Tullian Tchividjian People Quotations

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.

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.

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.

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people's.

The best evangelists, the best preachers, the best teachers are desperate people.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

When we reduce the notion of “calling” to work inside the church, we fail to equip our people to apply their Christian faith to everything they do, everywhere they are.

If we're not reaching the same people Jesus reached, then we're not preaching the same message Jesus preached.

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.

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 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.

God wants every local church to be the first place people think to go when they've really messed up...not the last.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The gospel doesn't just free me from what people think of me, but also from what I think of me.

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.

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

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

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