Tullian Tchividjian

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.

Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.

We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God's law and God's gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things.

God reminds us again and again that things between He and us are forever fixed. They are the rendezvous points where God declares to us concretely that the debt has been paid, the ledger put away, and that everything we need, in Christ we already possess. This re-convincing produces humility, because we realize that our needs are fulfilled. We don__ have to worry about ourselves anymore. This in turn frees us to stop looking out for what we think we need and liberates us to love our neighbor by looking out for what they need.

most people live their life as if their justification depends on their sanctification: if I do and become all that I must do and become, God will love me and accept me.

The passive righteousness of faith frees me from passing final judgment on myself.

The tragic irony in all of this is that when we focus so strongly on our need to get better, we actually get worse.

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__.

If you uproot the idol and fail to plant the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.

An institution theoretically devoted to providing comfort to those in need (the church) is in trouble because it has embraced the same pressure cooker we find everywhere else.

one primary enemy of the Gospel__egalism__omes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they__e told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this __ront-door legalism_). Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this __ack-door legalism_).