Book Review: Quotes from The Bookends of the Christian Life by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington

YouAre_JustifiedBook

Quotes from The Bookends of the Christian Life
by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington

Faith involves both renunciation and a reliance. (28)

We must renounce any trust in our own performance as the basis of our acceptance before God. (28)

We must place our reliance entirely on the perfect obedience and sin-bearing death of Christ as the sole basis of our standing before God - on our best days as well as our worst. (28)

For Paul, justification was not only a past event; it was also a daily present reality. So every day of his life, by faith in Christ, Paul realized he stood righteous in the sight of God - he was counted righteous and accepted by God as righteous - because of the perfectly obedient life and death Christ provided for him. He stood solely on the rock-solid righteousness of Christ alone, which is our first bookend. (29)

Genuine love for Christ comes through (1) an ever growing consciousness of our own sinfulness and unworthiness, coupled with (2) the assurance that our sins, however great have been forgiven through his death on the cross…If we find we lack love for the Savior; one or both of these prerequisites are deficient. (34)

Self-righteousness is a gospel enemy because it disregards, devalues, and discredits the gospel provision of the righteousness of Christ - the sinless life he lived for us and the sin-bearing death he died for us. (43)

Unless we’re vigilant about this, we’re unlikely to recognize the remnants of self righteousness in our lives. At times our approach to God becomes like preparing a resume for a job application - we carefully include all our accomplishments, anything that might present us in a good light and make us more acceptable. (46)

So every time we approach God in prayer, worship, or any other spiritual discipline, we must see our resume only as he sees it - overlaid by Christ’s perfect resume. (47)

We must continually battle two gospel enemies, self-righteousness and persistent guilt. They represent a form of unbelief that may not send us to hell but will rob us of fruitfulness, joy and the assurance that God is for us and not against us, both now and forevermore. (51)

But, take note: the message of the cross is absent from the signals sent by our guilty conscience; it knows only the law. So all we hear from it is bad news, not good news. (53)

Leave a Comment

Comments for this post have been disabled.