The Bookends of the Christian Life E-Book

Jerry Bridges

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 163

Beschreibung

The authors use an extended metaphor to serve up a little book with a big message about two essentials of the Christian life. What do bookends have to do with the Christian life? They are a metaphor that Jerry Bridges has developed over the years, and which he and coauthor Bob Bevington flesh out in this small volume. The two "bookends" explain not only how we as sinners can be made acceptable to a holy God but also we can find the power to change. They are thus essential for the Christian life. In a unique book that should garner the attention of a wide range of readers, the authors use their extended metaphor to help readers answer questions like: - How can I overcome persistent guilt? - How can I deal with the pressure to measure up? - Where can I find the motivation it takes to grow? - How can I live the Christian life with both my head and my heart? - How can I be sure God loves me? - How can I change in an authentic and lasting way?So what are The Bookends of the Christian Life? Christ's righteousness as it is transferred to dependent believers, and the Holy Spirit's power as it enables their transformation. In continuing their goal to re-center the church at large onto the historic gospel of Jesus Christ, Bridges and Bevington have served up this little book with a big message so that believers and seekers alike can understand these two keys to a genuine Christian life.

Leseprobe

OTHER CROSSWAY BOOKS BY Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington

The Great Exchange:My Sin for His Righteousness (2007)

The Bookends of the Christian Life

Copyright © 2009 by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington

Published by Crossway Books a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: The DesignWorks Group, www.thedesignworksgroup.com

First printing 2009

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from The New American Standard Bible, © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the authors.

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-0551-5

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-0552-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bridges, Jerry.

The bookends of the Christian life / Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4335-0319-1 (hc)

1. Justification (Christian theology). 2. Sanctification—Christianity. I. Bevington, Bob, 1956–      . II. Title BT764.3.B75       2009 234'.7—dc22

2008038697

LB           18     17   16      15     14     13        12     11         10        09 14     13         12      11     10     9    8     7     6     5     4    3    2     1

To all who, like the two of us, recognize the utter insufficiency of their ownrighteousness and strength, and thus are desperate for the gospel.And to our Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who provides us with an impeccable righteousnessand an indomitable strength through our union with Christ.

Only in the Lord . . . are righteousness and strength.

ISAIAH 45:24

FOR INDIVIDUAL OR SMALL GROUP STUDY

We encourage you to visit:

www.TheBookendsBook.com

where you’ll find a free downloadable study guide and other tools to help you get the most out of this book.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Books and Bookends

PART ONE

The First Bookend:

The Righteousness of Christ

1 The Righteousness of Christ

2 The Motivation of the Gospel

3 Gospel Enemy #1: Self-righteousness

4 Gospel Enemy #2: Persistent Guilt

5 Leaning on the First Bookend

PART TWO

The Second Bookend:

The Power of the Holy Spirit

6 The Power of the Holy Spirit

7 Dependent Responsibility

8 The Help of the Divine Encourager

9 Gospel Enemy #3: Self-reliance

10 Leaning on the Second Bookend

Conclusion: The Bookends Personal Worldview

Notes

PREFACE

Over the past several years, as the two of us have shared with each other what God is teaching us through his Word and our experiences, we’ve concluded there are two foundational truths that give stability to our Christian lives. We’ve chosen to use the illustration of bookends to teach these two truths.

The Bookends of the Christian Life is a collaborative effort. So in every instance, whether the teaching or illustration is from one or both of us, we’ve chosen to use the plural pronouns we or us.

We would like to acknowledge Greg Plitt, Chris Thifault, Steve Myers, and Joe Coffey for their valuable assistance with the early drafts and Greg Bryan for the diagram design. Thanks also to Allan Fisher, senior vice president for book publishing at Crossway, for his support of this project, and to Lydia Brownback and Thomas Womack for their outstanding editorial work. In addition, we’re grateful for each and every member of the Crossway team.

Lastly, we would like to thank Mitch Gingrich for his excellence in providing the free study guide at www. TheBookendsBook.com.

Jerry Bridges Bob Bevington

INTRODUCTION

BOOKS AND BOOKENDS

Most of us have experienced the difficulty of putting books on a bookshelf without having a set of bookends to keep them in place. You know what happens. The books on the end tip over. Then the books next to those tumble over the ones already fallen. Inevitably some end up on the floor. At this point we do what we should have done in the first place. We set a couple of sturdy bookends in position to support and stabilize the books on the shelf.

Think of your life right now as a long bookshelf. The books on it represent all the things you do—both spiritual and temporal. There’s a spiritual book for each activity of your Christian growth and service, perhaps with titles such as Church Attendance, Bible Study, Daily Quiet Time, Sharing the Gospel, or Serving Others. The temporal books might include Job Performance, Educational Pursuits, Recreation and Leisure, Grocery Shopping, Driving the Car, Doing the Laundry, Mowing the Grass, and Paying the Bills, to name a few. Our temporal books are intermingled with spiritual books on our bookshelf, since all our activities are to be informed and directed by the spiritual dimension, just as Paul indicated: “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

This bookshelf of your life is a very active place. In the course of each day, as you pull one book after another off the shelf, life can get complicated. And the more committed and conscientious you are, the more frustration you might feel trying to manage all your various books simultaneously.

