Tullian Tchividjian Quotes

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

I had turned personal validation into my primary source of meaning and value, so that without it I was miserable and depressed.

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

Christmas is the beachhead of God’s campaign against sin and sadness, darkness and death, fear and frustration.

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.

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.

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 emphasis of the Bible is on the work of the Redeemer, not on the work of the redeemed.

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

Jesus has done everything for you.

I ended up dropping out of high school at 16 and getting kicked out of my home. My parents told me, sadly, that because I was so disruptive to the rest of the household, that I could no longer live under their roof.

The gospel is for the defeated, not the dominant.

Christianity is not about good people getting better. It is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.

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.

I think it's super important for the church itself to rediscover the gospel.

The more I focused on my need to get better the worse I actually got - the more neurotic and self-conscious and self-absorbed I became.

The bad news that we are all guilty is met with the best news that God loves and forgives guilty people.

God does everything through people who understand they're nothing. And God does nothing through those who think they're everything.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The cross [is] the ultimate statement of God's involvement in the world on this side of heaven.

Because the church has moved away from the gospel anytime you move away from the gospel, you at the same time move toward pretense, you move toward image-keeping, you move toward the need to pretend.

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

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.

Between writing, traveling, speaking, preaching, and doing my best to be a good husband to my wife and my three kids, that's about as much as one man or at least this man can do.

The lifeblood of Christianity is not our persistence in moving toward God but God's persistence in moving toward us.

To focus on how I'm doing more than what Christ has done is Christian narcissism

I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand why some Christians get mad when we say that the ultimate hero in the Bible is not Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, etc... but Jesus.

An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.

My job as a pastor and theologian is to tease out the nature and the necessity of the gospel in meticulous ways, in everything I say, in everything I like. I want desperately for the church in America to rediscover the power and the beauty and the nature and the necessity of the gospel.

The good news of the gospel [for sufferers] is not an exhortation from above to 'hang on at all costs,' or 'grin and bear it' in the midst of hardship. No, the good news is that God is hanging on to you, and in the end, when all is said and done, the power of God will triumph over every pain and loss.

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.

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.

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.

Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.

Once God saves us He doesn't move us beyond the gospel, but He moves us more deeply into the gospel.