The Bookends of the Christian Life, written by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington, is a well-written book for Christians who are at any stage in their life. Whether you are a mature Christian needing encouragement or a new Christian looking to understand the pillars of the faith for learning how to live as a new creation, this book will provide a blessing.

The purpose of a bookend is to keep the books upright, to prevent them from toppling over or worse, falling on the ground. Authors Jerry and Bob help us to understand the Christian life as a bookshelf with two extremely important book ends. Using the symbol of our Christian life as a set of books, these bookends help us to live so as not to tip over all our books on the floor in catastrophe.

What are these two bookends? They are the righteousness of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. I found this quote from page 23 very encouraging because it is the foundation for us as Christians. “The obedient death of Christ is the very apex of the righteousness of Christ.” Jesus’ obedience to the law (active obedience) and then his death (passive obedience) are the two aspects that make up his perfect righteousness.

Under the first bookend, co-authors Jerry and Bob identify two gospel enemies that cause the Christian to look to his or her own works and ignore the first bookend. These two enemies are self-righteousness and persistent guilt.

When we take our eyes off the righteousness of Christ as the perfect obedience that we cannot attain, we fall into the two enemy pitfalls. On the one hand, if we are over-confident with regard to God's righteousness and we lower the law's requirement for perfect obedience to something we can attain, our lives can be filled with self-righteousness.

This self-righteousness is rooted in the spiritual deception that we have obeyed God's law satisfactorily. On the other hand, when a Christian endeavors to keep the law's requirement for perfect obedience and rightly understands his or her inability, the believer will experience persistent guilt and failure for not doing enough.

Because God's Law is written on the conscience, it judges not only the behavior, but the motives of the heart. If the believer is honest, he or she will persistently be riddled and plagued with guilt for falling short of the law's demands.

When we look to ourselves for righteousness, we will find that our best books are beat up with tattered pages because of our sin. Our books of works that make up our bookshelf are full of good intentions but we fall short. As Romans 3:10 states, “as it is written: None is righteous, no, not one...”.

The second bookend, the power of the Holy Spirit, includes a gospel enemy as well. This gospel enemy is titled, self-reliance. Today’s culture teaches us that we can be anything we want, whoever we want, wherever we want, and all we need to do is to rely on ourselves.

Many people let this mentality flow into their Christian lives in the form of just trying to do everything on their own power. They are the ones in control. The problem is that we can’t live the Christian life on our own. We are bound in our sinful nature and when we try to do things on our own we eventually fail.

We need the Holy Spirit to guide us and to give us the strength to persevere, to remind us that Jesus is our righteousness and we should rest in him, which brings us full circle to the first bookend.

This book doesn’t necessarily address covenant theology, but I want to make the connection to it. Covenant Theology helps us to understand the law-gospel distinction of what God requires (law) and that which he provides (gospel). This distinction helps us to see our need for a savior because of our guilt, and also shows us our great need for a savior because God requires perfect, perpetual and personal obedience to his law.

Jesus is the perfect savior and it is through his perfect obedience (active and passive) that we have the imputed righteousness of Christ. As J Gresham Machen stated, “I’m so thankful for active obedience of Christ: no hope without it.”