Without adequate bookends, even if we succeed in getting all our books to remain upright, their stability is precarious at best. If we try removing even one book, we may jostle those next to it, disturb the delicate balance, and cause books to topple and fall. Sometimes a single tilted book can knock over every other volume on the shelf in a catastrophic “domino effect.” You can see why two sturdy, reliable bookends can make all the difference.

On top of life’s complexity with its demands in both the spiritual and temporal realms, we often add a sense of guilt—guilt for what we should do but don’t and guilt for what we do but shouldn’t. Regrettably, many Christians struggle with one or more persistent sin patterns, often called besetting sins. They produce a sense of deep, gnawing, demoralizing guilt, which tends to hinder us from pursuing godly change. In fact, contrary to popular thinking, guilt by itself rarely, if ever, motivates a person to change. By itself, it only discourages us.

However, when rightly handled, guilt is actually good for us. It’s like pain. Pain tells us something’s wrong and alerts us to do something to address its root cause. Consider leprosy, a disease that causes the loss of the sensation of pain in the hands and feet so that its victims frequently injure themselves without realizing it. In a similar way, a person without a sense of guilt can continue on a destructive path of sin without being aware of it. Such was generally the case of the self-righteous Pharisees, the ones Jesus opposed so vehemently.1Truth be told, there’s probably something of the Pharisee in all of us, but in some, numbness to guilt is the prevalent condition of their heart. And their resulting sense of self-righteousness is far more dangerous than a sense of guilt.

On the other hand, the guilt-laden person is painfully aware of his situation. He struggles with his persistent sins, but sooner or later he fails again. He just doesn’t know what to do. He has been told to “try harder,” but that hasn’t worked either. So he continues a life of quiet desperation.

Both the self-righteous Pharisee in his smugness and the guilt-laden person in his desperation have one thing in common: their bookshelf of life has no bookends.

The solution for both is the same. When we become united to Christ by faith, God places a set of bookends on the bookshelf of our lives. One bookend is the righteousness of Christ; the other is the power of the Holy Spirit. Though they’re provided by God, it’s our responsibility to lean our books on them, relying on them to support, stabilize, and secure all our books—everything we do.

Why are these two gracious provisions from God the bookends of the Christian life? And how do we lean our books on them? This book will answer those questions, and these:

How can I overcome persistent guilt?

How can I deal with the pressure to measure up?

Where can I find the motivation to grow?

How can I live the Christian life with my heart and not just my head?

How can I be sure God loves and accepts me?

Where do I draw the line between God’s grace and my works?

Where can I find the strength to change in an authentic and lasting way?

The answers start with the first bookend. So continue with us as we explore the meaning and application of the righteousness of Christ.

PART ONE

The First Bookend:

The Righteousness of Christ

CHAPTER ONE

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF CHRIST

I am not ashamed of the gospel . . . for in it the righteousnessof God is revealed.

ROMANS 1:16–17

What is the righteousness of Christ, and why do we need it as the first bookend? The word righteous in the Bible basically means perfect obedience; a righteous person is one who always does what is right. This statement assumes there’s an external, objective standard of right and wrong. That standard is the universal moral will of God as given to us throughout the Bible. It’s the law of God written on every human heart. It’s the standard by which each person will ultimately be judged.1

Our problem is that we’re not righteous. As the apostle Paul put it so bluntly, “None is righteous, no, not one. . . . No one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:10, 12). That’s strong language. We may quickly protest that we’re not so bad. After all, we don’t steal, murder, or engage in sexual immorality. We usually obey our civil laws and treat each other decently. So how can Paul say we’re not righteous?

We respond this way because we fail to realize how impossibly high God’s standard actually is. When asked, “Which is the great commandment in the Law?” Jesus responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 22:36–40). None of us has even come close to fulfilling either of these two commandments. Yet Paul wrote, “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them’” (Galatians 3:10). “All” is absolute. It means exactly what it says; not most, but all.

If we applied this same standard in the academic world, scoring 99 percent on a final exam would mean failing the course. A term paper with a single misspelled word would earn an F. No school has a standard of grading this rigorous; if it did, no one would graduate. In fact, professors often grade “on a curve,” meaning all grades are relative to the best score in the class, even if that score isn’t perfect. We’re so accustomed to this approach we tend to think God also grades on a curve. We look at the scandalous sins of society around us, and because we don’t engage in them, we assume God is pleased with us. After all, we’re better than “they” are.

