Top 200 Tullian Tchividjian Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “And there’s nothing more enslaving than self-salvation projects. They never end because they never work. The story of David and Goliath is meant to point us to the one true hero, the one hero who is perfect at all times.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

102. “To focus on how I’m doing more than what Christ has done is Christian narcissism.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

103. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

104. “There’s absolutely no way you can feel the freedom to embarrass and humiliate yourself unless you have finally recognized that your identity is in someone other than yourself.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

105. “There’s nothing like suffering to reveal how small and needy you are. Pain has the remarkable capacity to reveal the weakness of the things you’re leaning on to make life worth living.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

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

— Tullian Tchividjian

107. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

108. “I became frustrated with myself for not being as sturdy and unquestioning as I knew a man in my position should be.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

109. “Christmas is the beachhead of God’s campaign against sin and sadness, darkness and death, fear and frustration.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

110. “From the time God saved me at 21 years old, I’ve always been fascinated by the parables of Jesus.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

111. “When you don’t know where you fit inside the home and you’re young and you’re desperate to fit in somewhere, I’d figured where I would fit outside the home. So I made some obviously bad decisions about who I hung out with and the things that I did.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

112. “Because the church has moved away from the gospel anytime you move away from the gospel, you at the same time move toward pretense, you move toward image-keeping, you move toward the need to pretend.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

113. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

114. “Our identity is anchored in Christ’s accomplishment, not our own; Christ’s strength, not ours; Christ’s pedigree and track record, not ours; Christ’s victory, not ours. Who we really are has nothing to do with us at all – rather, it has everything to do with what Jesus has done for us.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

115. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

116. “The grace of God sets us free from a life of perfection, performing, and pretending.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

117. “God is not interested in what you think you should be or feel. He is not interested in the narrative you have constructed for yourself, or that others have constructed for you – even the one that your church has constructed for you.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

118. “God attaches no strings to His love. None. His love for us does not depend on our loveliness. It goes one way. As far as our sin may extend, the grace of our Father extends further.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

119. “I had turned personal validation into my primary source of meaning and value, so that without it I was miserable and depressed.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

120. “Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! Its the truest truth in the entire universe. No strings attached! No fine print to read. No buts. No conditions. No qualifications. No footnotes. And especially, no need for balance.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

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

— Tullian Tchividjian

122. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

123. “There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

124. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

125. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

126. “What is indisputable is the fact that unbelief is the force that gives birth to all of our bad behavior and every moral failure. It is the root.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

127. “I was spending too much time thinking about how I was doing, if I was learning everything I was supposed to be learning during this difficult season, whether I was doing it right or not, taking my spiritual pulse, etc – my inner lawyer was working overtime.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

128. “I think it’s super important for the church itself to rediscover the gospel.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

129. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

130. “My lifestyle got so disruptive to my family that my parents had no choice but to say, “You can’t live here any longer if you’re going to live this way.” So, I was thrilled about it – thrilled!”

— Tullian Tchividjian

131. “Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It’s dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

132. “He knows that the only way to break the cycle of retribution and oppression and heartbreak is to demolish the ladder of deserving altogether.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

133. “If you feel compelled to respond every time you’re criticized it reveals just how much you’ve built your identity on being right.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

134. “William Temple in the nineteenth century, I like to remind myself and others that the only thing you contribute to your salvation and to your sanctification is the sin that makes them necessary.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

135. “Paul doesn’t pray that the Colossians will find something they don’t have; rather he prays they’ll grow in their awareness and understanding of what they already have.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

136. “Between writing, traveling, speaking, preaching, and doing my best to be a good husband to my wife and my three kids, that’s about as much as one man or at least this man can do.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

137. “Because Jesus was strong for us we are free to be weak.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

138. “Children will run from law, and they’ll run from grace. The ones who run from law never come back. But the ones who run from grace always come back. Grace draws its own back home.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

139. “My job as a pastor and theologian is to tease out the nature and the necessity of the gospel in meticulous ways, in everything I say, in everything I like. I want desperately for the church in America to rediscover the power and the beauty and the nature and the necessity of the gospel.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

140. “It’s when we come to the end of ourselves that we come to the beginning of grace.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

141. “The gospel is good news for losers, not winners. It’s for those who long to be freed from the slavery of believing that all of their significance, meaning, purpose, and security depend on their ability to “become a better you.” The gospel tells us that weakness precedes usefulness – that, in fact, the smaller you get, the freer you will be.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

142. “Moralism doesn’t produce morality; it produces immorality.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

143. “Suffering reveals to us the two things that ultimately matter: that we are weak but He is strong.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

144. “The lifeblood of Christianity is not our persistence in moving toward God but God’s persistence in moving toward us.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

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

— Tullian Tchividjian

146. “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.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

147. “Christianity is in no way a stoic faith. It fundamentally rejects the “stiff upper lip” school of thought.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

148. “Before we can even begin to grapple with the frustrations and tragedies of life in this world, we must do away with our faithless morality of payback and reward.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

149. “Disobedience happens not when we think too much grace but when we think too little of it.”

— Tullian Tchividjian

150. “Nothing makes me want to obey more than knowing that God unconditionally loves me and forgives me even when I disobey.”

— Tullian Tchividjian