Jerry Bridges
Jerry Bridges entered into the joy of his Master on Sunday evening, March 6, 2016, at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, the day after he suffered cardiac arrest. He was 86 years old.
Childhood
Gerald Dean Bridges was born on December 4, 1929, in a cotton-farming home in Tyler, Texas, to fundamentalist parents, six weeks after the Black Tuesday stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.
Jerry was born with several disabilities: he was cross-eyed, he was deaf in his right ear (which was not fully developed), and he had spine and breastbone deformities. But given his family’s poverty, they were unable to afford medical care for these challenges.
The separatist church in East Texas where the Bridges were members had an altar call after every service. Jerry walked the aisle three times, at the ages of 9, 11, and 13. But he later realized that he had not been born again.
His mother Lillian passed away in 1944 when he was 14.
Conversion
In August of 1948, as an 18-year-old college student right before his sophomore year began, Jerry was home alone one night in bed. He acknowledged to the Lord that he was not truly a Christian, despite growing up in a Christian home and professing faith. He prayed, ”God whatever it takes, I want Christ to be my Savior.”
The next week in his dorm room at the University of Oklahoma he was working on a school assignment and reached for a textbook, when he noticed the little Bible his parents had given him in high school. He figured that since he was now a Christian, he ought to start reading it daily, which he did (and never stopped doing for the rest of his days).
The Navy
After graduating with an engineering degree on a Navy ROTC scholarship, he went on active duty with the Navy, serving as an officer during the Korean conflict (1951-1953). A fellow officer invited him to go to a Navigator Bible study. Jerry went and he was hooked. He had never experienced anything like this before.
When stationed on ship in Japan, he got to know several staff members of the Navigators quite well. One day, after Jerry had been in Japan for six months, a Navy worker asked him why he didn’t just throw in his lot with the Navigators and come to work for them. The very next day, December 26, 1952, Jerry failed a physical exam due to the hearing loss in his right ear, and he was given a medical discharge in July 1953, after being in the Navy for only two years. Jerry was not overly disappointed, surmising that perhaps this was the Lord’s way of steering him to the Navigators.
When he returned to the U.S., he began working for Convair, an airplane manufacturing company in southern California, writing technical papers for shop and flight line personnel. It was there that he learned to write simply and clearly—skills the Lord would later use to instruct and edify thousands of people from his pen.
The Navigators
Jerry was single at the time, living in the home of Navigator Glen Solum, a common practice in the early days of The Navigators. In 1955 Jim invited Jerry to go with him to a staff conference at the headquarters of The Navigators in Glen Eyrie at Colorado Springs. It was there that Jerry sensed a call from the Lord to be involved with vocational ministry. He was resistant to the idea of going on staff, but felt conviction and prayed to the Lord, “Whatever you want.” The following day he met Dawson Trotman, the 49-year-old founder of The Navigators, who wanted to interview Jerry for a position, which he received and accepted. Jerry was put in charge of the correspondence department—answering letters, handling receipts, and mainly the NavLog newsletter to supporters.
When Trotman died in June of 1956 (saving a girl who was drowning), Jim Downing took a position equivalent to a chief operations operator. A Navy man, Jim Downing knew that Jerry had also served in the Navy and tapped him to be his assistant.
Jerry struggled at times in his role, unsure if this was his calling since his position was so different from the typical campus reps. After ten years on staff he told the Lord, “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. If you want me out of The Navigators you’ll have to let me know.”
Beginning in 1960, Jerry served for three years in Europe as administrative assistant to the Navigators’ Europe Director. In January of 1960, he read a booklet entitled The Doctrine of Election, which he first considered heresy but then embraced the following day.
In October of 1963, at the age of 34, he married his first wife, Eleanor Miller of The Navigators following a long-distance relationship. Two children followed: Kathy in 1966, and Dan in 1967. From 1965 to 1969 Jerry served as office manager for The Navigators’ headquarters office at Glen Eyrie.
From 1969 to 1979 Jerry served as the Secretary-Treasurer for The Navigators. It was during this time that NavPress was founded in 1975. Their first publications began by transcribing and editing audio material from their tape archives and turning them into booklets. They produced one by Jerry on Willpower. Leroy Eims—who started the Collegiate ministry—encouraged Jerry to try his hand at writing new material. Jerry had been teaching at conferences on holiness, so he suggested a book along those lines.
In 1978, NavPress published The Pursuit of Holiness, which has now sold over 1.5 million copies. Jerry assumed it would be his only book. A couple of years later, after reading about putting off the old self and putting on the new self from Ephesians 4, he decided to write The Practice of Godliness—on developing a Christlike character. That book went on to sell over half a million copies, and his 1988 book on Trusting God has sold nearly a million copies.
Jerry served as The Navigators’ Vice President for Corporate Affairs from 1979 to 1994. It was in this season of ministry that Eleanor developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She went to be with the Lord on November 9, 1988, just three weeks after their 25th wedding anniversary. On November 24, 1989, Jerry married Jane Mallot, who had known the Bridges family since the early ’70s.
