Biography
Jerry Bridges was born on December 4, 1929, in Tyler, Texas. His early years were marked by loss and poverty. His father died when Jerry was young, and his mother raised him through the hard years that followed. As a boy he went to church and learned some of the right words, but he was not a Christian in any real sense. He later said that for years he thought being a decent person was enough.
He studied engineering at the University of Oklahoma. While he was a student, he heard the gospel clearly and understood for the first time that he could not earn his way to God. He trusted Christ. After college he joined the United States Navy as an officer. In the Navy he met men who belonged to The Navigators, a ministry that trained believers to know Scripture, memorize it and share their faith one person at a time. Their discipline and their love for the Word drew him in. In 1955 he joined the staff of The Navigators and stayed with them for the next fifty-seven years.
He did not take the easy road of public ministry. For many years he worked in administration at the Navigator headquarters at Glen Eyrie in Colorado Springs. He handled the business side of the work, kept the books and carried the practical weight of the mission. He lived quietly and wrote a little when he could. He had no great platform, no huge church and no wish for fame. Men who worked with him described a plain, steady man who showed up early and prayed with a heart that was fixed on the work.
In 1978 he published a small book called The Pursuit of Holiness. It grew out of a message he had given to a group of Navigator staff, and he later said he almost did not write it. The book called believers to take sin seriously and to put it to death by obedience, by the power of the Holy Spirit and by the grace of God. At a time when many in the church spoke easily about grace and grew careless about obedience, Bridges said that holiness was both a gift God works in us and a responsibility that He gives to us. The book sold in great numbers and was translated into many languages.
Other books followed over the next decades. The Practice of Godliness in 1983 took up the character of the believer. Trusting God in 1988 dealt with the sovereignty of God in pain and loss, and it was written by a man who had himself known sorrow. Transforming Grace in 1991 and The Discipline of Grace in 1994 pressed home that the Christian never stands on his own performance, and that he stands on Christ. Respectable Sins in 2007 looked at the sins that many believers excuse, such as pride, anxiety, discontentment, unthankfulness and a critical spirit. He wrote plainly and with a sober tenderness. He told readers that their sin was serious and that Christ was greater.
He was a man who feared getting things wrong. He often spoke of how he struggled in his own heart with things he wrote about and how he returned again and again to the gospel. In his later years his writing kept returning to one truth. The believer is saved by grace and kept by grace, and the same grace that forgives also teaches him to say no to ungodliness. He saw no conflict between resting in Christ and striving to obey Him.
He continued to teach, write and counsel until near the end of his life, often speaking with younger leaders. He died on March 6, 2016, at the age of eighty-six. He left behind no scandal and no great institution, and what he left was a body of books that have shaped the way a generation understands holiness. Many pastors say they first understood both grace and obedience from his pages.
His life shows what a faithful hidden work can do. God used a Navy engineer who kept books, prayed in secret and wrote carefully, and He used him to turn a great number of hearts toward holiness.