Tullian Tchividjian Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

My failure to lay aside the sin that so easily entangles is the direct result of my refusal to die to my natural proclivity toward attaining my own freedom, meaning, value, worth, and righteousness – not believing that, by virtue of my Spirit – wrought union with Christ, everything I need, I already possess.

God’s ability to clean things up is infinitely greater than our ability to mess things up.

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 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.

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.

Thankfully, God’s restraining grace keeps even the worst of us from being utterly depraved. The worst people who have ever lived could’ve been worse.

Sometimes God has to remind you that you’re weak so that you can be set free from your “self-sufficiency.”

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

If people knew the REAL us, they would run. God knows, stays, and loves.

If you feel compelled to respond every time you’re criticized it reveals just how much you’ve built your identity on being right.

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.

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

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.

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.

Our assurance is anchored in the love and grace of God expressed in the glorious exchange: our sin for His righteousness.

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.

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.

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.

God’s acceptance of us cannot be gained by our successes nor forfeited by our failures.

Here’s one way I can know that I’ve forgotten the gospel of grace: when your sin bothers me more than my sin.

We don’t need answers and explanations as much as we need God’s presence in and through the suffering.

Thankfully, while our self-righteousness reaches far, God’s grace reaches farther.

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.

The people who tend to be the most gracious are those who know how badly they need grace

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.

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.

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

Indeed, there is nothing like suffering to remind us how much we need God. What good news that His purpose and plan for our lives moves in a different direction from ours!

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.

Jesus plus nothing equals everything; everything minus Jesus equals nothing.

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.

Death is the operative device that sets us free in Christ – when we die, we truly live.

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

Contrary to popular assumptions, the Bible is not a record of the blessed good, but rather the blessed bad. That’s 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; it’s a witness to God making it down to the worst people.

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

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.

Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It’s one-way love.

Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! It’s 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 gospel is for the defeated, not the dominant.

Mt. Sinai says, ‘You must do. Mt. Calvary says, ‘Because you couldn’t, Jesus did.’ Don’t run to the wrong mountain for your hiding place

Walking with God doesn’t lead to God’s favor; God’s favor leads to walking with God.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The law is God’s first word; the gospel is God’s final word.

When everyone in the world spoke the same language, God came down in judgment, breaking the world apart. But at just the right time, he came down again, this time to reconcile that sinful world to himself.

We are broken people living in a broken world with other broken people. We all need grace.

Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable.

For years and years, Christians have been singing about their wandering hearts. Our hearts need to be recalibrated and realigned and reoriented by God.

Remember on your best day that Jesus had to die for you. Remember on your worst day that he did.