By Larry Stout
Introduction: “It is one thing to know the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement and a hundred other vital doctrines. It is another, more searching matter to know his heart for you” (p. 16).
Chap 1: His Very Heart
Key Verse: Matthew 11:29, “I am gentle and lowly of heart.” /“In the one place in the Bible where the Son of God pulls back the veil and lets us peer way down into the core of who he is…his surprising claim is that he is ‘gentle and low in heart.' (p. 18).
Chap 2: His Heart in Action
Key Verse: Matthew 14:14, “And he had compassion on them.” / “Thomas Goodwin said, ‘Christ is love covered over in flesh.’ Picture it. . .If compassion clothed itself in a human body and went walking around this earth, what would it look like? We don’t have to wonder” (p. 32).
Chap 3: The Happiness of Christ
Key Verse: Hebrew 12:2, “For the joy that was set before him…” / “Jesus doesn’t want us to draw on his grace and mercy only because it vindicates his atoning work. He wants us to draw on his grace and mercy because it is who he is. . . Christ gets more joy and comfort than we do when we come to him for help and mercy.” (p. 37)
Chap 4: Able to Sympathize
Key Verse: Hebrews 4:15, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.” / “All of our natural intuitions tell us that Jesus is with us, on our side, present and helping, when life is going well. This text says the opposite. It is in “our weaknesses” that Jesus sympathizes with us. (p. 46)
Chap 5: He Can Deal Gently
Key Verse: Hebrews 5:2, “He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he is also clothed with weakness.” / “Looking inside ourselves, we can anticipate only harshness from heaven. Looking out to Christ, we can anticipate only gentleness.” (p.57)
Chap 6: I Will Never Cast Out
Key Verse: John 6:37, “The one who comes to me I will never cast out.” / “The atoning work of the Son, decreed by the Father and applied by the Spirit, ensures that we are safe eternally. But a text such as John 6:37 reassures us that this is not only a matter of divine decree but divine desire.” (p.66)
Chap 7: What Our Sins Evoke
Key Verse: Hosea 11:8, “My heart recoils within me.” / “And just as we can hardly fathom the divine ferocity awaiting those out of Christ, it is equally true that we can hardly fathom the divine tenderness already resting now on those in Christ.” (p.68)
Chap 8: To the Uttermost
Key Verse: Hebrews 7:25, “He always lives to make intercession for them.” / “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.” (p.85)
Chap 9: An Advocate
Key Verse: 1 John 2:1, “We have an advocate with eFather, Jesus Christ the righteous.” / “We need not only exhortation but liberation. We need not only Christ as king but Christ as friend. Not only over us but next to us” (p.88)
Chap 10: The Beauty and the Heart of Christ
Key Verse: Matthew 10:12, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” / “Let the heart of Jesus be something that is not only gentle toward you but lovely to you. If I may put it this way: romance the heart of Jesus. . .Why not build in to your life unhurried quiet, where, among other disciplines, you consider the radiance of who he actually is, what animates him, what his deepest delight is? Why not give your soul room to be reenchanted with Christ time and time again?” (p.99)
Chap11: The Emotional Life of Christ
Key Verse: John11:33, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” / “Emotions are not themselves a result of the fall. Jesus experienced the full range of emotions that we do (Hebrews 2:17; 4:15). As Calvin put it, “The Son of God having clothed himself with our flesh, of his own accord clothed himself also with human feelings, so that he did not differ at all from his brethren, sin only excepted.” (p.104)
Chap 12: A Tender Friend
Key Verse: Matthew 11:19, “…a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” / “Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are giving a friend who will always enjoy than refuse our presence.” (p.115)
Chap 13: Why the Spirit?
