Top 100 Tullian Tchividjian Quotes
#1. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#2. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#3. We tend to think of the gospel as God's program to make bad people good, not dead people alive.
Tullian Tchividjian
#4. If your theological convictions are not producing a deeper love for others, then it's time to rethink some stuff.
Tullian Tchividjian
#5. An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion.
Tullian Tchividjian
#6. 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
#7. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#8. 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
#10. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#11. The biggest lie about grace that Satan wants the church to buy is the idea that it's dangerous and therefore needs to be kept in check.
Tullian Tchividjian
#12. Here's one way I can know that I've forgotten the gospel of grace: when your sin bothers me more than my sin.
Tullian Tchividjian
#13. The truth is that when it comes to suffering, if we do not go to our graves in confusion, we will not go to our graves trusting. Explanations are a substitute for trust.
Tullian Tchividjian
#14. If any kind of obedience, regardless of what motivates it, is what God is after, He would have showcased the Pharisees and exhorted all of us to follow their lead, to imitate them. But He didn't. Jesus called them 'whitewashed tombs'
clean on the outside, dead on the inside.
Tullian Tchividjian
#15. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#16. Grace could not have done it's curing work if the law had not first done its crushing work.
Tullian Tchividjian
#17. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#18. Self-righteousness is the fruit of a low view of God's law and a lite view of your own sin.
Tullian Tchividjian
#19. God knows us in all our conniving, self-centered, and jealousy-laden splendor and loves us anyway.
Tullian Tchividjian
#20. Unfortunately, some Christians are guilty of throwing out an equivalent sentiment when they play the "God is sovereign" card as a way to trump every evil that comes your way.
Tullian Tchividjian
#21. Hollywood is not known as a culture of grace. Dog-eat-dog is more like it. People love you one day and hate you the next. Personal value is very much attached to box office revenues and the unpredictable and often cruel winds of fashion.
Tullian Tchividjian
#22. The hub of Christianity is not "do something for Jesus." The hub of Christianity is "Jesus has done everything for you".
Tullian Tchividjian
#24. Being the middle child, I couldn't figure out where I fit in the home. I couldn't figure out whether I was the youngest of the older three or the oldest of the younger three.
Tullian Tchividjian
#25. A person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their arms grow back may be the best description I've ever read of what it feels like for a depressed person to try to cheer herself up. Yet this description applies to any kind of suffering that resists our attempts to address it.
Tullian Tchividjian
#26. Believing again and again the gospel of God's free justifying grace every day is the hard work we're called to.
Tullian Tchividjian
#27. I had turned personal validation into my primary source of meaning and value, so that without it I was miserable and depressed.
Tullian Tchividjian
#28. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#29. I think it's super important for the church itself to rediscover the gospel.
Tullian Tchividjian
#30. 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
#32. The gospel sets us free to become the romantic leaders of our marriages without fright or hesitation. Because we have been forever wooed by Jesus, we are now free to forever woo our wives.
Tullian Tchividjian
#33. Once God saves us He doesn't move us beyond the gospel, but He moves us more deeply into the gospel.
Tullian Tchividjian
#34. 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
#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. Matthew Henry wrote, "The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks."2
Tullian Tchividjian
#37. Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.
Tullian Tchividjian
#38. The only 'if' the Gospel knows is this: 'if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.' (1 John 2:1)
Tullian Tchividjian
#40. You can be sure that your deepest desires reveal important truths about your spiritual condition.
Tullian Tchividjian
#41. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#42. Nineveh represented the sin center of the world. Everything godless happened there; by all accounts its people were perverse, sadistic, and evil. The very fact that Jonah was even sent to such a place reveals that God's capacity to forgive is greater than our capacity to sin.
Tullian Tchividjian
#43. 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
#44. Even one who has been to God a million times with the same problem need not fear exhausting the grace of God.
Tullian Tchividjian
#45. The best evangelists, the best preachers, the best teachers are desperate people.
