by Jerry Bridges
2006 / 144 pages
The title of Discipline of Grace seems to express a contradiction. Isn’t grace a free gift and discipline something we have to work at? How do these terms relate? Isn’t he confusing faith and works?
Author Jerry Bridges focuses on the terms “dependence” and “discipline” and uses the analogy of a farmer. The farmer is completely dependent on God for the miracle of germination and for favorable weather conditions. Without these things there is no crop. However, he cannot just sit around waiting for God to produce crops for him. Cultivating, planting, fertilizing and harvesting are his responsibilities or the tasks in which he must be disciplined.
In the same way, we are all completely dependent on God’s grace and the righteous work of Jesus Christ. Without this we are all nothing and not one of us can ever present God with a glowing personal report card based on our own merit or accomplishments. Understanding this eliminates all haughtiness and self-righteousness, but we must also understand that this same grace transforms and motivates us in the disciplines of holy living.
The author emphasizes several times throughout the book that we must first and continuously preach the gospel to ourselves, and we must never feel complacent in our walk of faith, must never feel that we have arrived because we go a church with the right doctrines and do all the right things. Over and over he brings us back to our dependence on grace and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, and once that is clearly established he shows how that grace enables us to live a life of gratitude and holiness.
He outlines five different kinds of discipline. The discipline of commitment must be to God and serving Him, not ourselves or a set of moral values. The discipline of convictions explains that a conviction is something we believe so strongly that it affects the way we live. For the discipline of choices, he explains that, “Every day…we are disciplining ourselves in one direction or another by the choices that we make.” The discipline of watching cautions us to always be alert to those things which could cause us to fall, and the discipline of adversity encourages us to accept the Lord’s discipline.
I highly recommend this very biblical book that is both liberating and inspiring and leads well into its companion book, The Pursuit of Holiness.
This review appeared in the December 2011 issue.
