Whatever Happened to Sin?

That's the headline on the back cover of Jerry Bridges' book Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate. Often, it seems, Christians focus on the "big" sins of our time - abortion, crime, divorce for example - and neglected or forgotten about our own "smaller" personal sins. In his book, Bridges "addresses clusters of 'acceptable' sins that we tend to tolerate in ourselves - such as jealousy, anger, pride, unthankfulness, and judgmentalism." He does so not from an ivory tower or pedestal, but from "the trenches of his own battles with sin."

We are currently recruiting others to join us for our latest reading project, in which we will go through Bridges' book together. We are planning on reading two chapters each week, and posting a discussion/summary of each chapter on this blog. If you'd like to read along, discuss along, or even just read the posts, please join us! We are planning to start reading the week of March 31.

You can pick up a copy of the book here or here, or if you like supporting the bigger retailers, here. You can also read a good review of the book here. (Note: I nearly bought the discussion guide for this book accidentally - you can distinguish them because the guide has a tan cover and the book itself is pictured above).

After an introduction on the role of the gospel in our lives, Bridges devotes the rest of the book to confronting these "respectable sins." They include:
-Ungodliness
-Anxiety and Frustration
-Discontentment
-Unthankfulness
-Pride
-Selfishness
-Lack of Self-Control
-Impatience and Irritability
-Anger
-The Weeds of Anger
-Judgmentalism
-Envy, Jealousy, and Related Sins
-Sins of the Tongue
-Worldliness

May this be a time of giving glory to God, being strengthened in our faith by the Holy Spirit, and fellowshipping with fellow believers.