Pursuit of Holiness

Brandon Murray

Dr. Turner

INT-101-02

4 December 2014

The Pursuit of Holiness

The Pursuit of Holiness, by Jerry Bridges, was an interesting and thought provoking book. Not only did it make me think, but it also made me dig deeper to get to know Christ on a new level. Christ commands us to “be holy, for I am holy” in 1 Peter 1:16. Just because this command is stated simply, does not mean that it is easy to figure out. Holiness is not something that we, as living breathing people, can achieve. However, we are to live our lives in constant pursuit of this holiness even though we know that it can never be attained. Although holiness is unattainable, it is “not to say God doesn’t want us to experience victory, but rather to emphasize that victory as a byproduct of obedience” (Bridges 17). He tells us to be holy, so that we as Christians always have a goal to continuously attempt to achieve. In this book, I learned to understand holiness more deeply and how to live my life in constant pursuit of it.

Bridges came up with a difficult definition of holiness. He stated that to “be holy is to be morally blameless (15). We can never achieve this sense of being morally blameless because of two problems. The first problem is that instead of our attitude toward sin being Christ-centered it is more self-centered. We are more worried about personally overcoming sin, than thinking about how much sin can actually grieve God. God wants us to focus on being obedient to Him and have our focus totally towards Him. Our focus on sin should be completely different than how we typically look at it. If we were in constant unity with God, we would not want to sin because we would understand how much it hurts Him to see His children falling astray. This is such a difficult concept for us as humans to grasp because of our sinful nature.

The second problem that we would have to overcome is that “we have misunderstood ‘living by faith’ to mean that no effort at holiness is required on...