But God doesn’t grade on a curve. The effect of Galatians 3:10 is to put us all under God’s curse. And while it’s one thing to fail a course at the university, it’s altogether something else to be eternally damned under the curse of God. The good news of the gospel, of course, is that those who have trusted in Jesus Christ as their Savior will not experience that curse. As Paul wrote just a few sentences later, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). Let this truth sink deeply into your heart and mind: apart from the saving work of Christ, every one of us still deserves God’s curse every day of our lives.

We may not commit “scandalous” sins. But what about our pride, our selfishness, our impatience with others, our critical spirit, and all sorts of other sins we tolerate on a daily basis? Even on our best days, we still haven’t loved God or our neighbor as we should.

So we have to agree with Paul. None of us is righteous, not even one.

We know we need a Savior, so we trust in Christ to redeem us from the curse of God’s law. But though we believe we’re saved as far as our eternal destiny is concerned, we may not be sure about our day-to-day standing with God. Many of us embrace a vague but very real notion that God’s approval has to be earned by our conduct. We know we’re saved by grace, but we believe God blesses us according to our level of personal obedience. Consequently, our confidence that we abide in God’s favor ebbs and flows according to how we gauge our performance. And since we each sin every single day, this approach is ultimately discouraging and even devastating. This is exactly why we need the first bookend. The righteousness of Christ changes all this.

JESUS CHRIST THE RIGHTEOUS ONE

What exactly is the righteousness of Christ? And how will it give us a sense of assurance in our day-to-day relationship with God? To begin answering those questions, let’s go to one of our favorite verses of Scripture:

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

The first thing we need to consider in this verse is the sinlessness—the perfect obedience—of Jesus as a man living among us for thirty-three years. The Scriptures consistently testify to this. All four of the major writers of the New Testament letters attest to the sinless, perfect obedience of Jesus throughout his life on earth. In addition to Paul’s words that Jesus “knew no sin,” we have the testimony of Peter, John, and the writer of Hebrews: “He committed no sin” (1 Peter 2:22); “In him there is no sin” (1 John 3:5); Jesus was in every respect “tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

One of the most powerful indications of the sinlessness of Jesus came from his own mouth. To a group of hostile Jews to whom he’d just said, “You are of your father the devil,” Jesus dared to ask the question, “Which one of you convicts me of sin?” (John 8:44–46). He could ask this question because he knew the answer—he was sinless. Jesus could confidently say of the Father, “I always do the things that are pleasing to him” (John 8:29). Every moment of his life, from birth to death, Jesus perfectly obeyed the law of God, the same law that is applicable to all of us.

Christ’s obedience was tested by temptation (Matthew 4:1–11; Hebrews 4:15), and the intensity of his temptation was greater than any we’ll ever experience or even imagine. When we succumb to temptation, the pressure is relieved for awhile; but unlike us, Jesus never gave in.

As astounding as that is, it wasn’t the epitome of Christ’s obedience. The pinnacle of his obedience came when “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). The obedient death of Christ is the very apex of the righteousness of Christ.

Let’s not miss the implications of this. At the cross, Jesus paid the penalty we should have paid, by enduring the wrath of God we should have endured. And this required him to do something unprecedented. It required him to provide the ultimate level of obedience—one that we’ll never be asked to emulate. It required him to give up his relationship with the Father so that we could have one instead. The very thought of being torn away from the Father caused him to sweat great drops of blood (Luke 22:44). And at the crescendo of his obedience, he screamed, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). The physical pain he endured was nothing compared to the agony of being separated from the Father. In all of history, Jesus is the only human being who was truly righteous in every way; and he was righteous in ways that are truly beyond our comprehension.

OUR SIN TRANSFERRED TO CHRIST

The second truth to note in 2 Corinthians 5:21 is that “for our sake he made him to be sin.” This is Paul’s way of saying God caused Jesus to bear our sin. Peter wrote something similar: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). So did the prophet Isaiah: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). Paul is telling us that God the Father took our sin and charged it to God the Son in such a way that Christ was made to be sin for our sake.

Now we can see what Paul meant in Galatians 3:13 when he said, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” He became a curse for us because he’d become sin for us. And by those words for us, Paul indicates that Christ did this in our place and as our substitute.

Imagine there’s a moral ledger recording every event of your entire life—all your thoughts, words, actions, even your motives. You might think of it as a mixture of good and bad deeds, with hopefully more good than bad. The Scriptures, however, tell us that even our righteous deeds are unclean in the sight of God (Isaiah 64:6). So Jesus has a perfectly righteous moral ledger, and we have a completely sinful one. However, God took our sins and charged them to Christ, leaving us with a clean sheet.

The biblical word for this is forgiveness. In and of itself, forgiveness is a monumental blessing. Paul echoed David on this when he wrote, “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin” (Romans 4:7–8; Psalm 32:1–2). But how did God do this and yet remain perfectly holy and just?