A Tale of Two Lunches

Tullian Tchividjian
4 Sep 2013
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Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (David C. Cook, October 2013) I was sixteen when my parents kicked me out of the house. What started out as run-of-the-mill adolescent rebellion in my early teens had, over the course of a few short years, blossomed into a black hole of disrespect and self-centeredness that was consuming the entire family. I would lie when I didn’t have to, push every envelope, pick fights with my siblings, carry on, and sneak around—at first in innocent ways; later in not-so-innocent ways. If someone […]

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Who is the Good Samaritan?

Tullian Tchividjian
6 Aug 2013
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For every good story in the Bible there’s a bad children’s song. This is the one I remember for the Good Samaritan: The man who stopped to help, right when he saw the need; he was such a good, good neighbor, a good example for me. On the surface, this little ditty may seem harmless. The problem, however, is that Jesus wants us to identify with every person in the parable except the good Samaritan. He reserves that role for himself. “You should be like the Good Samaritan.” If you grew up in church or Sunday School, you probably heard […]

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It’s Not Me It’s You

Tullian Tchividjian
2 Jul 2013
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The Bible makes it clear that self-righteousness is the premier enemy of the Gospel. And there is perhaps no group of people who better embody the sin of self-righteousness in the Bible than the Pharisees. In fact, Jesus reserved his harshest criticisms for them, calling them whitewashed tombs and hypocrites. Surprisingly to some, this demonstrates that the thing that gets in the way of our love for God and a deep appreciation of his grace is not so much our unrighteous badness but our self-righteous goodness. In Surprised by Grace: God’s Relentless Pursuit of Rebels, I retell the story of […]

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Grace and the Summer of George

Tullian Tchividjian
4 Jun 2013
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For many Americans of a certain age, the college admissions process is an oppressive and extraordinarily stressful area of life. It is performancism writ very, very large. One’s entire worth and value as a person is boiled down to a short transcript and application, which is then judged according to a stringent and ever-escalating set of standards. High school seniors are called upon to justify themselves according to their achievements and interests, and as the top schools have gotten more and more competitive, so has the pressure under which our top students place themselves. Watching the students at our church […]

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The Fruit of One-Way Love

Tullian Tchividjian
1 May 2013
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Hollywood is not known for being a culture of grace. Dog eat dog is more like it. People love you one day and hate you the next. Personal value is very much attached to box office revenues and the unpredictable and often cruel winds of fashion. It was doubly shocking, therefore, when one-way love—and its fruit—made a powerful appearance on the stage in 2011. The occasion for it was Robert Downey Jr. receiving the American Cinematheque Award, a prize given to, “…an extraordinary artist in the entertainment industry who is fully engaged in his or her work and is committed […]

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Does Grace Make You Lazy?

Tullian Tchividjian
5 Apr 2013
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The gospel doxologically declares that because of Christ’s finished work for you, you already have all of the justification, approval, security, love, worth, meaning and rescue you long for and look for in a thousand different people and places smaller than Jesus. God does not relate to us based on our feats for Jesus but on Jesus’ feats for us. Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life does not have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves or validate ourselves. He came to rescue us from the slavish need […]

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Inexhaustible Grace

Tullian Tchividjian
8 Mar 2013
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A few years ago, I read something astonishing. Dr. Richard Leahy, a prominent psychologist and anxiety specialist was quoted as saying, “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.” It turns out the problem wasn’t limited to an age group; in 2007 the New York times reported that three in ten American women confess to taking sleeping pills before bed most nights. The numbers are so high and unprecedented that some are calling it an epidemic. This came across my screen about the same time that the […]

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Give Me Law or Give Me Death

Tullian Tchividjian
10 Feb 2013
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Les Miserables profoundly pronounces the contrast between law and grace. The most powerful scene in the 2012 movie release is Inspector Javert’s song right before he kills himself. Javert embodies our natural addiction to law and our natural aversion to grace. Committed to the rigorous inflexibility of the law, Javert has been given grace time and time again from the very one he has mercilessly hunted for decades, Jean Valjean. The grace of Valjean haunts and radically disorients Javert. Javert sings: “Who is this man? What sort of devil is he, to have me caught in a trap and choose […]

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Grace: Law Without Gospel Leads To Sin

Tullian Tchividjian
6 Jan 2013
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I received this letter a few weeks ago from someone I’ve never met. He sent it to me as a word of encouragement regarding how the message of grace has revitalized his love for God. I hesitated to post it because, given the kind things he says about my work, I didn’t want to appear self-promotional. But what he says about the effect of grace in revitalizing his spiritual life and the inability of the law to engender what it commands is so good that I just had to share it with you. He wrote: “Over the last couple of […]

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A Barrier to Honesty

Tullian Tchividjian
7 Dec 2012
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One of the chief vehicles for dishonesty in my own life has been my involvement in “accountability groups.” For those who have been spared them, an “accountability group” is a single-sex small-group Bible study on steroids. A group of friends arrange for a time each week to get together, ostensibly to encourage one another by upholding standards of personal righteousness in a confidential context. Instead, the members spend most of the time picking each other apart, uncovering layer after layer after layer of sin in a coercive and sometimes even competitive fashion. You confess your sin to your friends and […]

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