Quotes from Tullian Tchividjian

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

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

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

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

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

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

Even one who has been to God a million times with the same problem need not fear exhausting the grace of God.

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.

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.

The gospel announces that God doesn't relate to us based on our feats for Jesus, but Jesus' feats for us.

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

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.

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

Once God saves us He doesn't move us beyond the gospel, but He moves us more deeply into the gospel.

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

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

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