Tullian Tchividjian Self Quotations

The Bible makes it clear that self-righteousness is the premier enemy of the Gospel.

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

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.

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.

When it comes to understanding and appreciating grace, our biggest problem is our so-called goodness...not our self-perceived badness.

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

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.

While our sin reaches far, God's grace reaches farther. God came after us not to strip away our freedom but to strip away our slavery to self, that we could become truly free.

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.

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.

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.

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