Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington, The Bookends of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).
We usually associate grace with the first bookend, thinking of verses like Ephesians 2:8: “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” But grace in the New Testament is actually much broader—it includes all the blessings God has given us through Christ. Those blessings can generally be classified under two categories: privileges and power.
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Now that we have clarified the role of the Holy Spirit, you might ask, “What’s our role?” It is the same as it was with the first bookend—faith. Here, however, it’s the action of leaning our books on the second bookend. And as we’ve already observed, faith involves both renunciation and reliance. We have to first renounce all confidence in our own power and then rely entirely on the power of the Holy Spirit. We must be enabled, not merely helped
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The Bible teaches that the Spirit applies his power to our lives in two different ways. The first we call his synergistic work, which refers to occasions that combine our effort with his enabling power. But this isn’t a pure synergism, as if we and the Spirit each contributed equal power to the task. Rather, we work as he enables us to work, so we use the expression qualified synergism.
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The second way the Spirit applies his power to our lives is his monergistic work, in which he works alone in us and for us but completely independent from us. The monergistic work of the Holy Spirit begins when he gives us new life by causing us to be born again (John 3:5–6; Titus 3:5–6).
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The sixteenth-century Heidelberg Catechism, which unfortunately is little known among believers today, provides a framework for understanding the monergistic work of the Spirit. It’s structured around three words: guilt, grace, and gratitude. These words refer to our guilt, God’s grace, and our response of gratitude.
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There are also important differences. The first bookend represents his work for us and outside of us. It’s totally finished and complete. We can never become more righteous or less righteous in our standing before God once we’re clothed with the perfect, completed righteousness of Christ. The second bookend represents his work not only for us but in us. This work, whether monergistic or synergistic, is always a process. It will never be finished and complete in this life.
There is another difference, one that is often misunderstood in ways that can have dire consequences. It involves our response to the bookends, the answers to questions such as, “What do I do? What’s my responsibility? What part do I play?” Our response to the first bookend is always passive; our part is simply to receive it. The same is true with the monergistic work of the Holy Spirit in the second bookend. But the synergistic work of the Holy Spirit in the second bookend requires an active response from us; there is something we are responsible to do.
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So where does our own responsibility come into the picture? In responding to the synergistic work of the Holy Spirit in the second bookend, where do we draw the line between what we are to do and what he is to do? Does such a line even exist?
Throughout the New Testament, the answers to these questions are consistent: we’re both responsible and dependent.
We have a responsibility to respond to each means of grace the Spirit provides. We’re to participate in using them to our spiritual advantage. The term spiritual disciplines is used to describe this process and to emphasize our responsibility
As we practice these disciplines, it’s of paramount importance that we keep two truths in mind. First, the disciplines themselves are not the source of spiritual power. Only the Holy Spirit is. The disciplines are his instruments to transmit his power. Second, the practice of the disciplines doesn’t earn us favor with God or secure his blessings
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Daily Communion with God
The first means of grace we will look at is the spiritual discipline often referred to as the quiet time but which might better be called daily communion with God....Instead of simply reading a chapter or two of the Bible, we need to reflect on and pray over what we read, asking him to reveal what he has for us in the Scriptures before us. Our reading becomes a conversation, a process of talking to God and listening to him. We may ask him questions as we seek a deeper meaning or a specific application of a given passage. We interact with a living Person. And in so doing, we experience communion with God
The Gospel
Within the scope of our communion with God, the most important means of grace is the gospel. Once again we turn to 2 Corinthians 3:18. .... Basically Paul was saying that it’s through beholding the glory of the Lord that we’re transformed more and more into his image. In what way do we behold his glory? We get the answer when we read this verse in context (2 Corinthians 3:8–4:6). It’s the gospel that reveals Christ’s glory. Therefore, to behold his glory we must gaze into the gospel by faith. As we do this, the Spirit will transform us more and more into his likeness.....the gospel is the primary instrument of spiritual transformation.
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We should bathe our hearts and minds in the gospel as part of our daily communion with God. To use an increasingly popular expression, we should “preach the gospel to ourselves every day.”
All of Scripture
We respond to this means of grace by consistently bringing our minds under the renewing and transforming influence of Scripture.....We need to regularly listen to Bible-centered preaching, and we need to diligently pursue Bible study and Scripture memorization, all as a means of grace pointing us to communion with God.
