Tullian Tchividjian's Blog, page 24

“Christian” Narcissism

Below is an excerpt from my most recent article in Leadership Journal on our misguided understanding of Christian growth:

The way many of us think about sanctification is, well, not very sanctified. In fact, it’s downright narcissistic. We thinking about how we’re doing, if we’re growing, whether we’re doing it right or not. We spend too much time brooding over our failures and reflecting on our successes. We seem to believe that the focus of the Christian faith is the life of the Christian.

Reflecting this common assumption, someone who was frustrated with something I had written said to me not long ago, “Don’t you know that the focus of the New Testament is the personal holiness of the Christian?”

What? Seriously? To keep calm, I replayed Mr. Miyagi in my head, “Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out …”

The truth is, we spend way too much time thinking about ourselves, and we justify this spiritualized navel-gazing by reasoning that this is what God wants us to be doing.

You can read the whole thing here.

LIBERATE 2013: Grace In Practice

Liberate 2013 from Coral Ridge | LIBERATE on Vimeo.

Last February, over 1000 people from 31 states and 3 countries gathered for 3 days in Ft. Lauderdale for the launch of LIBERATE. I, along with some of my friends (Mike Horton, Scotty Smith, Paul Tripp, Elyse Fitzpatrick, David Zahl, Darrin Patrick, and Rod Rosenbladt), considered the nature of unmeasured grace and the reality that “while our sin reaches far, God’s grace reaches farther.” It was a three day grace-fest where our minds were informed and our hearts were enlarged. I met so many amazing people and made so many new friends. We had so much fun. I was sad when it was over. (Read a Recap here).

Immediately after the conference, we started planning for LIBERATE 2013. We couldn’t wait to do it again. And this year we’re taking it up a notch.

Real life is long on law and short on grace—the demands never stop, the failures pile up, fear sets in. The idea that there is an unconditional love that relieves the pressure, forgives our failures and replaces our fear with faith seems too good to be true. Longing for hope in a world of hype, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the news we’ve been waiting to hear: God sent Jesus to set sinners free. Jesus came to liberate us from the weight of having to make it on our own, from the demand to measure up. He came to emancipate everyday people from the burden to get it all right, from the obligation to fix ourselves, find ourselves, and free ourselves.

That, of course, is the best news imaginable. But it sometimes feels a little high-flying—an idea floating like a blimp above our heads but never quite landing where we live. Our hope and prayer is that this conference will help to get this good news on the ground of everyday life. We want you to see and savor this radical one-way love so that it impacts your family, your church, and your relationships–trusting that hearing grace proclaimed will lead to experiencing “grace in practice.”

Join me, Bryan Chapell, Elyse Fitzpatick, Mark Galli, Ray Ortlund, David Zahl, Paul Tripp, Sally Lloyd-Jones, Steve Brown, Tony Merida, and the White Horse Inn on February 21-13, 2013 at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale for LIBERATE 2013: Grace in Practice. We will take a close look at grace in the Christian life, personal failure, families, the church, pop-culture, and more.

The experience of grace landing right where we live promises to be a bit unnerving, but God is in the habit of rattling cages so that the captives can go free.

You Believe In Karma

The following is another excerpt from my forthcoming book Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free

“Good people get good stuff. Bad people get bad stuff.” Or as the Beatles sang with their last gasp on Abbey Road, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

Now I love John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but I take issue with them here, and I know I am in the minority. After all, the world runs on retribution. “This for that” comes as naturally to us as breathing. Moralists interpret misfortune as the karmic result of misbehavior. This for that. “You failed to obey God, so He gave your child an illness.” Such rule-based economies of punishment and reward may be the default mode of the fallen human heart, but that doesn’t make them any less brutal!

This does not mean that sin doesn’t have consequences. If you blow all of your money on booze, you will likely reap poverty, loneliness, and cirrhosis of the liver. Simple cause and effect. But to conclude that suffering people have somehow heaped up trouble for themselves on the Cosmic Registry and that God is doling out the misery in direct proportion would be more than mistaken; it would be cruel. The humorist Jack Handey perceptively parodied such ideas in his Saturday Night Live-featured book Deep Thoughts:

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is “God is crying.” And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is, “Probably because of something you did.”

Hahaha…not really.

The truth is that while we laugh at something as silly as Handey’s “deep thought”, most of us are naturally governed by this kind of thinking regarding God.

So, while no one can deny that our actions have consequences—that if you put your finger in a light socket you will “reap” a shock—we do God (and ourselves!) a great disservice when we project this schema onto Him. That is, when we moralize our suffering and that of others. The lab test results come back positive, and we interpret it as some sort of punishment. Or your loved ones interpret it that way. Your marriage falls apart, and you assume God is meting out His judgment on your indiscretions. Most of us—not all, I’m afraid—would stop short of blaming the citizens of New Orleans for the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, but that doesn’t mean we don’t moralize our suffering in other, more subtle ways.

