Tullian Tchividjian Quotes

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people's.

Submitting self to God is the only real freedom - because the deepest slavery is self-dependence, self-reliance. When you live your life believing that everything (family, finances, relationships, career) depends primarily on you, you're enslaved to your strengths and weaknesses. You're trying to be your own savior. Freedom comes when we start trusting in God's abilities and wisdom instead of our own. Real life begins when we transfer our trust from our own efforts to the efforts of Christ.

If you look at the gospel, it just doesn't break things apart. The gospel brings things together. One of the great demonstration of the gospel's power is reconciliation.

We are not responsible for finding the right formula to combat or unlock our suffering.

At some level, every relationship is assaulted by an aroma of judgment - this sense that we will never measure up to the expectations and demands of another.

Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make good people good; it makes dead people alive. That's the difference between the gospel of Jesus Christ and every other world religion. All the others exhort their followers to save themselves by being good, by conforming their lives to whatever their worshiped deity is. But the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.

It's better to feel sorry for doing something bad than to feel superior for doing something good.

Don't get me wrong - what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.

As long as I am focusing on the faults of others, then I don't have to face my own.

The deepest cry of the human heart is to be loved without condition, no matter what. The gospel of grace announces that you are.

The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.

Contrary to what I had thought, I did not need easing circumstances, relief from difficulty, and distance from pain in order to be free. I was learning that the freedom Jesus secured for me is not freedom from pain and suffering here and now. Rather, it's freedom from bitterness, anger, fear, resentment, self-pity, offense, and hopelessness in the crucible of present pain and suffering; it is freedom from my burdensome sense of "I deserve better," the encumbrance of entitlement. I was realizing that only the gospel can free us from the enslaving pressure to defend ourselves. That's real freedom - God-sized freedom!

When we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better, that is what it means to get better!

Unfulfilled dreams, ongoing relational tension, the loss of friendships, a hard marriage, rebellious teenagers, the death of loved ones, remaining sinful patterns - whatever it is for you - live long enough, lose enough, suffer enough, and the idealism of youth fades, leaving behind the reality of life in a broken world as a broken person.

Sin isn't only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God.

Our performancism leads to pride when we succeed and to despair when we fail.

God loves us too much to leave us in the hell of unhappiness that comes from trying to do his job. Into the slavish misery of our ladder-defined lives, God condescends.

Luther also said that one of our biggest problems was our own "good" works. They obscure our need for a Savior. "At the cross," said Gerhard Forde, "God has stormed the last bastion of the self, the last presumption that you were really going to do something for him." Genuine freedom awaits all who stop trusting in their own work and start trusting in Christ's work.

Long-term, gospel-motivate d obedience can only come from the grace of what Jesus has already done, not the guilt of what we must do.

The gospel frees you from the pressure of having to fix people: your worth is located in Christ, not in their transformation.

We don't need answers and explanations as much as we need God's presence in and through the suffering.

God is the one to be praised, not our transformation.

The hub of Christianity is not "do something for Jesus." The hub of Christianity is "Jesus has done everything for you".

God attaches no strings to His love. None. His love for us does not depend on our loveliness. It goes one way. As far as our sin may extend, the grace of our Father extends further.

The Gospel frees us to speak honestly about the reality of pain, confident that nothing is riding on our ability to cope with or fend off suffering.

He knows that the only way to break the cycle of retribution and oppression and heartbreak is to demolish the ladder of deserving altogether.

Real, pure, unadulterated freedom happens when the resources of the gospel smash any sense of need to secure for myself anything beyond what Christ has already secured for me.

God's chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be Himself for you.

God's ability to clean things up is infinitely greater than our ability to mess things up.

Today, remember that you're worse than you think you are. But remember, also, that God's gift of righteousness to you is greater than you could ever imagine.

Passive righteousness tells us that God does not need our good works. Active righteousness tells us that our neighbor does. The aim and direction of good works are horizontal, not vertical.

When you don't know where you fit inside the home and you're young and you're desperate to fit in somewhere, I'd figured where I would fit outside the home. So I made some obviously bad decisions about who I hung out with and the things that I did.

There's absolutely no way you can feel the freedom to embarrass and humiliate yourself unless you have finally recognized that your identity is in someone other than yourself.