Prayer is another instrument the Holy Spirit uses as a means of grace to strengthen us.....Our response to this means of grace is obvious: we’re to practice the spiritual discipline of prayer by regularly asking him to work in us and enable us to work. This includes daily periods of extensive prayer as well as brief, spontaneous prayers when we’re in the heat of the battle.
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The more prayer, the more dependency; the more dependency, the more power. The source of power is not the prayer; it is the Holy Spirit, who uses prayer as a means of grace through which he provides the power.
Circumstances
A fourth instrument the Holy Spirit uses is the circumstances he allows or brings into our lives.
Our response should be to continually reflect on the various circumstances that come our way, especially the difficult ones, and seek to profit from them according to his will.
This concept of communion may be easy enough to see and understand intellectually, but we need more than intellectual assent and understanding; we need application. We need this truth to become our daily practice and our heart’s desire. For that to happen, we are dependent on the enabling power of the Holy Spirit as we work diligently at the spiritual disciplines.
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Chapter 8 The help of the divine encourager
Our gratitude for the love that provided the first bookend encourages us to depend on the second for strength to obey the commandments, including the greatest ones—to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves
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He refuses to leave home in the morning until a deep awareness of God’s love for him in the gospel is renewed. He works at this each morning through the spiritual disciplines of Bible meditation and prayer, but he’s dependent on the Holy Spirit all the while. Since he started this habit, he is often encouraged by grace and strengthened for the daily battle against his functional saviors
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We attempted to use our knowledge of “what I should do” to fight our sinful desire of “what I want to do.” We assumed that if the argument of our mind prevailed, we would do the right thing.
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The Expulsive Power of a New Affection
Chalmers’s point is that we must battle desire with desire. Whichever desire is the strongest will always determine the outcome....So to win the battle against sin, we must strengthen and encourage our godly desires. How? By simultaneously growing in our awareness of: (1) our sin—our knowledge of the moral will of God and how far short we fall daily; and (2) God’s love—the grace and blessings purchased by Christ in the gospel.
As we see how incomparably desirable God is, he becomes our superior satisfaction, our all-surpassing treasure (Matthew 13:44). Our appetite for sin grows weak by comparison, and we expel it because there’s not room enough in our heart for both. Our affection—our love for God—is then expressed in personal obedience and deepened relationship with the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.
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Enjoying the Relationship
The Westminster Confession of Faith provides a succinct and extraordinary statement of our purpose in life: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”.... As believers, we’re meant to enjoy God in the here and now as well as in heaven. And we enjoy him when we experience him in an active and intimate relationship of communion.
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Because of our union with Christ, the Father loves us the same way he loves the Son,and the glory the Father has given to the Son is in turn given to us by the Son. Therefore, the glorifying love that exists within the Trinity is shed upon us and shared by us in such a way that we are capable of experiencing communion with the triune God that is enjoyable beyond measure.
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the greatest source of encouragement in our battle against sin is often our Spirit-driven desire to experience this enjoyment. You can’t enjoy sin and God at the same time.
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The Promises of God
In his role as our Encourager, the Spirit frequently leads us to specific promises of God. For the most part, when the Spirit guides us to God’s promises, they’re for use in our immediate or near future. They provide us with assurance that when we take a step of faith, as our weight shifts forward and our foot descends, God’s grace and truth will arrive in time to support our foot as it lands
Though the Spirit often gives us momentary strength through the promises of God, the Spirit also directs us to promises to equip us for events that may not take place right away. When this occurs, we need to collect these promises so we can have easy access to them in a future battle. Journaling is a good way to do this. But we believe the best method may very well be Scripture memorization.
Chapter 9, Gospel Enemy #3: Self-Reliance
Self-reliance toward God is a dependence on our own power, not the power of the Holy Spirit. Self-reliance is to the second bookend what self-righteousness is to the first.
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What’s wrong with this kind of self-reliance? Everything. First of all, it doesn’t work. The Christian life is a spiritual life lived in a spiritual world. Our human strength, be it physical power or willpower, is inadequate. We need divine strength that comes from a divine source—the Spirit of God. When we attempt to live the Christian life in our own strength, we head in the direction of legalism, pride, frustration, or ungodly living. It can even lead to a shipwrecked faith.
