Quotes from Jerry Bridges

He permits, for reasons known only to Himself, people to act contrary to and in defiance of His revealed will. But He never permits them to act contrary to His sovereign will.

And if God permits it, it is because the ungodly action is part of God's plan for him. No one can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it (see Lamentations 3:37).

How do we view those who do not show love for us? Do we see them as persons for whom Christ died or as persons who make our lives difficult?

But when we complain about the weather, we are actually complaining against God who sent us our weather.

Sometimes, according to the Bible, God even moves in the hearts of some people to act stubbornly.

His moral purity serves to magnify our impurity.

Furthermore, even a deep, penetrating sense of our sinfulness does not do justice to the reality of our predicament. Our need is not to be measured by our own sense of need, but by what God had to do to meet that need.

Well did the Puritan John Owen say, "Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of a self-righteousness is the soul and substance of all false religion." Mortification must be done by the strength and under the direction of the Holy Spirit.

Our situation was so desperate that only the death of His own Son on a cruel and shameful cross was sufficient to resolve the problem.

For the LORD your God had made his spirit stubborn and his heart obstinate in order to give him into your hands, as he has now done" (Deuteronomy 2:30).

Many people erroneously think that God can just forgive our sins because He is a loving God. Nothing could be further from the truth. The cross speaks to us not only about our sin but about God's holiness.

My purpose is not to attempt an explanation but rather to exhibit once again the Bible's consistent teaching that God is able and does move upon the hearts and minds of people to accomplish His purposes.