Christ was uninterested ... in human beings from the outside in. He was only interested in people from the inside out. He pulled away from people who looked like ‘whitewashed tombs’ but whose insides were filled with ‘the bones of the dead’ (Matthew 23:27). Intimacy is the opposite of a whitewashed tomb. It is seeing into the core of a person while not being repelled by what you see.
(via Ray Ortlund's blog, from Paul F. M. Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, 2007), page 139.)