Self-reliance, like self-righteousness and persistent guilt, is sin. These gospel enemies entice us to redirect our dependencies to objects of faith outside the bookends, such as our strength, our righteousness, or our functional saviors.
What was the object of Peter’s dependence? It was his willpower. “I will never fall away; I will not deny you.” He assumed he had the strength to stand where others would fall.
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Isn’t it ironic that the more God-given natural abilities we have, the more prone we are to rely on them rather than on God?
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One way the Spirit of God helps free us from self-reliance is by revealing our sinfulness while simultaneously leading us back to the bookends.
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Chapter 10, Leaning on the second bookend
Focal point #1: our desperate weakness
Likewise for us, seeing ourselves as weak and helpless is a necessary step in shifting our dependence from our strength to his. We must stop relying on our own power before we’re able to receive power from the Holy Spirit.
Focal point #2: The reliable power of the Holy Spirit
Think of it this way: we wage war in the power of another. It’s a spiritual war, and the power is that of the Spirit of Almighty God.
Focal point #3: Rejection of Self-reliance
If you take even a cursory overview of your life with an eye to self-reliance, we expect you’ll quickly detect it. If you don’t, simply place your last twenty-four hours under the light of the following questions:
How many times was I consciously aware of relying on the power of the Holy Spirit, instead of on myself?
How many times did I acknowledge God’s sovereign hand and power sustaining my every endeavor—voluntary or involuntary, conscious or unconscious?
To kill poison ivy, or self-reliance, you have to get it by the roots. The tap-root of self-reliance is ultimately found in the statement, “I will be as God.” Adam and Eve embraced it as the motive for the original sin (Genesis 3:5–6). Long before that, Lucifer (Satan) said essentially the same thing: “I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:13–14). This constitutes a declaration of independence from God. It’s cosmic treason. But this attitude isn’t limited to the likes of Adam, Eve, and Lucifer. It’s at the root of the remaining sin nature in all of us. All three gospel enemies spring forth from this common root. It’s the essence of our self-reliance with its unspoken claim that I can do it myself. It’s behind our ever-present bent toward self-righteousness, as well. If I’m my own god, I determine what’s right and wrong, and I declare myself good enough. Even persistent guilt has its root in this statement, because it’s a refusal to acknowledge and embrace the solution God has provided for our sin dilemma, as if to say, I will be my own judge.
Therefore, the focus of the battle with all three gospel enemies, and self-reliance in particular, should center on making a deliberate, repeated counter-declaration: “God is God, and I am not.” And once we make that pronouncement each day, we must pray for opportunities and strength to apply it.
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Taking a lesson from both Mickey and the Bible, our daily war plan calls for us to kill self-reliance and replace it by planting and cultivating the daylilies of humility and the yellow irises of godliness.
Why is a fresh view of the cross needed in order to cultivate humility? When we see Jesus there bearing our sin, we also see exactly what we deserve from God for each sin we commit. Then and only then can we begin to honestly assess ourselves. The One whose flesh was nailed to the cross should have been us: “He was pierced through for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5, nasb). At the cross we see the holiness of God as well—his perfect justice served by unleashing his undiluted wrath against sin, as he punished and rejected the sin bearer in our place.
As we revisit the cross and linger there in meditation focused on its unending and unfathomable wonders, we cultivate a thick patch of the daylilies we call humility, and when this happens, there’s no longer any room for the pride that leads to the desire to be like God.
Now for the irises. We define godliness as “the attitude of regarding God in everything all the time.” We display this attitude when, no matter what we do, we “do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The godly person is a God-centered, God-glorifying, God-esteeming person. The opposite of godliness is ungodliness, the disregarding of God. All expressions of pride are rooted in ungodliness, because you must first disregard God before you can be prideful. So for us, the battle for godliness is the linchpin of our war plan.
How do we fight for godliness? It starts the same way we fight for humility—by seeing the cross as the overarching message and meaning of life and the universe. From there we must discipline our minds to practice the presence of God, “and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).
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The bookend worldview
Why is the bookends worldview so useful and worthwhile? Because it provides a constant awareness of the two most fundamental realities that apply to our lives. It reminds us that we’re 100 percent dependent on a source of righteousness and strength that resides outside ourselves, yet we remain 100 percent responsible for the placement of each of our books on the bookshelf of our lives.
Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington, The Bookends of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).
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