Tullian Tchividjian Quotes

Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It’s dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out.

Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace.

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

The deepest fear we have, ‘the fear beneath all fears,’ is the fear of not measuring up, the fear of judgment. It’s this fear that creates the stress and depression of everyday life.

When it comes to engaging and influencing culture, too many Christians think too highly of political activism.

Jesus is not the man at the top of the stairs; He is the man at the bottom, the friend of sinners, the savior of those in need of one. Which is all of us, all of the time.

My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace.

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.

What is indisputable is the fact that unbelief is the force that gives birth to all of our bad behavior and every moral failure. It is the root.

The Bible is plain that God requires moral perfection. It tells us unambiguously that God is holy and therefore cannot tolerate any hint of unholiness.

Christianity affirms that Jesus severed the link between suffering and deserving once for all on Calvary. God put the ledgers away and settled the accounts.

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.

Justification and sanctification are both God’s work, and while they can and must be distinguished, the Bible won’t let us separate them. Both are gifts of our union with Christ, and within this double-blessing, justification is the root of sanctification and sanctification is the fruit of justification.

The gospel announces that God doesn’t relate to us based on our feats for Jesus, but Jesus’ feats for us.

To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible’s radically disproportionate focus on God’s saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ.

Whether this was explicitly taught or implicitly caught, I grew up with the impression that when it comes to the Christian life, justification was step one and sanctification was step two and that once we get to step two there’s no reason to revisit step one.

Assurance never comes from looking at ourselves. It only comes as a consequence of looking to Christ.

In ‘Surprised by Grace: God’s Relentless Pursuit of Rebels,’ I retell the story of Jonah and show how Jonah was just as much in need of God’s grace as the sailors and the Ninevites.

Performancism is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly with our performance and accomplishments.

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

Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ’s accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his victory, not yours.

Sanctification consists of the daily realization that in Christ we have died, and in Christ we have been raised.

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.

God has hardwired me to thoroughly enjoy and be sharpened by good and friendly theological discussion about the gospel.

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.

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

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

God wants to free us from ourselves, and there’s nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.

Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.

There is a strange impulse in many to protect Bible characters and to use them as inspiration… as if sanctification happens as a result of emulation.

A religious approach to marriage is the idea that if we work hard enough at something, we can earn the acceptance, approval, and life we think we deserve because of our obedient performance.

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.

As Luke 24 shows, it’s possible to read the Bible, study the Bible, and memorize large portions of the Bible, while missing the whole point of the Bible.

Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life doesn’t have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves, validate ourselves.

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.