Quotes by Tullian Tchividjian

The world isnt scandalized by our freedom but by our fakeness.

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

The apostle Paul claimed the Law is written on the fleshy tables of the human heart (2 Cor. 3:3 KJV). What he meant are these shoulds and shouldnts are both instinctual and inescapable, part of our DNA. They are a psychological reality. We may justify our actions away, but deep down, we know when weve done something wrong.

The great hope we find in the Christian faith is that God is not us.

Disobedience happens not when we think too much grace but when we think too little of it

We spend more time asking what would Jesus do instead of what did Jesus do.

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.

The hub of Christianity is not do something for Jesus. The hub of Christianity is Jesus has done everything for you. And my fear is that too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard our pleas for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of Christian faith is our love for God instead of Gods love for us. Dont get me wrong--what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.

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

Daily Christian living, in other words, is daily Christian dying: dying to our trivial comforts, soul-shrinking conveniences, arrogant preferences, and self-centered entitlements, and living for something much larger than what makes us comfortable and safe.

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.

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

By looking at the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us, we totally miss the Point–like the two on the road to Emmaus. As Luke 24 shows, its possible to read the Bible, study the Bible, and memorize large portions of the Bible, while missing the whole point of the Bible. Its entirely possible, in other words, to read the stories and miss the Story.

Whether its a Christian or a non-Christian, theres 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 cant make it on our own, that we need help, that were broken.

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

Its when we come to the end of ourselves that we come to the beginning of grace.

We are, without doubt, broken people living with other broken people in a broken world.

God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be. It is the message of grace.~Quote by Brennan Manning

One-way love is rare, though, and it always comes as a surprise. Fortunately, the glimpses we receive in relationships are only a foreshadowing of Gods love for us. They are like little arrows that point to the very heart of the universe, what Dante called the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars, the love that received its fullest expression in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

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. Far from being a book full of moral heroes whom we are commanded to emulate, what we discover is that the so-called heroes in the Bible are not really heroes at all. They fall and fail; they make huge mistakes; they get afraid; theyre selfish, deceptive, egotistical, and unreliable. 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.