Jerry’s final position with The Navigator’s was in the area of staff development with the Collegiate Mission. He saw this ministry as developing people, rather than teaching people how to do ministry. In addition to his work with The Navigators, he also maintained an active writing and teaching ministry, traveling the world to instruct and equip pastors and missionaries and other workers through conferences, seminars, and retreats.
Lessons
In 2014, Jerry published a memoir of his life, tracing the providential hand of God through his own story: God Took Me by the Hand: A Story of God’s Unusual Providence (NavPress, 2014). He closes the work with seven spiritual lessons he learned in his six decades of the Christian life:
The Bible is meant to be applied to specific life situations.
All who trust in Christ as Savior are united to Him in a loving way just as the branches are united to the vine.
The pursuit of holiness and godly character is neither by self-effort nor simply letting Christ “live His life through you.”
The sudden understanding of the doctrine of election was a watershed event for me that significantly affected my entire Christian life.
The representative union of Christ and the believer means that all that Christ did in both His perfect obedience and His death for our sins is credited to us.
The gospel is not just for unbelievers in their coming to Christ.
We are dependent on the Holy Spirit to apply the life of Christ to our lives.
His last book, The Blessing of Humility: Walk within Your Calling, will be published this summer by NavPress.
Legacy
One of the great legacies of Jerry Bridges is that he combined—to borrow some titles from his books—the pursuit of holiness and godliness with an emphasis on transforming grace. He believed that trusting God not only involved believing what he had done for us in the past, but that the gospel empowers daily faith and is transformative for all of life.
In 2009 he explained to interviewer Becky Grosenbach the need for this emphasis within the culture of the ministry he had given his life to:
When I came on staff almost all the leaders had come out of the military and we had pretty much a military culture. We were pretty hard core. We were duty driven. The WWII generation. We believed in hard work. We were motivated by saying “this is what you ought to do.” That’s okay, but it doesn’t serve you over the long haul. And so 30 years ago there was the beginning of a change to emphasize transforming grace, a grace-motivated discipleship.
In the days ahead, many will write tributes of this dear saint (see, e.g., this one from his friend, prayer partner, and sometimes co-author Bob Bevington). I would not be able to improve upon the reflections and remembrances of those who knew him better than I did. But I do know that he received from the Lord the ultimate acclamation as he entered into the joy of his Master and received the words we all long to hear, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” There was nothing flashy about Jerry Bridges. He was a humble and unassuming man—strong in spirit, if not in voice or frame. And now we can rejoice with him in his full and final healing as he beholds his beloved Savior face to face. Thank you, God, for this man who helped us see and know you more.
Jerry Bridges wrote more than 20 books over the course of nearly 40 years:
The Pursuit of Holiness (NavPress, 1978)
The Practice of Godliness (NavPress, 1983)
True Fellowship (NavPress, 1985) [later published as The Crisis of Caring (P&R, 1992); finally republished with a major revision as True Community (NavPress, 2012)]
Trusting God (NavPress, 1988)
Transforming Grace (NavPress, 1991)
The Discipline of Grace (NavPress, 1994)
The Joy of Fearing God (Waterbrook, 1997)
I Exalt You, O God (Waterbrook, 2000)
I Give You Glory, O God (Waterbrook, 2002)
The Gospel for Real Life (NavPress, 2002)
The Chase (NavPress, 2003) [taken from Pursuit of Holiness]
Growing Your Faith (NavPress, 2004)
Is God Really in Control? (NavPress, 2006)
The Fruitful Life (NavPress, 2006)
Respectable Sins (NavPress, 2007) [student edition, 2013]
The Great Exchange [co-authored with Bob Bevington] (Crossway, 2007)
Holiness Day by Day (NavPress, 2008) [a devotional drawing from his earlier writing on holiness]
The Bookends of the Christian Life [co-authored with Bob Bevington] (Crossway, 2009)
Who Am I? (Cruciform, 2012)
The Transforming Power of the Gospel (NavPress, 2012)
31 Days Toward Trusting God (NavPress, 2013) [abridged from Trusting God]
God Took Me by the Hand (NavPress, 2014)
The Blessing of Humility: Walk within Your Calling (NavPress, 2016)
For an audio library of Jerry Bridges’ talks, go here.
Funeral
Visitation for Jerry Bridges was held on Thursday, March 10, 2016, from 5 to 8 pm, at Shrine of Remembrance (1730 East Fountain Blvd, Colorado Springs, CO 80910).
The memorial service was held on Friday, March 11, 2016, at 2 pm at Village Seven Presbyterian Church (4055 Nonchalant Circle South, Colorado Springs, CO 80917).