Key Verse: John 14:16, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper.” / “The Spirit’s role, in summary, is to turn our postcard apprehensions of Christ’s great heart of longing affection for us into an experience of sitting on the beach, in a lawn chair, drink in hand, enjoying the actual experience.” (p.126)
Chap 14: Father of Mercies
Key Verse: 2 Corinthians 1:3, “…the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.” / “A correct understanding of the triune God is not that of a Father whose central disposition is judgement and a Son whose central disposition is love. The heart of both is one and the same; this is, after all, one God, not two. Theirs is a heart of redeeming love, not compromising justice and wrath bit beautifully satisfying justice and wrath.” (p.131)
Chap 15: His “Natural” Work and His “Strange” Work
Key Verse: Lamentations 3:33, “He does not afflict from his heart.” / “Left to our own natural intuitions about God, we will conclude that mercy is his strange work and judgment his natural work. Rewiring our vision of God as we study the Scripture, we see, helped by the great teachers of the past, that judgment is his strange work and mercy his natural work. He does afflict and grieve the children of men. But not from his heart.” (p.144)
Chap 16: The Lord, the Lord
Key Verse: Exodus 34:6, “A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger…” / “His highest priority and deepest delight and first reaction–his heart–is merciful and gracious. He gently accommodates himself to our terms rather than overwhelming us with his.” (p.148)
Chap 17: His Ways are Not Our Ways
Key Verse: Isaiah 55:8, “My thoughts are not your thoughts ” / “God’s ways and thoughts are not our ways and thoughts in that his are thoughts of loves and ways of compassion that stretch to a degree beyond our mental horizon.” (p.158)
Chap 18: Yearning Bowels
Key Verse: Jeremiah 31:20, “My heart yearns for him. ” / “The Bible takes us by the hand and leads us out from under the feeling that his heart for us wavers according to our loveliness. God’s heart confounds our intuitions of who he is.” (p.167)
Chap 19: Rich in Mercy
Key Verse: Ephesians 2:4, “But God, being rich in mercy…. ” / “Christ was sent not to mend wounded people or wake sleepy people or advise confused people or inspire bored people or spur on lazy people or educate ignorant people, but to raise dead people.” (p.175)
Chap 20: Our Lawish Hearts, His Lavish Heart
Key Verse: Galatians 2:20, “The Son of God, who loved me…. ” / “The battle of the Christian life is to bring your own heart into alignment with Christ’s, that is, getting up each morning and replacing your natural orphan mind-set with a mind-set of full and free adoption into the family of God through the work of Christ your older brother, who loved you and gave himself for you out of the overflowing fullness of His gracious heart.” (p.181)
Chap 21: He Loved Us Then; He’ll Love Us Now
Key Verse: Romans 5:8, “God shows His love for us …. ” / “Those in Christ are eternally imprisoned within the tender heart of God. We will be less sinful in the next life than we are now, but we will not be any more secure in the next life than we are now.” (p.195)
Chap 22: To the End
Key Verse: John 13:1, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” /
God shows His love for us …. ” / “But for his own, Jesus himself endured that punishment. He set his heart on his own. They are his. “There is not the meanest, the weakest, the poorest believe on the earth,” wrote John Owen, “but Christ praises him more than all the world.” (p.204)
Chap 23: Buried in His Heart Forever More
Key Verse: Ephesians 2:7, ““. . .so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us.” / “Ephesians 2:7 is telling you that your death is not an end but a beginning. Not a wall, but a door. Not an exit, but an entrance.”
Chapter 21: He Loved Us Then; He’ll love us now
Key Verse: “God shows His love for us. . .” Romans 5:8
Read Romans 5:6-11.
What are the descriptors of our state before we received reconciliation through Jesus? (p.191)
What is the central word in Romans 5:6-11? Why is this the “ultimate point” that Paul was driving home? (p.193)
Make it personal: “He loved us in our mess then. He’ll love us in our mess now. Our very agony in sinning is the fruit of our adoption. A cold heart would not be bothered. We are not who we were.” (p.194). Would you describe your concerns about your spiritual condition as an “agony?” If not, what word would you use and why?
Chapter 22: To the End
Key Verse: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” John 13:1
The theologian B. B. Warfield wrote, “In the presence of this mental anguish, the physical tortures of the crucifixion retire into the background, and we may well believe that our Lord, though he died on the cross, yet died not of the cross, but, as we commonly say, of a broken heart”? (p.200) . What do you believe he meant that Jesus died “of a broken heart?”
How is the cross proof that Jesus set His heart to love us?
Chapter 23: Buried in His Heart Forever More
Key Verse: “. . .so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us.” Ephesians 2:7
It is impossible to describe heaven, but Jonathan Edwards statements on page 208 certainly makes a good stab at it. Try to imagine what it would be like to “swim in the ocean of love, and be eternally swallowed up in the infinitely bright, and infinitely mild and sweet beams of divine love.”
How do you think about heaven? How would you describe it to someone who had never heard of it before?
What do you think will be your biggest takeaway from this entire book?