Also, unless you critique moralism, many irreligious people won't know the difference between moralism and what you're offering. The way to get antinomians to move away from lawlessness is to distinguish the gospel from legalism. Why? Because modern and post-modern people have been rejecting Christianity for years thinking that it was indistinguishable from moralism. Non-Christians will always automatically hear gospel presentations as appeals to become moral and religious, unless in your preaching you use the good news of grace to deconstruct legalism. Only if you show them there's a difference - that what they really rejected wasn't real Christianity at all - will they even begin to consider Christianity.2

Christianity is not "Jesus is our example." Christianity is "Jesus is our substitute."

The Bible is not a witness to the best people making it up to God; it's a witness to God making it down to the worst people. Far from being a book full of moral heroes whom we are commanded to emulate, what we discover is that the so-called heroes in the Bible are not really heroes at all. They fall and fail; they make huge mistakes; they get afraid; they're selfish, deceptive, egotistical, and unreliable. The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness.

Even political insiders recognize that years of political effort on behalf of Evangelical Christians have generated little cultural gain.

There's just as much sin inside the church as outside.

If we're not reaching the same people Jesus reached, then we're not preaching the same message Jesus preached.

The great hope we find in the Christian faith is that God is not us.

We are all both victims and victimizers. Just as everyone suffers, no one is innocent of causing suffering themselves.

Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It's one-way love.

The grace of God sets us free from a life of perfection, performing, and pretending.

I became frustrated with myself for not being as sturdy and unquestioning as I knew a man in my position should be.

Christian growth does not involve becoming stronger and stronger, more and more competent every day. It involves becoming more and more aware of how weak and incompetent we are and how strong and competent Jesus was and continues to be for us.

Christianity is founded on, and grounded in, a cross - not a ladder.

For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God's chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be Himself for you. And in the end, what we discover is that this really is enough.

Sometimes God has to remind you that you're weak so that you can be set free from your "self-sufficiency."

Grace always runs downhill, meeting us at the bottom, not the top.

Like Adam and Eve, each time we sin we're choosing to be our own deity. We're placing ultimate trust in ourselves, not in our Creator and Savior and Lord.

I wish I could say that everything I do is for God's glory but I can't. And neither can you. What I can say is Jesus' blood covers all my efforts to glorify myself.

The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves - a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is the place of desperation, which is the place of faith, which is the place of freedom.

If we read the Bible asking first, 'What would Jesus do?' instead of asking 'What has Jesus done,' we'll miss the good news that alone can set us free.

An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought. . . .

The Bible makes it clear that self-righteousness is the premier enemy of the Gospel.

The overwhelming emphasis of contemporary Christianity: "Just do it." The overwhelming emphasis of Biblical Christianity: "It is finished"

When the condemning weight of the law is removed, people don't react with wild sin, as we might expect; they relax in their new freedom.

The people who have taught me the most about grace are those who have blown it so bad that they know how much they need it.

The Christian life has been nothing more and nothing less than a daily dependence on and a rediscovery of God's grace.

Spiritual growth is not about climbing a mountain, getting better, and therefore needing Christ less and less. Spiritual growth is about discovering more and bigger caverns of need into which more and more of Christ's grace can flow.

Grace loves without reference to what may or may not happen-which is precisely why such incredible things do happen!

I wish I could say I do everything for God's glory. I can't. Neither can you. What I can say is Jesus' blood covers all my efforts to glorify myself. I wish I could say Jesus fully satisfies me. I can't. Neither can you. What I can say is Jesus fully satisfied God for me.

The heart of sanctification is the life which feeds on justification.

in God's city, the inhabitants love people and walk on gold, while in man's city, the inhabitants love gold and walk on people.

Information is seldom enough to heal a wounded heart.

What I'm most deeply grateful for is that God's love for us, approval of us, and commitment to us does not ride on our resolve but on Jesus's resolve for us. The gospel is the good news announcing Jesus's infallible devotion to us despite our inconsistent devotion to Him. The gospel is not a command to hang on to Jesus; it's a promise that no matter how weak and unsuccessful our faith and efforts may be, God is always holding on to us.

Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can't make it on our own, that we need help, that we're broken.

There are a still lot of people in today's church who can easily identify the idolatry outside the church and are pretty proud of the fact that they are not like them. And yet, we are far too slow to recognize the idolatry inside the church and more painfully, the idolatry inside our hearts.

