Tullian Tchividjian

The smaller you get__he smaller life makes you__he easier it is to see the grandeur of grace. While I am far more incapable than I may have initially thought, God is infinitely more capable than I ever hoped.

God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be. It is the message of grace.~Quote by Brennan Manning

The only 'if' the Gospel knows is this: 'if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.' (1 John 2:1)

The Bible is not a witness to the best people making it up to God; it's a witness to God making it down to the worst people. Far from being a book full of moral heroes whom we are commanded to emulate, what we discover is that the so-called heroes in the Bible are not really heroes at all. They fall and fail; they make huge mistakes; they get afraid; they're selfish, deceptive, egotistical, and unreliable. 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.

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.

One-way love is rare, though, and it always comes as a surprise. Fortunately, the glimpses we receive in relationships are only a foreshadowing of God's love for us. They are like little arrows that point to the very heart of the universe, what Dante called 'the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,' the love that received its fullest expression in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

We are, without doubt, broken people living with other broken people in a broken world.

What you will encounter is 'grace unmeasured, vast and free' --the kind that will frighten and free you at the same time. That's what grace does, after all.

It's when we come to the end of ourselves that we come to the beginning of grace.

Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.

Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can't make it on our own, that we need help, that we're broken.

By looking at the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us, we totally miss the Point__ike the two on the road to Emmaus. As Luke 24 shows, it's possible to read the Bible, study the Bible, and memorize large portions of the Bible, while missing the whole point of the Bible. It's entirely possible, in other words, to read the stories and miss the Story.

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

I wish I could say that everything I do is for God__ glory but I can__. And neither can you. What I can say is Jesus_ blood covers all my efforts to glorify myself.

Because Jesus was someone, you__e free to be no one.

Daily Christian living, in other words, is daily Christian dying: dying to our trivial comforts, soul-shrinking conveniences, arrogant preferences, and self-centered entitlements, and living for something much larger than what makes us comfortable and safe.

Because Jesus paid it all, we are free from the need to do it all. Our identity, worth, and value, are not anchored in what we can accomplish but in what Jesus accomplished for us.

The hub of Christianity is not 'do something for Jesus.' The hub of Christianity is 'Jesus has done everything for you.' And my fear is that too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard our pleas for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of Christian faith is our love for God instead of God's love for us. Don't get me wrong--what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.