensions that exist within Scripture to some extent, at least in our perception of them, letting those live on and continue to do their work on us. And it got me thinking a little bit about how as helpful as books are, and in particular your books on this topic, as wonderful as those can be for us as we think about these things, ultimately we need God’s word itself to help calibrate and recalibrate our thinking on all of these issues.

Dane Ortlund
Let me add a footnote to that. Let’s read other books as they help us understand God’s word. Not even read God’s word and then also read other good books. But actually, other good books that are going to help us with God’s word itself. Back to you.

Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. And so it got me thinking, though, could you speak a little bit to what are the habits and rhythms that you have in your own life? Not prescriptive for all of us, but give us a glimpse into how you continue to keep yourself tethered to God’s word on a regular basis?

Dane Ortlund
I have absolutely nothing to offer. I’ll answer your question, but I think some Christians can be seeking to persevere in the mess and the ups and downs of life that is causing their communion with God and time in Scripture and prayer to be very sporadic and flat, and therefore conclude from that, “I just haven’t stumbled upon the secret thing yet.”

Matt Tully
The secret formula.

Dane Ortlund
There is no secret thing. Life is hard. We’re weak. So, I get up in the morning. I used to have to set an alarm, but I’m old enough now that I just kind of wake up. I get my coffee, and it usually takes me one cup of coffee to do my Old Testament reading. I go get a second cup for New Testament reading. And what I try to do, and I really want to keep growing in this, Matt, is I want to pray the Scripture back. I want to inhale Bible, exhale prayer. Rather than it being two independent disciplines—reading the Bible, and then now where’s my prayer list? I’ll scrounge that up and start praying—that’s good too. But rather it be one discipline with two aspects—reading Scripture and praying it back. And this will help us pray God’s thoughts. If I’m left to Dane’s little imagination and creativity in what to pray, I’m going to have a sad prayer life. I’ll be self-generating how I’m communing with God. But if I go to the Scriptures, especially the Psalms, which are the one book of the Bible written to God, it is prayers. And you got Ephesians 1 and other places where there are prayers, the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6, but this whole book is prayers covering all of the experiences of life. It deepens communion with God because we are praying his thoughts after him, and he’s actually shaping us and helping us to know how to commune with him. So absolutely nothing new or clever. All you do is you get up in the morning a little earlier than you would have to do if you weren’t doing this. You get up in the morning, you open up a Bible, you read some Bible, figure out a good Bible reading plan and just kind of systematically work through the whole terrain of some Bible, pray it back, take a deep breath, calm down, go take your shower. There is no secret bullet here.

Matt Tully
I think that maybe at first blush can feel a little bit underwhelming if we’re looking for that secret sauce to add to our daily Bible reading habits. But I also think more fundamentally, as we think more carefully about it, it is quite encouraging that there is no secret. This is just day in, day out, making it a priority in small, simple ways. It doesn’t have to be two hours long.

Dane Ortlund
And it’s like anything in life. You take a multivitamin. It doesn’t taste good, but it’s helping you. You work out, you go for a jog or lift some weights. One day of that, or even a week, you don’t see any results. But if you build the habit in, over the years, it makes you healthy. It makes you whole. It makes you a functioning human being. And so we just doggedly, ruggedly stay at it. And go to church on Sunday to encourage one another to stay at.

Matt Tully
Well, Dane, thank you so much for helping us, giving us this little encouragement to pay more attention to what Scripture actually says about who Jesus is really. And we appreciate your work on that front.

Dane Ortlund
It is always a joy to talk with you, Matt. Thank you, brother.

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