The Grace of a Great: A Farewell to LeBron James

Tullian Tchividjian
4 Aug 2014
no comments

What is it about LeBron James that generates so much raw emotion and passion among his fans? Is it because of his two NBA championships, four NBA Most Valuable Player Awards, two NBA Finals MVP Awards, two Olympic gold medals, an NBA scoring title, and the NBA Rookie of the Year Award? His pure athletic greatness could be the reason he has so many die-hard followers. But for me, as of yesterday, he’s come to represent something much more. It wasn’t until he decided yesterday to return to his hometown and play once again for the team that drafted him […]

-Read More

Unburdened

Tullian Tchividjian
29 May 2014
no comments

In 1 John 5:3-4 John makes what seems, on the face of it, to be a ridiculous claim: the commands of God are not burdensome. What? Has John not read the Old Testament with its 613 commandments? Was he not there for the Sermon on the Mount, complete with Jesus’ proclamation that his followers are required to be perfect, just as their father in heaven is perfect? Self-imposed commandments As if those laws weren’t burdensome enough, we could add all of the self-imposed Christian commandments, like the kinds of movies we allow ourselves to watch (maybe a swear word or […]

-Read More

“Get Better” Doesn’t Work

Tullian Tchividjian
4 May 2014
no comments

In a New York Times op-ed, Oliver Burkeman suggests something counter-intuitive, but obvious: the more you force someone to have fun, the less fun they’ll have. His piece is called “Who Goes to Work to Have Fun,” and the money quote is this one: “Psychologists have shown that positive-thinking affirmations make people with low self-esteem feel worse; that patients with panic disorders can become more anxious when they try to relax; and that an ability to experience negative emotions, rather than struggling to exclude them, is crucial for mental health. And these are just the hazards of trying to enforce happiness […]

-Read More

God Threw a Stone

Tullian Tchividjian
1 Mar 2014
no comments

As I’ve said before: God speaks two words to the world. People have called them many things: Law and Gospel, Judgment and Love, Critique and Grace, and so on. In essence, though, it’s pretty simple: first God gives us bad news (about us) and then he gives us Good News (about Jesus). This is perhaps most clearly seen in another incredibly well-known (and incredibly misunderstood) passage of Scripture: Jesus’ interaction with the woman caught in the act of adultery. The scribes and Pharisees catch a woman in the act of adultery, and drag her before Jesus. Can you imagine a […]

-Read More

Punk’d by Grace

Tullian Tchividjian
1 Feb 2014
no comments
grace

During a radio interview last week, the interviewer told me a story that gets to the heart of how grace transforms. He was a camp counselor one summer and one of his responsibilities was to go around with another counselor and check the cabins every morning while the students were at breakfast. In order to motivate them to keep their cabins clean, awards were given at the morning assembly to the students who had the cleanest cabin. One morning the counselors walked into one of the cabins only to discover that it had been intentionally trashed. The students thought it […]

-Read More

Progressing Downward

Tullian Tchividjian
10 Jan 2014
no comments

Last month, I talked about Reader’s Digest Christianity, and how it reduced the Christian faith to pithy, easily-achievable goals that ensure our personal improvement. Today, I have a different (though depressingly similar) target: “LiveStrong” Christianity. LiveStrong bracelets are today even more popular than the infamous WWJD bracelets were 10 years ago, despite the public fall from grace of their namesake, Lance Armstrong. In the minds of many people inside the church, Livestrong is the essence and goal of Christianity. You hear this obsession in our lingo: We talk about someone having “strong faith,” about someone being a “strong Christian,” a […]

-Read More

Reader’s Digest Christianity

Tullian Tchividjian
8 Dec 2013
no comments

For a while, my parents were getting Reader’s Digest every month while I was growing up. Because they were stored next to the toilet, they were widely read. In each and every issue there was an interview with some celebrity, usually an actor or an athlete. Reader’s Digest‘s favorite kind of celebrity was the “self-made” variety; someone who had come from nothing, preferably a broken home in which the single mother had to work multiple jobs to afford the windows that protected the family from the ceaseless gunfire outside. The interviewers inevitably ended their pieces by asking the celebrity something […]

-Read More

What Binds Up Broken Relationships

Tullian Tchividjian
6 Nov 2013
no comments

It doesn’t matter where you live, what you do for a living, or how you spend your free time, you have experienced, are experiencing, or will experience the wreckage of broken relationships. Infidelity, divorce, misunderstanding, fragmented workplaces, even death…these things touch us all, even in the “safe haven” of church. Broken relationships are everywhere. But what breaks them? And how can they be restored? This is the question taken up by James in the fourth chapter of his epistle. James is a “horizontal” book, in that it is primarily concerned with the love that people ought to have and show […]

-Read More

Redeeming Repetition

Tullian Tchividjian
2 Oct 2013
no comments

“Christianity can be summed up in the two terms faith and love…receiving from above [faith] and giving out below [love].” Martin Luther One of the most common objections that those of us who are committed to preaching the gospel of grace week in and week out hear is, “Ok…I get it. Can we move on now? We hear the same thing week after week. Can we hear something different already?” Considering the way our consumeristic culture has conditioned us to always crave “what’s next”, the objection is understandable. Add to that a fundamental misunderstanding inside the church that the gospel […]

-Read More