Tullian Tchividjian's Blog

Sorry for the inconsistent blogging over the last two weeks. I’ve been traveling a lot and lots of travel makes me blog lazy.

But there’s no better way for me to get back into the groove than to press on in my desire to introduce you to the music I love (you can go back and check out all of my Monday Morning Music recommendations by simply typing “Monday Morning Music” in the search bar to your right).

This weeks choice track is “In The Morning Light” by Alex Schulz. I love it. I hope you do too.

Happy Monday, my friends…

The other day I saw a truck that made me laugh out loud. It was a truck from Premier Booting Services, one of those companies that comes to put the bulky metal lock on your front tire when you’ve parked illegally. Not that funny, right? What was funny was their slogan: “Your Source for Parking Compliance.” Something about that line struck me as appropriate for the Ministry of Information in George Orwell’s 1984. So I laughed. But while I was laughing, I realized that their slogan had profound—and unintended—theological implications as well.

Premier Booting Services doesn’t actually want to provide parking compliance. It would put them out of business. Their business model, in fact, depends on people getting booted, and then getting booted again. It’s not in Premier’s best interest for people to learn their lesson and start parking legally. They’re not actually in the compliance business, they’re in the punishment business. They say that they provide “compliance” because it doesn’t sound as nasty.

Preachers who think that simply telling bad people to be good—applying the boot to the tires of our spiritual lives—will actually produce compliance misunderstand the law’s purpose. The law tells us that compliance is required but the law is incapable of producing a compliant heart. We would all agree that compliance is a laudable goal. We want people parking legally and we want people loving their neighbors as themselves. But how might compliance actually happen?

Counter-intuitively, it is grace that produces compliance. Grace—that love that comes to the undeserving—is the thing that causes the kind of heart change that can actually generate true obedience. Punishment and judgment don’t create a reformed heart, they create—at best—a heart full of fear, and—at worst—a heart full of rebellion. Love and grace replace a fearful heart with a grateful one, a heart that desires whatever the lover asks.

(Excerpted from my forthcoming devotional It Is Finished: 365 Days of Good News)

“Even though we are now in faith, the heart is always ready to boast itself before God and say, ‘After all, I have… lived so well and done so much that surely He will take this into account.’ We… want to haggle with God to make Him regard our life, but it cannot be done. With men you may boast, ‘I have done the best I could… If anything is lacking, I will still try to make recompense,’ but when you come before God, leave all that boasting at home. Remember to appeal from justice into grace. But let anybody try this and he will see and experience how exceedingly hard and bitter a thing it is… I myself have been preaching and cultivating [grace] through reading and writing for almost twenty years and still feel the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God that I may contribute something so that He will give me His grace in exchange for my holiness. I just cannot get it into my head that I should surrender myself completely to sheer grace, yet I know that this is what I should and must do.”

- Martin Luther

(HT McKay Caston)

Big shout-out to my new friend Travis McReynolds (@djtravismac) for introducing me to this Teemid remix of Nico & Vinz’s track “Am I Wrong.”

Happy Monday, my friends!

We Christians may talk about God being loving and forgiving, but what we often mean is that God loves and forgives those who are good and clean—who meet His conditions, in other words.

Or maybe it is more subtle than that. Maybe you are a Christian, and you rightly believe that God forgave your past indiscretions—that was what drew you to Him in the first place. But once you made that initial Christian commitment, it was time to get your act together and be serious. We conclude that it was God’s blood, sweat, and tears that got us in, but that it’s our blood, sweat, and tears that keep us in. We view God as a glorified bookkeeper, tallying our failures and successes on His cosmic ledger. We conclude that in order for God to love us, we have to change, grow, and be good.

Author Jerry Bridges puts it perfectly when he writes:

My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace. If we’ve performed well—whatever “well” is in our opinion—then we expect God to bless us. If we haven’t done so well, our expectations are reduced accordingly. In this sense, we live by works, rather than by grace. We are saved by grace, but we are living by the “sweat” of our own performance. Moreover, we are always challenging ourselves and one another to “try harder.” We seem to believe success in the Christian life (however we define success) is basically up to us: our commitment, our discipline, and our zeal, with some help from God along the way. We give lip service to the attitude of the Apostle Paul, “But by the grace of God I am what I am (1 Cor. 15:10), but our unspoken motto is, “God helps those who help themselves.”

The liberating truth of the Christian gospel is that God’s love for us and approval of us has nothing to do with us. The Christian life commences with grace, continues with grace, and concludes with grace. Jesus met all of God’s holy conditions so that your relationship to God could be wholly unconditional.

Thanks to Jesus, I am clothed in an irremovable suit of love and forgiveness.

As I mentioned here, for a long time now I’ve wanted to share some of the stories of people who have been trusting enough to open up to me. The English poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, “All cases are unique, and very similar to others,” and I think he was onto something. Desperation is desperation, suffering is suffering, brokenness is brokenness, and it is universal. The stories people tell me about their lives are all unique, but they are all the same. These are my stories, your stories, our stories. They are the stories of broken people living with other broken people in a broken world. So, I decided to start a blog series entitled, “Portraits of Grace” where I will periodically (maybe once or twice a month) share stories about real people and their real experiences (you can find Christina’s story here). These stories paint pictures of what it means to experience God’s grace and his presence in the painful, confusing, and desperate moments of our lives – which are seemingly constant. The most wonderful result is the freedom that these broken people experience and how that gift of love and unmerited favor is then bestowed on others – over and over.

