One year ago tomorrow, Jerry Bridges died at the age of 86. He worked with the Navigators for sixty years and was author of more than twenty books, including the modern classics The Pursuit of Holiness and The Discipline of Grace.

Jerry was a friend of John Piper and Desiring God, and we had the privilege of hosting him twice in recent years. The 12-minute video above is a previously unreleased episode of the podcast Theology Refresh, made available here for the first time on the first anniversary of his death.

Dependent Discipline

Jerry loved to stress the twofold realities at work in Christian perseverance: God preserves us, and we participate in his preservation. God keeps us by his Spirit, and will not let us go, and he does so through means. Jerry’s term for it was “dependent discipline.” When we asked him to unpack some of the practical means he had found most helpful in his eighty-plus years, he pointed first to daily “time alone with God” and the practice of taking Scripture to heart in Bible memory.

Jerry also said he sought to remind himself regularly that he was “still a practicing sinner and liable to temptation.” He remembers hearing a preacher admit that he’d concluded that there’s no sin he couldn’t commit given the right set of circumstances. Jerry could identify.

Well Done, Good and Faithful

In this episode, Jerry shares one of his go-to verses in life — the last part of Hebrews 13:5: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” It’s a powerful text to reflect on here at the one-year anniversary of Jerry’s death.

“When I stand before God,” he says in the interview, “I want to hear him say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’”