Christians know that God loves them, but can easily feel that he is perpetually disappointed and frustrated, maybe even close to giving up on them. As a result, they focus a lot—and rightly so—on what Jesus has done to appease God’s wrath for sin. But how does Jesus Christ actually feel about his people amid all their sins and failures? This book draws us to Matthew 11, where Jesus describes himself as “gentle and lowly in heart,” longing for his people to find rest in him. The gospel flows from God’s deepest heart for his people, a heart of tender love for the sinful and suffering. These chapters take readers into the depths of Christ’s very heart for sinners, diving deep into Bible passages that speak of who Christ is and encouraging readers with the affections of Christ for his people. His longing heart for sinners comforts and sustains readers in their up-and-down lives.

This study guide by Dane Ortlund helps readers reflect further on the biblical truths found in Gentle and Lowly through discussion questions organized into 10 helpful lessons. Designed for individual and small-group use.

Our ability to walk on two legs is not only a characteristic human trait but one of the things that made us human in the first place. Once our ancestors could walk on two legs, they began to do many of the things that apes cannot do: cross wide open spaces, manipulate complex tools, communicate with new signal systems, and light fires. Titled after the last two words of Darwin's Descent of Man and written by a leading scholar of human evolution, Lowly Origin is the first book to explain the sources and consequences of bipedalism to a broad audience. Along the way, it accounts for recent fossil discoveries that show us a still incomplete but much bushier family tree than most of us learned about in school. Jonathan Kingdon uses the very latest findings from ecology, biogeography, and paleontology to build a new and up-to-date account of how four-legged apes became two-legged hominins. He describes what it took to get up onto two legs as well as the protracted consequences of that step--some of which led straight to modern humans and others to very different bipeds. This allows him to make sense of recently unearthed evidence suggesting that no fewer than twenty species of humans and hominins have lived and become extinct. Following the evolution of two-legged creatures from our earliest lowly forebears to the present, Kingdon concludes with future options for the last surviving biped. A major new narrative of human evolution, Lowly Origin is the best available account of what it meant--and what it means--to walk on two feet.

Why have we come to revere Francis of Assisi, a simple thirteenth-century Italian merchant's son, as a saint? Why has his appeal endured over eight hundred years and even expanded beyond the world of Catholicism to make him one of the most beloved religious figures of all time? This penetrating meditation on Francis's life gently but sure-handedly cuts through every pious legend to uncover what is timeless and universally true about him. Christian Bobin's unexpected and thoroughly original work presents a compelling image of a man whose power is found in humility, whose radical casting aside of wealth, honor, and even personal identity is inseparable from his overwhelming intimacy with God. Poetic, luminous, utterly hypnotic, The Very Lowly is a unique modern variation on the saint's life that will entrance everyone, whether "religious" or—almost especially—not.

Poet, weaver, mystic, saint, Shah Hussein created a stir in sixteenth-century Punjab through his unconventional lifestyle and the subversive power of his poetry. Popularly known as Madho Lal Hussein, after he adopted the name of his young lover and disciple, he remains a beguiling, enigmatic figure: a firebrand whose growing fame was a cause of anxiety for the political elite, a Muslim who fell in love with a Hindu boy and won his heart and devotion, a rebel philosopher who found solace in ignominy. Deceptively simple and astonishingly relevant, the poems in this magnificent collection are charged with longing, and offer insight into the true nature of love and death, desire and sublimation. Naveed Alam’s lilting translation brings out the verve and allure of Hussein’s verses which continue to be sung and recited over 400 years after his death.