Quotes by Jerry Bridges

In times of adversity Satan will seek to plant the thought in our minds that God is angry with us and is disciplining us out of wrath. Here is another instance when we need to preach the gospel to ourselves. It is the gospel that will reassure that the penalty for our sins has been paid, that Gods justice has been fully satisfied. It is the gospel that supplies a good part of the armor of God with which we are to stand against the accusing attacks of the Devil (see Ephesians 6:13-17).

It is not the fact that we are united in common goals or purposes that makes us a community. Rather, it is the fact that we share a common life in Christ.

So we see that God has made provision for our holiness. Through Christ He has delivered us from sins reign so that we now can resist sin. But the responsibility for resisting is ours. God does not do that for us. To confuse the potential for resisting (which God provided) with the responsibility for resisting (which is ours) is to court disaster in our pursuit of holiness.

Theres a direct correlation between faith in the righteousness of Christ and zeal in the cause of Christ. The more a person counts as loss his own righteousness and lays hold by faith of the righteousness of Christ, the more hell be motivated to live and work for Christ.

Christianity is not a do-it-yourself thing.

A willingness to share our possessions with one another is a very important aspect of true biblical community.

Practice of true community involves responsibilities and actions that do not come naturally to us.

Biblical community is first of all the sharing of a common life in Christ.

God does not believe for us, but through His Spirit He creates spiritual life in us so that we can believe. Faith is the gift of God. Its part of the whole salvation package that God gives to us through the work of Christ for us and the work of the Holy Spirit in us. Its not our contribution, so to speak, to Gods great plan of salvation. God does it all. Its part of the unsearchable riches of Christ.

Materialism wars against our souls in a twofold manner. First, it makes us discontent and envious of others. Second, it leads us to pamper and indulge our bodies so that we become soft and lazy. As we become soft and lazy in our bodies, we tend to become soft and lazy spiritually. When Paul talked about making his body his slave, so that after having preached to others he himself would not be disqualified, he was not thinking about physical disqualification, but spiritual. He knew well that physical softness inevitably leads to spiritual softness. When the body is pampered and indulged, the instincts and passions of the body tend to get the upper hand and dominate our thoughts and actions. We tend to do not what we should do, but what we want to do, as we follow the cravings of our sinful nature.

No, we are not defeated; we are simply disobedient! It might be good if we stopped using the terms victory and defeat to describe our progress in holiness. Rather we should use the terms obedience and disobedience.

... self-control is not control by oneself through ones own willpower but rather control of oneself through the power of the Holy Spirit.

We cannot effectively pursue holiness without the Word of God stored up in our minds where it can be used by the Holy Spirit to transform us. Jerry Bridges, The Discipline of Grace, 180

We must be careful to let the Holy Spirit do this searching. If we try to search our own hearts, we are apt to fall into one or both of two traps. The first is the trap of morbid introspection. Introspection can easily become the tool of Satan, who is called the accuser (Revelation 12:10). One of his chief weapons is discouragement. He knows that if he can make us discouraged and dispirited, we will not fight the battle for holiness. The second trap is that of missing the real issues in our lives.