Quotes from Jerry Bridges

Above all else, our response to adversity should be to seek God's glory.

The so-called sovereign nations of the world are not truly sovereign. They are nothing more than instruments in the hand of God to accomplish His will:

We are all sinners and are on an equal plane with one another. So we cannot exercise grace as God does, but we can relate to one another as those who have received grace and who wish to operate on the principles of grace.

The assurance here is that God will show compassion. It is not enough to say that He is compassionate, but He will show compassion.

God wants us to walk in obedience—not victory.

If I complain about the difficult circumstances of my life, I impugn the sovereignty and goodness of God and tempt my listener to do the same.

He is with us in our troubles.

The good that God works for in our lives is conformity to the likeness of His Son.

Because His people were in union with Him, to persecute them was to persecute Him. This truth is no different today. You are in union with Christ, just as surely as the disciples were in the time of the book of Acts.

God's unfailing love for us is an objective fact affirmed over and over in the Scriptures. It is true whether we believe it or not. Our doubts do not destroy God's love, nor does our faith create it.

Pharisee-type believers unconsciously think they've earned God's blessing through their behavior. Guilt-laden believers are sure they've forfeited God's blessing through disobedience or lack of discipline. Both have forgotten the meaning of grace - God's unmerited favor to those who deserve only His wrath.

It is vain to guard our minds and emotions against that which comes from without if we do not at the same time deal with habits of sin which are within. The battle for holiness must be fought on two fronts—without and within. Only then will we see progress toward holiness.

Contrary to popular opinion, with God there is no such thing as mere forgiveness. There is only justice.

There is a vast difference between failing and becoming a failure. We become a failure when we give up—when we stop trying. But as long as we are working on those sinful habits, regardless of how often we fail, we have not become a failure, and we can expect to see progress.

Most of us probably entertain either of these attitudes on different days. On a good day (as we perceive it), we tend toward self-righteous Pharisaism. On a not-so-good day, we allow ourselves to wallow in a sense of failure and guilt. Either way we've moved away from the gospel of God's grace, trying to relate to God directly on the basis of our performance rather than through Christ.

We were not drowning people needing a life ring—we were dead people in need of life. Further, we were slaves to the world, to the devil, and to our own sinful natures. And as we've already seen, we were by nature objects of God's holy wrath. Dead, slaves, objects of wrath—what a desperate condition!

If Christ grieved over unrepentant Jerusalem, does He not grieve over unrepentant America as well?

If we are going to learn to trust God in adversity, we must believe that just as certainly as God will allow nothing to subvert His glory, so He will allow nothing to spoil the good He is working out in us and for us.

It means we believe that God causes all events in our lives, whether good or bad as we judge them, to work together to conform us more and more into the likeness of Christ. It means we give thanks in all circumstances - not for the circumstance considered in itself, but for God's promise to use these circumstances to conform us more to Christ.

The perfect righteousness that we pursue is unattainable in this life. But if we hunger and thirst for it and diligently pursue it, over time we will grow more and more into the person God wants us to be.

the reason we in the West do not suffer more persecution is because we have accommodated ourselves too much to the world around us.

Did He create you with an incurable speech impediment?

He did so because that particular infirmity uniquely fits you for the life He has planned for you.

John Owen again expressed this attitude of total reliance on Christ when he paraphrased Galatians 2:20: "The spiritual life which I have is not my own. I did not induce it, and I cannot maintain it. It is only and solely the work of Christ. It is not I who live, but Christ lives in me. My whole life is His alone.