What Does It Mean to Be Real
Nobody likes a fake. Even in our airbrush culture, we despise counterfeits and crave authenticity. Everyone wants to be real. But what does it mean to be real? No one really knows. Or so it seems. Try an experiment. Listen to people talk about what it means to be a Christian. Do you know what you will hear? Lots of competing answers and plenty of confusion. Perhaps you recall when 2012 presidential hopeful, Senator Rick Santorum, claimed that President Barack Obama’s policies were based on “a different theology.” Reporters, of course, pounced on this juicy piece of journalist red meat. “Did Senator Santorum,” they asked, “have the audacity, not of hope, but political incorrectness, to call into question the president’s claim to be a Christian?” When Senator Santorum was pressed, he gave a politically savvy response: “If the president says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian.” End of story. Next question, please. His answer satisfied reporters, and thousands of others following the story. It was as if he said, “To profess faith is to possess faith.” And what could be less objectionable, or more American, than that? But one wonders what Jesus thinks of what Santorum said. More Than Mere Talk Is it enough simply to say  we’re real, or should we be able to see  we’re real? And if so, what should we see? Are there marks of authentic faith we should see in our lives, or in the lives of others? And what about the watching world? What should they see in the lives of real Christians? Now, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, the evangelical church faces huge challenges to its ministry and mission — radical pluralism, aggressive secularism, political polarization, skepticism about religion, revisionist sexual ethics, postmodern conceptions of truth. But perhaps the greatest threat to the church’s witness is one of our own making — an image problem.  Many outside the church view Christians as unchristian  in their attitudes and actions — bigoted, homophobic, hypocritical, materialistic, judgmental, self-serving, overly political. Several years ago, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons showed this in their book Unchristian , which landed like a bombshell on a happy-go-lucky evangelicalism, causing many of us to do some serious soul-searching. The evangelical church’s image problem doesn’t bode well for its future. In fact, the data suggests that evangelical Christianity is declining in North America. Despite the church’s best efforts to appeal to the disillusioned, we continue to see alarming trends. Droves of people, especially from younger generations, are leaving the church and don’t plan to return. This has driven some to even predict the end of evangelicalism (See David Fitch, The End of Evangelicalism? ). One True Soil The reasons for this discouraging state of affairs are complex, not cookie-cutter. But we know one thing is certain: When Christians are confused about what it means to be real, the spiritual decline of the church will follow. In our increasingly post-Christian culture, where confusion about what it means to be real abounds, and where distrust of organized religion has reached an all-time high, the church needs to get real . We must clarify for ourselves, and for a watching world, what it means to live a life of authentic faith. While Christians are confused about what it means to be real, Jesus is not. “Thus you will recognize them by their fruits,” he says (Matthew 7:20). You know you’re real if you bear fruit, he tells us. Fruit is the telltale sign of authentic faith because fruit doesn’t lie. “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush” (Luke 6:43–44). Jesus underscores this point in his famous parable about the sower (Matthew 13:1–23). The parable itself is straightforward. A farmer sows seed in a field, and the seed represents the good news of the kingdom. It is sown on four different kinds of soil, each representing a different response to the message of the kingdom. Simple enough, right? But here’s the punch line: Only one type of soil bears fruit. Counterfeits Exposed The seed sown on the first soil hardly gets started. Satan comes and snatches it away. But what’s even more troubling is the outcome of the seed sown on the second and third soils. Why? Because both respond positively  to the message, at least initially. These seeds appear to take root and begin growing into something real. Yet as the story continues, we learn that neither seed bears fruit. Neither lasts to the end, and thus neither seed is real. Some of the seeds fail to develop roots, and they don’t persevere when life gets hard and their faith is tested. All we see from this seed is a burst of enthusiasm, but no staying power. Perhaps this is someone who got excited about fellowship or forgiveness, but lacked love for Christ. They only have the appearance  of being real. Over time, their faith proved counterfeit. We assume the third seed had a similarly joyful response to the message. Yet this soon dissipates because of revived interest in the things of the world — a career promotion, a new vacation home, saving toward their 401(k) plan. These concerns choke any fledgling faith, and the person falls away. New People with New Lives Why does Jesus tell his disciples this sobering parable? Why such a blunt story about the distinction between authentic and inauthentic responses to his message? Evidently, Jesus doesn’t equate professing faith with possessing faith, as we so often do. Instead, he warns his disciples that only one things matters — bearing fruit Although provocative, I think Jesus’s point is simple. Real is something you can see.  There is a visible difference  between real and not-real Christians. It’s not enough to say  you’re real; you should be able to see  you’re real. Real faith is something you can see. Being real is more than regularly attending church, feeling good about God, or “accepting” Jesus as your Savior; it goes beyond being baptized, receiving Communion, reciting the creed, or joining in church membership. As important as these things are, being real runs deeper than these things. Real Christians are new creatures. Physically, they won’t look different than others, at least not in the way they dress or keep their hair. Yet real Christians are radically changed — they’ve experienced a new birth, received a new heart, and enjoy new desires. Which makes them altogether new people who live new lives. And it shows. If you’re real, it will reveal itself in your life. Real Christians bear the marks of authentic faith in ways that can be seen, heard, and felt. When you know what you’re looking for, you can see the marks of real in their lives — and in your own.
