Jerry Bridges
Jerry Bridges
Jerry Bridgeswas an evangelical Christian author, speaker and staff member of The Navigators. Born in Tyler, Texas, United States, he was the author of more than a dozen books, including The Pursuit of Holiness, which has sold more than one million copies. His devotional Holiness Day By Day garnered the 2009 ECPA Christian Book Award for the inspiration and gift category, and The Discipline of Grace received a similar award in 1995 for the Christian living category...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth4 December 1929
CountryUnited States of America
As we become soft and lazy in our bodies, we tend to become soft and lazy spiritually.
Evil Rulers Are Never Beyond The Bounds of God's Sovereign Will
The wisdom of the chess player is displayed more in winning over a capable opponent than a novice. The wisdom of the general is displayed more in defeating a superior army than in subduing an inferior one. Even more so, the wisdom of God is displayed when He brings good to us and glory to Himself out of confusion and calamity rather than out of pleasant times.
God is never at a loss because He cannot find someone to cooperate with Him in carrying out His plan. He so moves in the hearts of people - either Christians or non Christians, it makes no difference - that they willingly, of their own free will carry out His plans.
Sometimes the end God has in mind is to exercise our faith, so He brings us into straitened circumstances so that we might look up to Him and see His deliverance.
All pain we experience is intended to move us closer to the goal of being holy as He is holy.
No circumstance is so big that He cannot control it.
Trials always change our relationship with God. Either they drive us to Him, or they drive us away from Him. The extent of our fear of Him and our awareness of His love for us determine in which direction we will move.
Patience is the ability to suffer a long time under the mistreatment of others without growing resentful or bitter.
The cure for impatience with the fulfillment of God's timetable is to believe His promises, obey His will, and leave the results to Him. So often when God's timetable stretches into years we become discouraged and...want to give up or try to work something out on our own.
Giving thanks to God for both His temporal and spiritual blessings in our lives is not just a nice thing to do - it is the moral will of God. Failure to give Him the thanks due Him is sin.
I warmly commend it to all Christians who want to grow in their faith.
In order to trust God, we must always view our adverse circumstances through the eyes of faith, not of sense. And just as the faith of salvation comes through hearing the message of the gospel (Romans 10:17), so the faith to trust God in adversity comes through the Word of God alone. It is only in the Scriptures that we find an adequate view of God's relationship to and involvement in our painful circumstances. It is only from the Scriptures, applied to our hearts by the Holy Spirit, that we receive the grace to trust God in adversity.
Justified" is even better than "just as if I'd never sinned." It is also "just as if I'd always obeyed.