Book Review: Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

By Dane Ortlund

I read Gentle and Lowly along with a group in an online Bible study. Over the course of the study, we read two chapters per week and pondered a couple of questions related to the reading. I won’t comment for others, only myself.

An imbalance of heart

I was quite disappointed to read in the early part of the book the definition of lowly in the original Greek, but the word gentle was not addressed. This set the book up for the imbalance that ensued. The book focused on the sin of man the compassion of Christ. That all sounds fine, but doesn’t accurately reflect the book title, which included gentle. This theme carried through the book – the focus was on compassion and sin.

The book was an exposition of various verses on the ‘heart’ of Christ. These verses were about the empathy, the sadness, the suffering with us in our sins. There was little about the actions of Christ in response to our sin and that we have been liberated from the sin through the righteousness of Christ. As such, this book fell short of explaining the full heart of Christ for sinners and sufferers.

The book was secondly a commentary on other commentaries. Bunyan, Goodwin, and Edwards are some of those theologians who were quoted and then expounded upon. These did little to provide insight and only compounded the sin in which the author chose to dwell, rather than the salvation and entrance into his kingdom on earth. The chapters tended toward nuanced explanations rather than new understanding of the idea of Christ’s heart.

Left in the sin swamp.

I feel the lack of examples and verses about how Christ overcame our sin leaves the believer in a pond of muck, namely our sin, with Christ sitting there with us. When, in fact what Christ’s heart led him to do was to pull us from the pond and establish us as his own. The actions, the ‘gentle’, of Christ is the capstone of his heart and its work. Yet this book barely hints at the actions that came forth from the heart. The heart drives us to act – that is what we all must recall of Christ and what we all must do in response to Christ.

2/5 stars for incompleteness

This book fell far short of the whole truth of the heart of Christ and is therefore not recommended. The amount of the text that dwells in our sin rather than in leaving it behind is such that most will find it lacking. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the theology, it just isn’t what we need.