Top 100 Tullian Tchividjian Quotes
#1. The tragic irony in all of this is that when we focus so strongly on our need to get better, we actually get worse.
Tullian Tchividjian
#2. Christianity is in no way a stoic faith. It fundamentally rejects the "stiff upper lip" school of thought.
Tullian Tchividjian
#3. Whatever we may mean by 'Christian growth,' it is ultimately this: less faith in me, more faith in God.
Tullian Tchividjian
#4. People who know they are not good make the best messengers of grace because they are desperately aware of their own need for it.
Tullian Tchividjian
#5. I agree we have enough books that attempt to explain why God allows suffering, presumably in a way that lets God off the hook. And while much smarter men than I have constructed elaborate systems in this pursuit, they are by definition exercises in speculation.
Tullian Tchividjian
#8. I was a surfer so I hung out with people who were surfers and made fun of people who weren't surfers and I listened to surf music and made fun of people who didn't listen to surfer music.
Tullian Tchividjian
#9. The grace of God sets us free from a life of perfection, performing, and pretending.
Tullian Tchividjian
#10. What I need and long for most has come from outside of me in the person of Jesus.
Tullian Tchividjian
#11. The gospel declares, because of Christ's finished work for you, you already have all the approval, all the security, all the love, all the worth, and all the rescue you long for and that you desperately look for in a thousand places, all of which are infinitely smaller than Jesus.
Tullian Tchividjian
#12. There is no better news than that the God who makes the demand for perfection also meets the demand for perfection on our behalf.
Tullian Tchividjian
#14. If people knew the REAL us, they would run. God knows, stays, and loves.
Tullian Tchividjian
#15. The emphasis of the Bible is on the work of the Redeemer, not on the work of the redeemed.
Tullian Tchividjian
#16. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#17. Our minds are affected by sin. Our hearts are affected by sin. Our wills are affected by sin. Our bodies are affected by sin.
Tullian Tchividjian
#18. Every time we sin in thought, word, or deed, we're essentially saying in that moment that, "I don't need you God. I don't want you God. I like my way better than your way."
Tullian Tchividjian
#19. The good news of Jesus Christ is that, although the law comes and destroys us, the Son of God comes and resurrects us. Our death is overturned by Christ's death. Our life is created by Christ's life.
Tullian Tchividjian
#21. God wants every local church to be the first place people think to go when they've really messed up ... not the last.
Tullian Tchividjian
#22. Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you've been holding on to more dearly than Him.
Tullian Tchividjian
#24. The hub of Christianity is not "do something for Jesus." The hub of Christianity is "Jesus has done everything for you".
Tullian Tchividjian
#25. God knows us in all our conniving, self-centered, and jealousy-laden splendor and loves us anyway.
Tullian Tchividjian
#26. Self-righteousness is the fruit of a low view of God's law and a lite view of your own sin.
Tullian Tchividjian
#27. Grace could not have done it's curing work if the law had not first done its crushing work.
Tullian Tchividjian
#28. The gospel is good news to those who know they don't measure up. It's offensive to those who think they do.
Tullian Tchividjian
#29. First, we need to understand theologically that the gospel doesn't just ignite the Christian life, but it's also the fuel that keeps Christians going and growing every day.
Tullian Tchividjian
#30. We tend to think of the gospel as God's program to make bad people good, not dead people alive.
Tullian Tchividjian
#32. Even one who has been to God a million times with the same problem need not fear exhausting the grace of God.
Tullian Tchividjian
#33. My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace.
Tullian Tchividjian
#34. Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.
Tullian Tchividjian
#35. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#36. Grace frees you to be honest about what you've always known to be true about yourself: that you're weaker & more afraid than you want to be.
Tullian Tchividjian
#37. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#38. As J. C. Kromsigt said, The good seed cannot flourish when it is repeatedly dug up for the purpose of examining its growth.
Tullian Tchividjian
#39. When it comes to understanding and appreciating grace, our biggest problem is our so-called goodness ... not our self-perceived badness.
Tullian Tchividjian
#40. The gospel doesn't just free you from what other people think about you, it frees you from what you think about yourself.
Tullian Tchividjian
#41. Walking with God doesn't lead to God's favor; God's favor leads to walking with God.
Tullian Tchividjian
#42. Jesus plus nothing equals everything - and everything minus Jesus equals nothing.
Tullian Tchividjian
#44. Gospel only sounds good to a heart that knows it is bad. For people who think they're good, grace is frustrating. For people who know they're not, grace is freeing.
Tullian Tchividjian
#45. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#46. because Jesus was strong for me, I was free to be weak; because Jesus won for me, I was free to lose; because Jesus was someone, I was free to be no one; because Jesus was extraordinary, I was free to be ordinary; because Jesus succeeded for me, I was free to fail.
Tullian Tchividjian
#47. Grace is the most dangerous, expectation-wre cking, smile-creating, counterintuitiv e reality there is.
Tullian Tchividjian
#48. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#49. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#50. The passive righteousness of faith frees me from passing final judgment on myself.
Tullian Tchividjian
#51. The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!
Tullian Tchividjian
#52. I became frustrated with myself for not being as sturdy and unquestioning as I knew a man in my position should be.
Tullian Tchividjian
#53. Everything is not all right. It's not helpful, but insulting, to say that it is. What we can hope for is that it will be all right one day.
Tullian Tchividjian
#54. I think for far too long the Church has concluded that Christians don't need the gospel, it's simple what non-Christian people need in order to be saved.