Each story is based on actual events that have been painfully and emotionally shared with me. It is for this reason, that no one’s true identity is exposed and why some of the details have been purposely altered. I hope these stories are a great and comforting reminder to you that God always meets our mess with his mercy, our guilt with his grace, our desperation with his deliverance. For God is irresistibly drawn to the desperate; he hones in on the hopeless; his love is like a magnet to the messed up.

The following is Ellen’s story…

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“I despised myself.” This was the one sentence from her email that haunted me throughout the day. This morning, as I was going through my inbox, I was immediately drawn to a message from a woman named Ellen because her subject line simply read: “Faith and Friends and It is Finished.” A fan of alliteration, this was like music to my ears on this Friday morning in February. I opened the note and was quickly drawn into Ellen’s world as she neatly chronicled the last 10 years of her life – a tale riddled with words like hopelessness, loneliness, and faithlessness.

While her story was unique, it was also tragically familiar.

For the last decade, Ellen experienced the emptiness and loneliness of life without God. She believed it was this emptiness that provided a breeding ground for her brokenness to run rampant.

Ellen explained that she was raised by two wonderful, loving and devoted parents, but they believed after instilling in her a basic understanding of ‘religion’ she should be free to decide what was right for her. Her life, as she explains, was good. She was happy. After high school, she never really needed to “seek a higher power” to give her strength – that is, until she started to despise what she looked like.

While she said she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment or reason, after years of being fairly indifferent to her size and weight, she was now disgusted by what she saw in the mirror. In her own words, she “needed to be fixed.” And, Ellen knew just the person that was going to fix her–she was going to fix herself. In her world, she was the person in control. She was her own savior.

You see, it may sound freeing and open-minded to “choose your own religion”, as Ellen’s parents had suggested she do. But there’s a problem with that. The human condition is such that, left to our own choice, we choose ourselves to be our own god and savior. And while this may at first seem to be an empowering choice to make, it leads to a weary and heavy laden existence—it leads to what Martin Luther called, the plight of “an unhappy god.”

So, with no one by her side, Ellen embarked on her self-salvation project. She was in control, she kept telling herself. She could do it. She could fix herself and finally find the freedom and fullness of life that had been evading her.

Adhering to a strict diet while exercising like a “mad woman,” Ellen shed 70 pounds in that first year. Yet, something still wasn’t right. She was much happier with the way she looked on the outside but she still felt alone and empty on the inside. She (like the rest of us) had fallen prey to what Robert Capon calls “the greatest temptation”—believing that it is “by further, better, more aggressive living that we can find life.” It’s been said that the loneliest moment in life is when you have just achieved what you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has failed you. Wanting to pray but not knowing who to pray to, Ellen struggled. “What do I have to do to find true happiness?” was always the question in her heart as she deprived herself of food and then pushed her body to run, or ride, or swim another mile, another hour. She was exhausted and unfulfilled.

“I know this probably sounds crazy,” she writes, “But, it was like one day as I was in my kitchen wondering how I got to this unhappy place, God just tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, turn around.’”

In her own words, “after that infamous moment I became a hearer—a person possessing new ears that before were incapable of hearing the voice that alone could set me free.” Ellen said that she felt “more drawn to her spiritual friends and was desperate to hear about their suffering, their pain, their joys, and their journey of faith.” At the recommendation of these friends, she read books and started praying. In fact, Ellen began writing down her fears and her hopes and her imperfections for God’s eyes only. Taking baby steps, she fully exposed herself like never before. She said, “I could slowly feel the chains falling off as I started to give up control to a God who I was getting to know—a God who I knew loved me unconditionally.”

Ah yes, I thought, Ellen had been tracked down and magnificently defeated by the Hound of Heaven—she had been “discovered” by the grace of God and the freedom that comes with it. She was starting to accept the fact that her brokenness was beyond her capacity to fix. Instead of continuing to try and “save” herself, she was finally resting in the embracing arms of a gracious God who loves broken people because broken people are all that there are. I like how Mike Yaconelli describes it in his book, Messy Spirituality:

Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God being present in the mess of our unfixedness.

What was true for Ellen is also true for you. You cannot fix yourself. You’re’ not big enough or strong enough or wise enough. But the good news is that you don’t have to. As it was for Ellen, so it is with all of us: when we come to the end of ourselves, we come to the beginning of God’s rescuing love and grace—Jesus promises rest to the weary and heavy laden.

The Gospel of grace is good news to those, like Ellen, who’ve been crushed by their own efforts to save themselves. It announces that because Jesus won for me, I’m free to lose; because Jesus was strong for me, I’m free to be weak; because Jesus was Someone, I’m free to be no one. The Gospel doesn’t just free you from what other people think about you, it frees you from what you think about yourself. In fact, who you really are has nothing to do with you—how much you can accomplish, who you can become, your behavior (good or bad), your strengths, your weaknesses, your past, your present, your future, your family background, your education, your looks, and so on. Your identity is firmly anchored in Jesus’ accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his victory, not yours.

