“Think of what you could do with the money!”

In The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges says that “the world, or the sinful society in which we live, is characterized by the subtle and relentless pressure it brings to bear upon us to conform to its values and practices. It creeps up on us little by little. What was once unthinkable becomes thinkable, then doable, and finally acceptable to society at large. Sinn becomes respectable, and so Christians finally embrace it.”

It happens just like that sometimes. I had been a Christian for only a few months when a serious temptation arose.

During my senior year in college, I lived with three other guys in an off-campus apartment. We had a constant stream of visitors – friends, girlfriends, fraternity brothers, campus political types (one of my roommates was active politically on campus), law school types (another of my roommates was in law school), even journalism types (I was a copy editor and managing editor of the campus newspaper). It was busy.

One of the people regularly dropping by had been at college for two or three years and was desperately trying to pass freshman English. He had flunked it several times. (You had to know him to understand; English simply wasn’t in his DNA.) During my last semester, as I began to realize I was graduating and needed to find a job, he came to me and suggested a quick summer job – he’d pay me to take freshman English in his name.

I had just become a Christian, but I wouldn’t have liked the idea anyway. It violated all kinds of university rules and regulations. It was unethical. It was immoral.

He was also offering $500. That was in 1973 dollars. For the purpose of perspective, my share of the apartment rent was $62.50 a month.

I said no. He kept trying to convince me. He pointed out I could buy an engagement ring with that $500. I still said no. He came up with other convincing arguments, including a rather innovative one of considering it as a charity. “Just think about it for a few days,” he pleaded.

I kept saying no, but I have to admit I considered it. “Lots of people do it,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how common it is,” he said, promptly reeling off the names of well known people on campus who had done it before.

But I finally said a big final no, and getting a job out-of-state that started the day after my graduation in May clinched it.

He did find someone to take the summer course. And they got caught. Someone who had flunked freshman English four times was simply too well known to the English Department.

My friend engaged in a wearing-down process. He was persuasive and persistent. But what he was asking me to do was flat-out wrong.

The experience did teach me something. I need to be watchful, always watchful. Not only did I not know when temptation might come along, I didn’t know how vulnerable I might be when it happened.

I needed to watch for the temptation, and watch for my own vulnerability.

I still do.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges. To see what others had to say on this chapter, “The Discipline of Watching,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Linnaea Mallette via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Discipline of Watching

There are scenes in my upcoming novel A Light Shining where a character does little except watch. In fact, the book opens that way. He’s observing two main characters, and he will continue observing them throughout the story.

His purpose in watching is to learn their habits and patterns, see where they go, understand how they live their lives, and wait for further instructions. And no, his intentions are not good.

In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges emphasizes the importance of – the discipline – of watching. But the watching, in this case, is directed at ourselves. And Bridges seems to define “watching” as part observation, part understanding and part introspection – with an emphasis on doing and not doing.

And what we have to watch for, Bridges says in this chapter, “The Discipline of Watching,” are “three different sources of temptation: the world, the flesh, and the Devil.”

I know it’s rather passé, even for Christians, to talk about the devil. We like to think we’re so much cooler than to engage in a conversation about Satan without at least sharing a knowing look of “this is how people used to talk about the devil.” The fact is, the Bible is either right or wrong about Satan, and there’s no room for smiling condescension.

And the world. “The world, or the sinful society in which we live, is characterized by the subtle and relentless pressure it brings to bear upon us to conform to its values and practices. It creeps us on us little by little. What was once unthinkable becomes thinkable, then doable, and finally acceptable to society at large. Sin becomes respectable, and so Christians finally embrace it. It is my perception that Christians are no more than five to ten years behind the world in embracing most sinful practices.”

Read that paragraph over again. My ears burned when I read it. That description may have summarized that last 50 years of American Christianity.

But he saves most of his ammunition in this chapter for “the flesh.” That means us. That means, he says, that “our greatest source of temptation dwells within us.” It is our sinful, fallen nature. As long as we live on this planet, we have to deal with the consequences of sin, and especially as those consequences play out in ourselves and our lives.

To summarize what he counsels us to do: know yourself; study your weaknesses; identify areas of strength (and be extremely careful about them – they can be as much our downfall as our weaknesses); look for the little things, “the things that seem so unimportant;” understand what the Apostle Paul meant by Christian “liberty” – it is not a license to do whatever we please; and employ the best defense we have available to us – the study of God’s Word and prayer.

This chapter may not contain the most popular things he has to say in the book, but it might likely be the most important.

Tim Challies at Informing the Reforming is leading a discussion of The Discipline of Grace. To see what he has to say and comments (and links) by others, please visit Tim’s site.