Tullian Tchividjian
#55. To flee from God is to rise against God. It is stand-up, straight-out, in-your-face defiance against the One to whom we owe all loyalty and love. It means insisting that our way of doing things is better than God's way.
Tullian Tchividjian
#56. In his law-fulfilling life, curse-bearing death, and death-defeating resurrection, Jesus has entirely accomplished for sinners what sinners could never in the least do for themselves. The banner under which the Christian lives reads, It is finished.
Tullian Tchividjian
#57. We are broken people living in a broken world with other broken people. We all need grace.
Tullian Tchividjian
#58. In Christ, we are carried directly to heaven, no work necessary on our part.
Tullian Tchividjian
#59. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#60. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#62. In those moments when I'm obsessively counting my sins against me, it is good news to remember that God has counted my sins against Christ.
Tullian Tchividjian
#63. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#64. Because Jesus paid it all, we are free from the need to do it all. Our identity, worth, and value, are not anchored in what we can accomplish but in what Jesus accomplished for us.
Tullian Tchividjian
#65. If we're not reaching the same people Jesus reached, then we're not preaching the same message Jesus preached.
Tullian Tchividjian
#66. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#68. To the extent that we ignore (or run from) our own sinfulness, we will be unable to care for other sinners. We will be unable to extend forgiveness to others until we are honest about the extent to which we are forgiven.
Tullian Tchividjian
#69. Real change does not and cannot come independently of the gospel, which is the good news that even though we're more defective and lost than we ever imagined, we can be more accepted and loved than we ever dared hope, because Jesus Christ lived, died, and rose again for sinners like you and
Tullian Tchividjian
#70. Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace.
Tullian Tchividjian
#71. An institution theoretically devoted to providing comfort to those in need (the church) is in trouble because it has embraced the same pressure cooker we find everywhere else.
Tullian Tchividjian
#72. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#73. When we succumb to temptation, we are failing to believe in that moment that everything we need, in Christ we already have.
Tullian Tchividjian
#74. We don't need answers and explanations as much as we need God's presence in and through the suffering.
Tullian Tchividjian
#75. What kind of person should you be to someone who has fallen? The kind of person you will run to when you fall.
Tullian Tchividjian
#76. The Gospel is not ultimately a defense from pain, it is the message of God's rescue through pain. In fact, it allows us to drop our defenses, to escape not from pain but from the prison of "How" and "Why" to the freedom of "Who?"
Tullian Tchividjian
#77. In short, Christmas is God's answer to the slavery of self-salvation. Jesus came to liberate us from the pressure of having to fix ourselves, find ourselves, and free ourselves.
Tullian Tchividjian
#78. The smaller you get - the smaller life makes you - the easier it is to see the grandeur of grace. While I am far more incapable than I may have initially thought, God is infinitely more capable than I ever hoped.
Tullian Tchividjian
#79. The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn't make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn't produce morality; rather, it produces immorality.
Tullian Tchividjian
#80. The Gospel declares that our guilt has been atoned for, the law has been fulfilled. So we don't need to live under the burden of trying to appease the judgment we feel.
Tullian Tchividjian
#81. We find it is when we feel no one could possibly love us that we are most eager for a God who says, I came to love the unlovable.
Tullian Tchividjian
#82. I was always in places where I was widely accepted, approved and loved and I was finally in a place where people did not approve of me, did not accept me and did not love me. It was killing me.
Tullian Tchividjian
#83. The Gospel announces that Jesus came to acquit the guilty. He came to judge and be judged in our place. Christ came to satisfy the deep judgment against us once and for all so that we could be free from the judgement of God, others, and ourselves.
Tullian Tchividjian
#84. We are deeply conditioned against unconditionality because we've been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment always precedes acceptance, that achievement always precedes approval.
Tullian Tchividjian
#85. One surefire way to know you're starting to grasp this message of grace is when you're finally able to admit that you're not the good guy - that you never were and apart from grace never will be.
Tullian Tchividjian
#86. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#87. God did not rescue me out of the pain, He rescued me through the pain!
Tullian Tchividjian
#88. A preacher who doesn't believe he's that bad will attract people who don't think they're that bad. And that's bad.
Tullian Tchividjian
#89. The bad news that we are all guilty is met with the best news that God loves and forgives guilty people.
Tullian Tchividjian
#90. Paul doesn't pray that the Colossians will find something they don't have; rather he prays they'll grow in their awareness and understanding of what they already have.
Tullian Tchividjian
#91. The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.
Tullian Tchividjian
#92. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#93. I was afraid that if I surrendered my life over to God, God would tell me not to do those things that I desperately wanted to do.
Tullian Tchividjian
#94. Legalism breeds a sense of entitlement that turns us into complainers.
Tullian Tchividjian
#95. The focus of the Christian faith is not our morality; it is Jesus, who died for our immorality.
Tullian Tchividjian
#96. I'm not saying the Christian life is effortless; the real question is Where are we focusing our efforts? Are we working hard to perform? Or are we working hard to rest in Christ's performance for us?
Tullian Tchividjian
#97. Thankfully, while our self-righteousness reaches far, God's grace reaches farther.
Tullian Tchividjian
#98. There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.
Tullian Tchividjian
#99. The Adam story is really about the essence of sin: our substituting ourselves for God. The Jesus story is really about the essence of salvation: God substituting Himself for us.
Tullian Tchividjian
#100. The law demands that we do it all; the gospel declares that Jesus paid it all.
Tullian Tchividjian
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