Gentle and Lowly

What Gentle and Lowly is

Gentle and Lowly is a 23-chapter devotional meditation on one phrase Jesus uses to describe himself — "gentle and lowly in heart" (Matthew 11:29). Each chapter takes a single facet of that idea — Christ’s patience with sinners, his nearness to sufferers, his unchanging affection, his intercession — and works it through scripture, Puritan commentary, and short pastoral application. The book is roughly 224 pages in standard hardcover and reads, by design, slowly.

The structure is meditative rather than argumentative. Ortlund is not building toward a thesis you’ll see in chapter 23 that wasn’t visible in chapter 1. He’s circling. The book’s power is cumulative — by the time you’ve spent a month or two reading a chapter every few days, the central claim has worked its way into how you think about prayer, repentance, and your own failures. That cumulative effect is the whole point.

Why Gentle and Lowly became the give-away book of the decade

The single biggest practical difference between Gentle and Lowly and the hundred other Christian books on tenderness published in the last decade is that Ortlund refuses to add a "but." Most books that start with "Jesus loves you" pivot quickly into "and therefore you must…" Ortlund holds the first claim for 224 pages and never pivots. Readers in grief or shame have noticed.

That’s why pastors, counselors, hospice chaplains, and lay leaders kept buying stacks of the padded gift edition through 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. It became the book you hand someone who just lost a parent, got a cancer diagnosis, left rehab, or walked into your office not knowing why they couldn’t pray anymore. It does the one thing a book in that moment can do — it tells the reader, slowly and at length, that Christ’s posture toward them is not what they’re afraid it is.

The 23-chapter meditative structure: one verse, two months, no shortcuts

The book is built around 23 short chapters, each one a self-contained meditation on a different facet of Matthew 11:29. The chapters are titled simply — "His Very Heart," "The Happiness of Christ," "Able to Sympathize," "He Loved Us Then; He’ll Love Us Now" — and each runs around 8-10 pages. There is no overarching argument that builds across chapters; instead the structure is contemplative, returning to the same center from different angles, the way a hymn returns to its refrain.

In practice this means the book reads at exactly the pace its content asks for. A reader doing one chapter every two or three days finishes in about two months, which is roughly the time it takes for the central claim — that Christ’s deepest disposition toward sinners and sufferers is tenderness, not reluctance — to settle into the way you read scripture and pray. Pastors who use the book in care meetings often hand it out with a simple instruction: one chapter at a time, don’t rush, don’t take notes. The structure does the work.

Puritan source-mining: Thomas Goodwin rehabilitated for 2026

Ortlund leans heavily on the 17th-century Puritans, especially Thomas Goodwin’s 1651 work "The Heart of Christ in Heaven Towards Sinners on Earth," along with Thomas Watson, John Bunyan, and Jonathan Edwards. Goodwin in particular is the spine of the book — Ortlund returns to him repeatedly and credits him in the introduction as the source the whole project grew from. For most readers, Goodwin had been unreachable: the prose is dense, the sentences run long, the typography in surviving editions is brutal. Ortlund does the work of translating without making it feel translated.

The effect has been a small Puritan revival among readers who had never read a word of 17th-century theology before. Crossway has reported a noticeable bump in sales of the Banner of Truth edition of Goodwin’s "Heart of Christ" since Gentle and Lowly came out, and several modern editions of Watson and Bunyan have followed similar patterns. This is the rare popular book that functions as a gateway to its sources rather than a substitute for them — which is roughly what Ortlund seems to have intended.

The padded gift edition phenomenon: why a book becomes a stocking-stuffer

In 2021 Crossway released a padded cloth hardcover gift edition with a ribbon marker and slightly heavier paper. It looked, deliberately, like the kind of book you give someone. Within two years it had become exactly that — the most-given new Christian book of recent memory, displayed on the front table of seminary bookstores, stocked by churches for hospital visits, given by grandparents to grandchildren at confirmation and baptism, slipped into care packages by counselors.

The format matters more than it sounds. The padded edition costs around $25 versus $20 for the standard hardcover, and the difference is mostly tactile — the cover feels like something you keep. Readers who would never normally spend $25 on a book they could buy for $20 routinely buy three or four copies to keep on hand. That economic behavior — buying multiples to give away — is rare among new Christian books and is a large part of why Gentle and Lowly crossed the 1.5 million mark.

Pricing

Where Gentle and Lowly falls behind

No systematic doctrine of Christ. Ortlund is not trying to write a treatise on the person and work of Christ, and the book does not function as one. If you want a fuller theological treatment, this is a meditation that sits beside something denser — Knowing God, Grudem, or a serious commentary — not a replacement for it.

Single-verse anchor. The book hangs on Matthew 11:29, and that is deliberate, but it does mean the angle is narrow. Readers wanting a broader picture of Christ — judge, king, prophet, sovereign, the Christ of Revelation 19 as well as the Christ of Matthew 11 — will need to read more widely. Ortlund knows this and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

No discussion guide or study questions in the base edition. Small groups using the book end up writing their own questions or buying the Companion Devotional separately. A built-in discussion section would have made it the default small-group book of the decade as well as the default gift book.

Puritan prose is still Puritan prose. Ortlund modernizes carefully, but the source quotes from Goodwin and Watson appear at length and in their original cadence. Readers allergic to 17th-century English will find those passages slower going than the surrounding chapters.

Emotional register stays in one key. Twenty-three chapters on Christ’s tenderness, read straight through, can flatten the way a meal of nothing but desserts can flatten. The book is best read slowly, in small doses, the way it was designed — not in a weekend.

Gentle and Lowly vs. Knowing God vs. New Morning Mercies

Different strengths, different jobs. Gentle and Lowly is a focused meditation on one facet of Christ’s heart, read slowly over weeks. J.I. Packer’s Knowing God is a 22-chapter systematic walk through the attributes of God — wider in scope, denser in argument, harder to read at the same pace. Paul Tripp’s New Morning Mercies is a 365-day daily devotional — structured for one short reading every morning over a year, with no overarching argument at all.

If you want one book that meditates deeply on Christ’s posture toward sinners and sufferers, Gentle and Lowly is the pick. If you want a fuller theological tour of who God is, Knowing God is broader (the attributes of God, the work of Christ, the doctrine of adoption, prayer, providence, suffering). If you want a year-long daily companion with a fresh entry every morning, New Morning Mercies is built for exactly that and Gentle and Lowly is not.

Most readers end up with all three over time, used differently. Knowing God lives on the reference shelf and gets pulled down for specific topics. New Morning Mercies lives on the nightstand and gets read daily for a season. Gentle and Lowly lives in a stack of copies in the kitchen because you keep giving it away.

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