Isaiah 57:15 says, “”For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.'” Most of us would never choose the low place, but often…that’s where we grow the most. Ray Ortlund’s newest book, Good News at Rock Bottom may just be the balm that your soul has been searching for. Or…if it’s not for you right now, it’s for someone that you are close to. In fact, the book would actually challenge us to find a group to walk through life together…so perhaps this book is a good starting spot to launch that.
I highlighted several things while reading and have posted those notes below…
- There is a reason we talk about going to “a deeper place” with Christ. He meets us at our worst moments and our lowest defeats. He even takes us deeper than we thought we needed to go. If we could have found an easier way, we would have settled for it! But since it’s honest reality with Jesus we want, then the real us can be known only in the low place. Our false selves are exposed as frauds. It’s painful. But our selfish dreams fading away to nothing—that’s where Jesus surprises us with everything we really wanted all along. But he sure isn’t the cheerleader of the triumphant winners. He is “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53: 3). He knows rock bottom firsthand. He is our good news at rock bottom. p. 16
- You and I experience reality in tiny increments, one moment after another, as time unfolds. But God, in his majestic eternality, is equally present to all points of time at once. For us, time means we have to wait—and we hate waiting. Amazon Prime built their success on our impatience! But God is never forced to wait. He isn’t stuck inside time. He invented it and stands above it. Time serves him. p. 22
- What is forgiveness? It is deciding we will not make the traitors pay for what they did. Look how our Lord puts it: “as we forgive our debtors” means that they owe us. What they took from us they should restore to us. But forgiveness means we absorb the impact of their wrong. We accept the losses we suffered because of their evil. We trust God to turn the wreckage into beauty we can scarcely imagine. His covenant faithfulness will overrule their betrayal, bending it around in the opposite direction. He will take us further into what we really want than we ever could have achieved by a comfortably undisturbed mushy-middle existence. p. 44
- One or two trusted friends are all you need. And they need you. Get together once a week and confess your sins to one another. Tell them, especially, that one enslaving sin you’d rather not admit. Until you open up with radical honesty, you’re playing a game. But when you put that sin out on the table and your friends pray for you about that sin, you start getting free. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Life Together, p. 112-113) explained: The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him. Sin wants to remain unknown. The sin must be brought into the light. It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted. The sinner surrenders; he gives up all his evil. He gives his heart to God, and he finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother. The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power. It has been revealed and judged as sin. Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother. He is no longer alone with his evil. p. 66