Jerry Bridges, in his book “The Pursuit of Holiness,” writes about holiness and how it greatly lost in the American churches of today! Many people within the churches have lost their identity as Christians and that is largely because The Pursuit of Holiness” has ceased to exist! “The Pursuit of Holiness is mainly an application book for the nominal, lukewarm, and even passionate believer.

            Throughout the last year or so of my life, God has been directing back time and time again to the different passages of holy living and right living. I spent all of last semester reading through Galatians 5 with the main focus of that passage being living out the fruit of the spirit and avoiding wholeheartedly the deeds of the flesh. After that semester spent in Galatians 5, I moved to another passage that directed the believer to doing good works and that is Ephesians 2, specifically verses 8-10. Reading through and studying that passage, I spent a lot of time at the beginning of my study spent with verses eight and nine. I realized soon after reading the chapter over and over again that you cannot separate the verses of this chapter and specifically you cannot separate verses eight and nine from ten!

            This chapter is an amazing expression of grace lived out and verses eight through ten show and exemplify the beauty of it! It states, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8-10 ESV). The last verse is a call to live a holy life! If this verse were not there, we could live however we wanted, but it is there and now we have a command to live a life of good works!

            This passage and the one mentioned prior are exactly what Jerry Bridges talked about in his book, “The Pursuit of Holiness.” He outlines many different things in his book about this concept of holy living and ways to fight the temptation that is so easily overlooked in the American Christian lives of today. In chapter seven of the book, Jerry Bridges talks about how to basically remedy this problem of ungodliness and the opposite of holy living. The chapter is titled “Help in a Daily Battle!” On page 73, it states, “This is not theoretical teaching, something to be placed on the library shelves of our minds and admired, but of no practical value in the battle for holiness. To count on the fact that we are dead to sin and alive to God is something we must do actively. To do it we must for the habit of continually realizing that we are dead to sin and alive to God. Practically speaking we do this when by faith in God’s Word we resist sin’s advances and temptations. We count on the fact that we are alive to God when by faith we look to Christ for the power we need to do the resisting. Faith must always be based on fact, and Romans 6:11 is always a fact for us.”

            Romans 6 is an amazing passage that Jerry Bridges refers to throughout his book. It is the gospel message tied together with the defeat of death and sin. He talks in verse six how our old bodies have been crucified and this was so that we could have a defeat over sin and that we would no longer be enslaved to it. This is so true and the more and more Paul writes in this passage, the more and more you begin to see this truth laid out. In verses 10-12, Paul continues to write about sin’s death and the possibility of holy living. He writes, “For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.” Sin is dead in our lives and now we are alive to God! We do not have to obey sin’s passions any longer. In verse 14, Paul concludes this paragraph stating, “For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” We have been given the wonderful grace of Jesus and now in the last part of the chapter, Paul instructs us in righteous living! In verses 14-23, the instruction to holy living is quite clear. The reader is first asked the question, “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” (verse 14). This right there is the bluntest verse about holy living you will ever get. Then Paul goes on to state that we are now slaves to, not sin, but righteousness, or right living. In the later verses, Paul, like in his other letters, uses the illustration of fruit. He says, we have been set free from sin and now are slaves to righteousness, but when we were in sin, he speaks of the fruit that we were receiving and what it’s end was. He states that “the end of those things is death” (verse 21). This verse ties back to Galatians 5 and the fruit of the spirit and the deeds of the flesh. It first goes on to state the deeds of the flesh and the sinful life that leads to death or in other words, it leads to a live outside of the kingdom of God. Then it goes on to contrast the verse using the word “but”: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-25). This call to living for Christ is not an easy life. This life will be full of hardships and trials, but through those things we are slowly being sanctified. We are being changed into people who can be recognized as followers of Christ by the way we “walk” not just by what we say. This is the call of Christianity, not some half-hearted approach to living. We are called to holy living. A life filled with Christ and filled with the attributes of him. The fruit of the Spirit, not just any spirit, but the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit! We are called to have the attributes, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, so that we can live holy lives that have crucified our flesh of its passions and desires! This is a remarkable truth that if we only took a fourth of what it was saying and applied it to our lives communally as the church of God, this world would look a lot different, and Christianity would look a lot different! But, praise the Lord we are called to a life filled with the Holy Spirit, not just partially! Through this book, these passages have come alive to me. Yes, I will still struggle with sin because I have a body that is sinful, but I have been made new in Christ and my heart desires to follow after him! I pray that America (and myself) will open up their Bibles more often and see the truths so prevalent throughout scripture!