Category Archives: Jerry Bridges

What We Can’t See

Posted on by under Jerry Bridges

…it is difficult for us to appreciate the reality of God sovereignly doing as He pleases in our lives because we do not see God doing anything. Instead we see ourselves or other people acting and events occurring, and we evaluate those actions and events according to our own preferences and plans. We see ourselves influencing or perhaps even controlling or being controlled by the actions of other people, but we do not see God at work. But over all the actions and events of our lives, God is in control doing as He pleases— not apart from those events, or in spite of them, but through them. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery— a malicious act in and of itself—but in due time Joseph recognized that through his brothers’ actions God was acting. He could say to them, “So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.”

Jerry Bridges, Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts

HT: Reformed Quotes

Performance Based Relationships

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We believers are apt to fall into a servile fear if we don’t fully understand the grace of God and His acceptance of us through Christ. If we believe we’re in a performance relationship with God, then He can seem to be a hard taskmaster whom we can never please. We’ll see Him as the divine ogre ready to judge us for even our least failure to live up to His rules.

Jerry Bridges, The Joy of Fearing God, p. 27

Daily Worship

Posted on by under Jerry Bridges, John MacArthur

Music and liturgy can assist or express a worshipping heart, but they cannot make a non-worshipping heart into a worshipping one. The danger is that they can give a non-worshipping heart the sense of having worshiped.  So the crucial factor in worship in the church is not the form of worship, but the state of the hearts of the saints. If our corporate worship isn’t the expression of our individual worshipping lives, it is unacceptable.

John MacArthur in Jerry Bridges, The Joy of Fearing God, p. 240