Everything by Jerry Bridges is worth reading. His newest book is extremely helpful: The Bookends of the Christian Life.Basically, here is the point of the book:
Bridges and Bevington compare our lives to a book shelf. Each book represents something about us. Our bookshelves are full of activities and roles. In order to keep all these books stable, we need some sturdy bookends to lean our books on. Without bookends, our books will fall.
Bridges proposes that every Christian should have two particular sturdy bookends that we lean everything in our lives against:
Bookend #1: The Righteousness of Jesus Christ
Bookend #2: The Power of the Holy Spirit
The first bookend is the Gospel. We are accepted by God because of what Christ accomplished, not because of what we have done.
The second bookend is dependence on God's power to enable us to live the Christian life.
The second bookend is dependence on God's power to enable us to live the Christian life.
This is a brilliant and Biblical illustration. Indeed, these are the bookends of the Christian life. If we try to lean our lives on anything else, we will fail constantly.
I hope this book gains wide readership and that these two bookends begin to shape our worldview.
2 comments:
Great point and I haven't thought about it as a bookends. I need to put this on the list a book to read. I need to start making a list of book that I need to read.
Thank you for sharing this with us!
Hungry to eat His Word,
'Guerite ~ BoldLion
Good food for thought -- in fact, I completely stopped typing for about 30 seconds to re-read your post!
Can I recommend another book that can change lives? It's "The Missing Link: Revealing Spiritual Genetics," by Drs. Arno. The authors are Christian writers and educators -- this book can help us understand the important people in our lives, and why they behave the way we do. For example -- I'm pretty gregarious and my husband is not -- instead of driving each other crazy ("why do you sit in a corner at a party?") we've learned to complement each other beautifully. Great stuff.
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