I never realized how much I've become dependent on human approval until God took it away. I didn't even realize that I was in a self-made prison of human approval and human acceptance. Most of the prisons we live in we are not conscious of. God showed me Jesus plus nothing equals everything. And everything minus Jesus equals nothing. That set me free.

The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness. The overwhelming focus of the Bible is not the work of the redeemed but the work of the Redeemer. Which means that the Bible is not first a recipe for Christian living but a revelation book of Jesus who is the answer to our un-Christian living.

When I came to see that Christian growth doesn't happen by working hard to get something you don't have, but rather it happens by working hard to live in the reality of what you already have, this gospel insight radically transformed my life.

The truth, whether we admit it or not, is that grace scares us to death. It scares us primarily because it wrestles control and manageability out of our hands - introducing chaos and freedom.

Since Genesis 3 we have been addicted to setting our sights on something, someone, smaller than Jesus.

The good news is that God's "I love you" is proclaimed specifically to those who don't deserve it. In other words, we don't need a makeover to be loved by God. God's love is not fake or forced; it is an "I love you" that says, "I forgive you." God's "I love you" is based on the deserving of another. "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). On the cross, Christ's righteousness was given to us and our sin was laid upon Him. God's "I love you," aimed at His perfect Son, is ours forever.

In Christ, we are carried directly to heaven, no work necessary on our part.

There's no power in the world like the power of grace.

Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good. The heart of the Christian faith is Good News, not good advice, good technique, or good behavior. Too many people have walked away from the church, not because they're walking away from Jesus, but because the church has walked away from Jesus.

I showed him how the gospel frees us from this obsessive pressure to perform, this slavish demand to "become." I showed him how the gospel declares that in Christ "we already are.

Grace is the most dangerous, expectation-wre cking, smile-creating, counterintuitiv e reality there is.

The only thing that frees you from the need to pretend in order to make people believe you are something when you are actually not is the gospel because the gospel tells you that identity, my meaning, my security, and all of those things are in Christ.

Our minds are affected by sin. Our hearts are affected by sin. Our wills are affected by sin. Our bodies are affected by sin.

Samson's story shows us a profound truth of Christianity: ours is a progress from strength to weakness, not weakness to strength. It is when Samson is at his weakest that he is most powerfully used. Samson ends his life blind and in chains. He is weak. So are we. God promises, in His Son, to perfect His power in our powerlessness (2 Cor. 12:9). So we can own our weakness. We'll find God's strength in it.

When we imply that our works are for God and not our neighbor, we perpetuate the idea that God's love for us is dependent on what we do instead of on what Christ has done.

I never had an intellectual struggle with the Bible, with the gospel, with the claims of Christ.

I was learning the hard way that the gospel alone can free us from our addiction to being liked - that Jesus measured up for us so that we wouldn't have to live under the enslaving pressure of measuring up for others.

My failure to lay aside the sin that so easily entangles is the direct result of my refusal to die to my natural proclivity toward attaining my own freedom, meaning, value, worth, and righteousness - not believing that, by virtue of my Spirit - wrought union with Christ, everything I need, I already possess.

We may not ever fully understand why God allows the suffering that devastates our lives. We may not ever find the right answers to how we'll dig ourselves out.

The fact is, real life is long on law and short on grace - the

Whatever we may mean by 'Christian growth,' it is ultimately this: less faith in me, more faith in God.

Living for anything else besides God leads to death, not freedom.

When the Christian faith becomes defined by who we are and what we do and not by who Christ is and what he did for us, we miss the gospel - and we, ironically, become more disobedient.

If your theological convictions are not producing a deeper love for others, then it's time to rethink some stuff.

One primary enemy of the Gospel - legalism - comes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they're told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this "front-door legalism"). Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this "back-door legalism").

Grace doesn't lead us into destructive behavior. Sin does. And grace is the only remedy for sin. The kindness of God leads to repentance.

Remember on your best day that Jesus had to die for you. Remember on your worst day that he did.

Our deepest fear is judgment. Our deepest longing is love. The gospel of grace removes the one and provides the other.

A biblical understanding of the Christian life is not 'let go and let God,' it's 'trust God and get going.'

The gospel doesn't make bad people good; it makes dead people alive.

There's nothing like suffering to remind us how not in control we actually are, how little power we ultimately have, and how much we ultimately need God.