Gentle and Lowly: A 14-Day DevotionalSample

Consider God’s richness in mercy for your own life. He is the resurrecting God. He doesn’t meet you halfway. And that’s not because resurrecting sinners is on his to-do list. His very nature is to engage death and bring life--and that’s true for you, too. He did that decisively once and for all at your conversion, but he continues to do it time and again in your sin and folly. 

Perhaps, looking at the evidence of your life, you do not know what to conclude except that this mercy of God in Christ has passed you up. Maybe you have been deeply mistreated. Misunderstood. Betrayed by the one person you should have been able to trust. Abandoned. Taken advantage of. Perhaps you carry a pain that will never heal till you are dead. If my life is any evidence of the mercy of God in Christ, you might think, I’m not impressed.

To you I say, the evidence of Christ’s mercy toward you is not your life. The evidence of his mercy toward you is his—mistreated, misunderstood, betrayed, abandoned. Eternally. In your place. 

If God sent his own Son to walk through the valley of condemnation, rejection, and hell, you can trust him as you walk through your own valleys on your way to heaven.

Perhaps you have difficulty receiving the rich mercy of God in Christ not because of what others have done to you but because of what you’ve done to torpedo your life, maybe through one big, stupid decision or maybe through ten thousand little ones. You have squandered his mercy, and you know it. 

To you I say, do you know what Jesus does with those who squander his mercy? He pours out more mercy. God is rich in mercy. That’s the whole point. 

Whether we have been sinned against or have sinned ourselves into misery, the Bible says God is not tightfisted with mercy but openhanded, not frugal but lavish, not poor but rich. 

That God is rich in mercy means that your regions of deepest shame and regret are not hotels through which divine mercy passes but homes in which divine mercy abides. 

It means the things about you that make you cringe most, make him hug hardest. 

It means his mercy is not calculating and cautious, like ours. It is unrestrained, flood-like, sweeping, magnanimous. 

It means our haunting shame is not a problem for him, but the very thing he loves most to work with. 

It means our sins do not cause his love to take a hit. Our sins cause his love to surge forward all the more. 

It means on that day when we stand before him, quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had.

Learn more about Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers  by Dane C. Ortlund.