The truth is that when you and I insist on that all-too-comfortable paradigm of cosmic score keeping, we’re no longer talking about Christianity. In fact, what we reveal is that we’ve adopted (unwittingly) a Westernized form of Hinduism. We are talking, in other words, about karma. If you are a bad person and things are going well for you, it is only a matter of time before karma catches up with you and “you get yours.” If you are good person, the inverse is true: just be patient and your good deeds will come back to you. This is a simplification of the complex Hindu understanding of history as determined by the past lives of others: that we are all stuck in an eternal cycle of suffering perpetuated by reincarnation.

Westerners are understandably reticent to embrace the notion that the universe is paying us back for a prior life of boozing, spousal abuse, or tax evasion. We believe in the inherent goodness of human beings, after all! We prefer to keep the cycle within the confines of a single life. But the appeal of this perspective should be fairly obvious: no one gets away with anything. If someone harmed you, she will suffer. If you do good, you will have a good life. Karma puts us in control. The problem in this worldview comes, as it always does, when we flip it around. If you are suffering, you have done something to merit it. Pain is proof.

No doubt many of us would object to the accusation that we share or agree with such a mind-set. That’s simplistic nonsense, we might think. No one with any education or experience would ever hold to such a juvenile relational bartering system. But hold on for a moment. Think about the last fight you had with your significant other—was there an element of deserving tucked into the conflict? “You hurt me, so now I’ll hurt you”? I can’t tell you how much self-abuse I’ve come across in my years of ministry that had some element of inward-directed retribution at its core: the teenage girl who punishes herself by cutting her arms; or men who sleep around to prove that they deserve the contempt of their wives. If we cling to quid pro quo when dealing with others and ourselves, why wouldn’t we project it onto God (or the universe)? We are all helpless moralizers, especially when it comes to suffering.

On the opposite end of our natural tendency to moralize life and suffering stands the counter-intuitive affirmation of Christianity. Christianity affirms that Jesus severed the link between suffering and deserving once for all on Calvary. God put the ledgers away and settled the accounts. The good news of the gospel is NOT that good people get good stuff. It’s not that life is cyclical and that “what comes around goes around.” Rather, it’s that the bad get the best, the worst inherit the wealth, and the slave becomes a son (Rom.5:8).

Because the truth is, that it’s just misery to try to keep count of what God is no longer counting. Your entries keep disappearing.

Known And Loved

Grace is God’s one-way love, “that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5: 8). Grace is more than a doctrinal proposition, it is an experiential reality that works radically and disruptively, justifying and freeing us to love our neighbor. But what does it look and feel like when it confronts the pressures of our experience on a daily basis?

I asked a group of friends to address this very thing in a five part July sermon series at Coral Ridge while I’m away. The series is entitled  Grace on the Ground and it is intended to help sinners think about how grace works in and through the challenges we face on a daily basis.

Two weeks ago my friend Jono Linebaugh’s (Professor of NT at Knox Theological Seminary and Content Manager of LIBERATE) preached a sermon in this summer series called “Known and Loved.” I’ve listened to it twice–and I rarely listen to any sermon twice. It’s that good. I strongly encourage you to take 35 minutes and listen. Enjoy!

Known and Loved | Jono Linebaugh from Coral Ridge | LIBERATE on Vimeo.

Theology Of Glory Vs.Theology Of The Cross

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free

It is not exactly breaking news to say that our culture has an aversion to suffering, regardless of how inescapable it may be. This is because we—you and me—have an aversion to suffering. Who wants to suffer? But the conscious avoidance of pain is one thing; the complete intolerance, or outright denial of it, is another.

Why do we run so hard from something so inexorable, so much so that we often make the painful situation even worse? Setbacks fly in the face of our dearly held beliefs about progress. They rub against the grain of our collective obsession with personal control, that is, our sin. Celebrated American novelist Jonathan Franzen put it this way:

We have this notion in this country, not only of endless economic growth but of endless personal growth. I have a certain characterological antipathy to the notion of we’re all getting better and better all the time. And it’s so clearly belied by our experience. You may get better in certain ways for 10 years, but one day you wake up and although things are a little bit different, they’re not a lot different.

It’s true. Despite the inevitability of suffering, everything in our culture points toward progress, progress, progress. And I’m not just talking about classic rock anthems like The Beatles’ “Getting Better,” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.” Unfortunately, our churches often espouse a Christianized version of this gospel of progress, framing the life of belief as primarily about personal improvement. What may start out as a faithful by-product of Christian belief soon becomes its focal point, inadvertently serving as the foothold for Original Sin, aka the innate God complex hiding within us all. Such is the default curved-in-on-itself position of the human heart, or what Augustine termed incurvatus in se.

