Top 261 Quotes & Sayings by Tullian Tchividjian - Page 3

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

There is no better news than that the God who makes the demand for perfection also meets the demand for perfection on our behalf.

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

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.

The desperate addict is closer to the heart of grace than the devout moralist.

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.

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

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

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.

The heart of the Christian faith is Good News, not good advice, good technique, or good behavior.

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 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.

People who know they are not good make the best messengers of grace because they are desperately aware of their own need for it.

The gospel brings things together. One of the great demonstration of the gospel's power is reconciliation. I've got friends who are surfers, doctors, lawyers, artists and entertainers. Some people are cool and some people are geeky. I look around at my friends and I think, only the gospel has the power to put together a friendship like this.

Grace doesn't lead us into destructive behavior. Sin does. And grace is the only remedy for sin. The kindness of God leads to repentance.

God loves broken people because broken people are all that there are.

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

Only when you realize that the gospel has nothing to do with your obedience but with Christ's obedience for you, will you start to obey. The only Christians who end up getting better are those who realize that if they don't get better, God will love them anyway.

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

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.

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

Real, pure, unadulterated freedom happens when the resources of the gospel smash any sense of need to secure for myself anything beyond what Christ has already secured for me.

Whatever we may mean by 'Christian growth,' it is ultimately this: less faith in me, more faith in God.

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.

Information is seldom enough to heal a wounded heart.

The Gospel is not ultimately a defense from pain, it is the message of God's rescue through pain. In fact, it allows us to drop our defenses, to escape not from pain but from the prison of "How" and "Why" to the freedom of "Who?"

The world isn't scandalized by our freedom but by our fakeness.

When we depend on anything smaller than God to provide us with the security, significance, meaning, and value that we long for, God will love us enough to take it away. Much of our anger and bitterness, therefore, is God prying open our hands and taking away something we've held onto more tightly than him.

Graciousness is the fruit of someone who knows how badly they themselves need grace.

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

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

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.

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.

In those moments when I'm obsessively counting my sins against me, it is good news to remember that God has counted my sins against Christ.

Legalism breeds a sense of entitlement that turns us into complainers.

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.

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.

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.

We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God's law and God's gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things.

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

Our hearts are continuously rebellious. 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." If this goes on day after day after day, year after year, month after month, it would understandable for God to say, "I've given you ten trillion tries. You're finished." But it's not. So in that sense, His grace is always surprising, never ceases to be amazing and His mercy is remarkably outrageous.

I was always in places where I was widely accepted, approved and loved and I was finally in a place where people did not approve of me, did not accept me and did not love me. It was killing me.

The overwhelming emphasis of contemporary Christianity: "Just do it." The overwhelming emphasis of Biblical Christianity: "It is finished"

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

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

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

Jesus has done everything for you.

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.

You can be sure that your deepest desires reveal important truths about your spiritual condition.

God did not rescue me out of the pain, He rescued me through the pain!

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

Self-righteousness is unavoidable. You can either be a self-righteous Pharisee where you think you are better than everyone else or you can be a self-righteous pagan who thinks you are better than the Pharisee. If you are a self-righteous person, I could become very self-righteous thinking that you're self-righteous and you think you're so good but I know you're bad. I know I'm bad so that makes me better than you.

The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn't make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn't produce morality; rather, it produces immorality.

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.

The people who have taught me the most about grace are those who have blown it so bad that they know how much they need it.

God is the one to be praised, not our transformation.

God's capacity to forgive is greater than our capacity to sin; while our sin reaches far, God's grace reaches farther. It's a message revealing the radical contrast between the sinful heart of mankind and the gracious heart of mankind's Creator.

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

The gospel frees you from the pressure of having to fix people: your worth is located in Christ, not in their transformation.

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