Top Ten Quotes: Gentle and Lowly
How ironic that a book titled Gentle and Lowly came charging onto the scene like a bull in a china shop. It has captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of believers. Its presence has flooded my social media pages. Crossway estimates that it will have printed over 1.5 million copies by the end of this summer.
I gave two copies to friends for Christmas (without reading or owning a copy myself), and when I went to order my own, I found it on backorder for several weeks.
And let me state the obvious: distilling this book to ten quotes seemed like an impossible task. In my copy, the inside back cover…and the pages leading up to it… are filled with my scribbles, takeaways, and things I want to remember. It’s probably easier to select passages I didn’t underline rather than those I did.
(Maybe you’re picking up on the fact that this is a book I wholeheartedly recommend.)
A friend told me recently that Gentle and Lowly completely shifted his view of his place in the gospel story. That’s a pretty significant thing. I was moved to tears several times while reading it. If you consider yourself a sinner or a sufferer (and you and I should, because you and I are), this book needs to be in your hands, on your shelf, and embedded in your heart.
Here is my attempt at my top ten favorite quotes:
- [Jesus’] heart of gentle embrace is never outmatched by our sins and foibles and insecurities and doubts and anxieties and failures.
- All our weakness – indeed, all of our life – is tainted with sin. If sin were the color blue, we do not occasionally say or do something blue; all that we say, do, and think has some taint of blue.
- …we don’t feel the weight of our sin because of our sin.
- Our sinning goes to the uttermost. But his saving goes to the uttermost. And his saving always outpaces and overwhelms our sinning, because he always lives to intercede for us.
- Your gentlest treatment of yourself is less gentle than the way your heavenly Father handles you.
- Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.
- He intends to restore you into the radiant resplendence for which you were created. And that is dependent not on you keeping yourself clean but on you taking your mess to him.
- There are two ways to live the Christian life. You can live it either for the heart of Christ or from the heart of Christ.
- Galatians teaches that we are made right with God based on what Christ has done rather than on what we do. To help the gospel, therefore, is to lose the gospel.
- How exhausting is the misery of self. How energizing are the joys of living for another.
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