Ellen ended her letter by thanking me for my sermons and my books. But she knows that it was God who set her free from herself. She acknowledged that while she still struggles with that internal voice which constantly whispers “Do this and live”, she finds daily rest as she remembers the external voice perpetually reminding her that “It is finished.”

I just love this remix of Adventure Club’s track “Wonder.” I hope you do too. Happy Monday, my friends.

“…we’re not always,

what we promised to be.”

Life, suffering, and failure have a way of transforming you from an idealist to a realist—from thinking that you’re strong to reminding you that you’re weak.

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 42, 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. Unfulfilled dreams, ongoing relational tension, the loss of friendships, a hard marriage, rebellious teenagers, the death of loved ones, remaining sinful patterns—whatever it is for you—live long enough, lose enough, suffer enough, and the idealism of youth fades, leaving behind the reality of life in a broken world as a broken person. Life has had a way of proving to me that I’m not on the constantly-moving-forward escalator of progress I thought I was on when I was twenty-five.

A while back, I received an email from a friend inquiring about my understanding between the relationship of ongoing sin in the life of a Christian and sanctification (Christian growth). He said he understood that Christians continue to be sinful, but the question he asked me was whether I thought Christians continue to be statically sinful. I told him that I hadn’t considered the categories of statically or non-statically sinful because, while those categories may be moderately helpful in a theoretical discussion, they are categories that don’t correspond to life as it is actually lived. For instance, it becomes pretty subjective as to what is static and what isn’t static. I have improved over the years in some ways but I also see areas in my life that seem better or worse given the day, the circumstances, the season of life, etc. Some things I’ve “licked” (although I’m typically proud of those things so that becomes a “new” problem) and others, I’m sure, will plague me the rest of my life with more or less success depending on a variety of situations, moods, people I’m dealing with, and so on. I told him that the category which speaks to the reality of life as it is actually lived is Martin Luther’s Simul iustus et peccator (Christians are both justified and sinner simultaneously)–a category that the Apostle Paul gives existential voice to in Romans 7.

I think most people can probably relate better to what my life has actually looked like: Try and fail. Fail then try. Try and succeed. Succeed then fail. Two steps forward. One step back. One step forward. Three steps back. Every year, I get better at some things, worse at others. Some areas remain stubbornly static. To complicate matters even more, when I honestly acknowledge the ways I’ve gotten worse, it’s actually a sign that I may be getting better. And when I become proud of the ways I’ve gotten better, it’s actually a sign that I’ve gotten worse. And ’round and ’round we go.

If this sounds like a depressing sentiment, it isn’t meant to be one. Quite the opposite. In fact, as my friend Mike Horton says, “The hype of a radical calling to change the world can creep into every area of our life and make us tired, depressed, and mean.” If I am grateful for anything about these past 17 years, it’s for the way God has wrecked my idealism about myself and the world and replaced it with a realism about the extent of His grace and love, which is much bigger than I had ever imagined. Indeed, the smaller you get—the smaller life makes you—the easier it is to see the grandeur of grace.

So, while I am far more incapable than I may have initially thought, God is infinitely more capable than I ever hoped.

The Jade Blue remix of this new track by The Prototypes, “Don’t Let Me Go”, is guaranteed to make you bounce as you get ready for another week. Trust me.

Happy Monday, my friends…

New beginnings. Fresh starts. Clean slates. Second chances. We love ‘em all. They carry so much promise; they —give us so much hope. If we blow it today, we can start again tomorrow. We conclude that the answer to yesterdays failure is today’s success. If I preached a bad sermon this past Sunday I can fix my sense of failure by preaching a great sermon next Sunday.

In many ways, all of our striving under this performance idol is a grown-up re-creation of the adolescent playground cry: “I want a do-over!” Have you ever heard that? Watch children playing a game at a park like football or basketball. Maybe somebody messed up the opening kick. Maybe they weren’t sure the ball stayed in bounds or not. So somebody proclaims, “Do-over!” And they start over. They have to get it right. They want the bad play erased and replaced by the good play.

We’re still doing this into our adult years, trying to manage our lives in some bizarre system of spiritual checks and balances, trying to outweigh our bad plays with our “do-overs.”

When we worship at the altar of performance we spend our lives frantically propping up our images or reputations, trying to do it all—and do it all well—often at a cost to ourselves and those we love. Life becomes a hamster wheel of endless earning and proving and maintenance and management and controlling, where all we can see is our own feet. We live in a constant state of anxiety, fear, and resentment until we end up heavily medicated, in the hospital, or just really, really unhappy.

So what’s the answer to this enslaving addiction that plagues us all?

The gospel of grace.

The gospel is God’s announcement to failing people like you and me that we are now free from the slavery of “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” We don’t have to put all our weight into the do-over. We can put it on Jesus. Because Jesus succeeded for me, I’m free to follow with abandon and fail without fear.