Quotes from Jerry Bridges

Ever since his fall in the Garden of Eden, man has listened to his desires more than his reason.

Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God's grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God's grace.

But note also the twofold objective of God's providence: His own glory and the good of His people. These two objectives are never antithetical; they are always in harmony with each other. God never pursues His glory at the expense of the good of His people, nor does He ever seek our good at the expense of His glory. He has designed His eternal purpose so that His glory and our good are inextricably bound together.

If we desire to experience the totality of fellowship with Christ, we must expect to experience the fellowship of His sufferings.

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.

Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.

Our good works are not truly good unless they're motivated by a love for God and a desire to glorify Him. But we cannot have such a Godward motivation if we think we must earn God's favor by our obedience or if we fear we may forfeit His favor by disobedience. Such a works-oriented motivation is essentially self-serving, prompted more by what we think we gain or lose than by a grateful response to the grace He has already given us through Jesus Christ.

The atonement was God's extending favor to people who deserved not favor but wrath. The atonement was God's bridging the awful "Grand Canyon" of sin to reach people who were in rebellion against Him. And He did this at infinite cost to Himself by sending Jesus to die in our place.

The universal testimony of those who have suffered for the sake of Christ and His church is that they have experienced a deep fellowship, an intimate communion with Him in the midst of their sufferings.

But we must be transformed more and more into the likeness of Christ. That is the purpose of discipline.

To memorize Scripture effectively, you must have a plan. The plan should include a selection of well-chosen verses, a practical system for learning those verses, a systematic means of reviewing them to keep them fresh in your memory, and simple rules for continuing Scripture memory on your own.

If you stop and think about it, you will realize that most godly character traits can only be developed through adversity.