Tullian Tchividjian Quotes

My daily sins require daily distribution of God's grace. In that sense, it never ceases to surprise me because I don't deserve any of it. I mean, I deserve to be locked in a cage and for God to throw away the key.

You are not obligated to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and find a way to conquer the odds, to be stronger or transform yourself into some better version of yourself. The pain you are feeling (whatever the degree) may be a reminder that things are not as they should be.

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

Before we can even begin to grapple with the frustrations and tragedies of life in this world, we must do away with our faithless morality of payback and reward.

Information is seldom enough to heal a wounded heart.

The law demands that we do it all; the gospel declares that Jesus paid it all.

Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! Its the truest truth in the entire universe. No strings attached! No fine print to read. No buts. No conditions. No qualifications. No footnotes. And especially, no need for balance.

Our default faith mode is to trust, above all things, our own ability to create a safe, controllable, predictable world.

Job's unraveling wasn't wrong or sinful; rather, it was emotionally realistic.

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.

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

Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you've been on to more dearly than Him.

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

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.

Contrary to popular assumptions, the Bible is not a record of the blessed good, but rather the blessed bad. Thats not a typo. The Bible is a record of the blessed bad. The Bible is not a witness to the best people making it up to God; its a witness to God making it down to the worst people.

The gospel is good news to those who know they don't measure up. It's offensive to those who think they do.

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.

God's grace is so counterintuitive and everything we do in our life is just based on conditions. You do this for me and I'll do that for you. Or if you don't do this for me, I won't do that for you. And God's grace works in a completely different direction.

Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.

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

I didn't realize that I was in a self-made prison of human approval and human acceptance. Didn't even realize it. Most of the prisons we live in we are not conscious of.

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.

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.

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.

If you uproot the idol and fail to plant the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.

In the Old Testament, we are continually told that our good works are not enough, that God has made a provision. This provision is pointed to at every place in the Old Testament.

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

Suffering reveals to us the two things that ultimately matter: that we are weak but He is strong.

There's nothing like suffering to reveal how small and needy you are. Pain has the remarkable capacity to reveal the weakness of the things you're leaning on to make life worth living.

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

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.

Self-righteousness is the fruit of a low view of God's law and a lite view of your own sin.

If you have suffered the loss of a family member to chronic disease, if you suffer debilitating seasons of depression, if you have lost your job and livelihood, gone through a divorce that came out of the blue, know that God is not punishing you. He is not waiting for you to do something.

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

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

We often read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our triumph, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness.

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

You see, the secret of the gospel is that we become more spiritually mature when we focus less on what we need to do for God and focus more on all that God has already done for us. The irony of the gospel is that we actually perform better as we grow in our understanding that our relationship with God is based on Christ's performance for us, not our performance for him.

Because Jesus was someone, you’re free to be no one.

Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make bad people good; it makes dead people alive...the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.

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

People who haven't experienced major setbacks sometimes feel that their hurts are somehow less legitimate or real.

When it comes to understanding and appreciating grace, our biggest problem is our so-called goodness...not our self-perceived badness.

When you don't have anything to lose, you discover something wonderful: you're free to take great risks without fear or reservation.

From the time God saved me at 21 years old, I've always been fascinated by the parables of Jesus.

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.

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