Tullian Tchividjian
#46. As long as we are seeking our worth in anything and everything but the gospel of God's grace, we will keep seeking and keep wearing ourselves out in the process. But in Christ's finished work is ultimate and eternal validation. And ultimate and eternal rest.
Tullian Tchividjian
#47. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#48. The gospel alone liberates you to live a life of scandalous generosity, unrestrained sacrifice, uncommon valor, and unbounded courage.
Tullian Tchividjian
#49. We are not responsible for finding the right formula to combat or unlock our suffering.
Tullian Tchividjian
#52. God has hardwired me to thoroughly enjoy and be sharpened by good and friendly theological discussion about the gospel.
Tullian Tchividjian
#53. Job's unraveling wasn't wrong or sinful; rather, it was emotionally realistic.
Tullian Tchividjian
#54. The grace of God sets us free from a life of perfection, performing, and pretending.
Tullian Tchividjian
#55. 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
#56. My job is not to show my children that I'm the man, but to show them that Christ is the man.
Tullian Tchividjian
#57. A biblical understanding of the Christian life is not 'let go and let God,' it's 'trust God and get going.'
Tullian Tchividjian
#58. When we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better, that is what it means to get better!
Tullian Tchividjian
#59. Today, and forever, remember that your peace is not dependent on anything but the one-way, never-ending love of Jesus.
Tullian Tchividjian
#60. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#61. When you don't have anything to lose, you discover something wonderful: you're free to take great risks without fear or reservation.
Tullian Tchividjian
#62. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#64. What I need and long for most has come from outside of me in the person of Jesus.
Tullian Tchividjian
#65. What you will encounter is 'grace unmeasured, vast and free'
the kind that will frighten and free you at the same time. That's what grace does, after all.
Tullian Tchividjian
#66. 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
#67. Christian growth doesn't happen by first behaving better, but by believing better
believi ng in bigger, deeper, brighter ways what Christ has already secured for sinners.
Tullian Tchividjian
#68. I enjoy receiving love from my wife. I'm ecstatic when Kim loves me and expresses affection toward me. Something in me comes alive when she does that. But I've learned this freeing truth: I don't need that love, because in Jesus, I receive all the love I need.
Tullian Tchividjian
#69. 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
#70. Whatever we may mean by 'Christian growth,' it is ultimately this: less faith in me, more faith in God.
Tullian Tchividjian
#71. If you uproot the idol and fail to plant the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.
Tullian Tchividjian
#72. Christianity is in no way a stoic faith. It fundamentally rejects the "stiff upper lip" school of thought.
Tullian Tchividjian
#73. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#74. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#75. 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
#76. Don't get me wrong - what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.
Tullian Tchividjian
#77. 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
#78. I never had an intellectual struggle with the Bible, with the gospel, with the claims of Christ.
Tullian Tchividjian
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#83. Grace loves without reference to what may or may not happen-which is precisely why such incredible things do happen!
Tullian Tchividjian
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. The deepest cry of the human heart is to be loved without condition, no matter what. The gospel of grace announces that you are.
Tullian Tchividjian
#87. 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
#88. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#89. He knows that the only way to break the cycle of retribution and oppression and heartbreak is to demolish the ladder of deserving altogether.
Tullian Tchividjian
#90. The emphasis of the Bible is on the work of the Redeemer, not on the work of the redeemed.
Tullian Tchividjian
#91. If people knew the REAL us, they would run. God knows, stays, and loves.
Tullian Tchividjian
#92. This culture of mandatory happiness actually promotes dishonesty and more suffering.
Tullian Tchividjian
#94. 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.
Tullian Tchividjian
#95. 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
#96. We need to be told that the sins we cannot forget, God cannot remember,
Tullian Tchividjian
#97. The gospel announces that God doesn't relate to us based on our feats for Jesus, but Jesus' feats for us.
Tullian Tchividjian
#98. Spiritual growth is marked by a growing realization of just how much grace you need.
Tullian Tchividjian
#99. As long as I am focusing on the faults of others, then I don't have to face my own.
Tullian Tchividjian
#100. 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
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