Perhaps you’ve heard this tendency expressed as a legalistic formula: “The reason for suffering and the lack of abundant life among Christians is due to lack of faith. Or, if you fall ill or come upon hard times financially, maybe it’s because there’s a hidden skeleton in your closet that needs to be confessed and exposed.” Sadly, such thinking has also seeped into our evangelism: “Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and all your dreams will come true”—despite the fact that the general tenor of the New Testament suggests increased suffering for believers, not decreased. Which isn’t to say that Christians never experience victory over areas of compulsive sin and brokenness. They certainly do! But as beautiful and miraculous as these thanksgivings may be, they are not the gospel. In fact, the thinking that ties suffering to faithlessness actually is in the Bible—but it’s not affirmed, it’s condemned! What is affirmed, however, is God working through our afflictions.

This is where Martin Luther, the great leader of the Protestant Reformation, comes in. One of his most important and lasting contributions to the faith involves the distinction between the “theology of glory” and the “theology of the cross.” These two divergent views did not originate with Luther. They are as old as the hills; he simply gave them names. It may sound like an esoteric distinction, but it is just as essential today as it was in the sixteenth century.

“Theologies of glory” are approaches to Christianity (and to life) that try in various ways to minimize difficult and painful things, or to move past them rather than looking them square in the face and accepting them. Theologies of glory acknowledge the cross, but view it primarily as a means to an end—an unpleasant but necessary step on the way to personal improvement, the transformation of human potential. As Luther puts it, the theologian of glory “does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore he prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil.” The theology of glory is the natural default setting for human beings addicted to control and measurement. This perspective puts us squarely in the driver’s seat, after all.

One way to understand this dynamic is to look at the ways people talk about painful experiences. If someone has just undergone an ugly, protracted divorce, for example, he or she might say something like, “Well, it was never a good marriage anyway,” or “But I’ve really learned a lot from this whole experience.” This kind of rationalization tries to make something bad sound like it is good. It is a strategy to avoid looking pain and grief directly in the face, to avoid acknowledging that we wish life were different but are powerless to change it.

In the church, one hallmark of a theology of glory is the unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of ongoing sin and lack of transformation in Christians. A sign that you are operating with a theology of glory is when your faith feels like a fight against these realities instead of a resource for accepting them. The English poet W. H. Auden captured it beautifully when he wrote,

We would rather die in dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.

A theology of the cross, in contrast, understands the cross to be the ultimate statement of God’s involvement in the world on this side of heaven. A theology of the cross accepts the difficult thing rather than immediately trying to change it or use it. It looks directly into pain, and “calls a thing what it is” instead of calling evil good and good evil. It identifies God as “hidden in [the] suffering.” Luther actually took things one key step further. He said that God was not only hidden in suffering, but He was at work in our anxiety and doubt. When you are at the end of your rope—when you no longer have hope within yourself—that is when you run to God for mercy. It’s admittedly difficult to accept the claim that God is somehow hidden amid all of the wreckage of our lives. But those who are willing to struggle and despair may in actuality be those among us who best understand the realities of the Christian life.

A theology of the cross defines life in terms of giving rather than taking, self-sacrifice rather than self-protection, dying rather than killing. It reorients us away from our natural inclination toward a theology of glory by showing that we win by losing, we triumph through defeat, and we become rich by giving ourselves away. Of course, our inner theologian of glory can be counted on to try to hijack the theology of the cross and make it a new, more reliable scheme for self-improvement. But the theology of the cross happens to us and in spite of us. For the suffering person, this is a word of profound hope.

To avoid confusion, a quick word about the term glory. It is indeed a biblical word that has its appropriate use. I am aiming to untangle the myriad ways we fuse God’s glory with our own glory. So the “glory” in the theology of glory is human glory focusing on human effort intended to earn God’s favor or exalt human achievement. The late great Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde put it like this:

A theology of glory … operates on the assumption that what we need is optimistic encouragement, some flattery, some positive thinking, some support to build our self-esteem. Theologically speaking it operates on the assumption that we are not seriously addicted to sin, and that our improvement is both necessary and possible. We need a little boost in our desire to do good works…. But the hallmark of a theology of glory is that it will always consider grace as something of a supplement to whatever is left of human will and power.

In the theology of glory, life becomes a ladder. Each little victory or improvement brings us one rung closer to the top—which is always just out of sight. At death, if all goes according to plan, we will enter the heavenly courts with a nicely wrapped gift for God that includes an equitable balance of our good versus bad actions, our moral scorecard, if you will. This image may seem ridiculous, but if we’re honest, it characterizes more of our religious life and mentality than we would care to admit. As we tell ourselves this story, we communicate that God exists for our benefit, happiness, self-fulfillment, and personal transformation. Those aren’t necessarily bad things, and God isn’t necessarily opposed to them, but God in Christ cannot be reduced to a means to our selfish ends. He is the end Himself!

The house of religious cards “that glory built” collapses when we inevitably encounter unforeseen pain and suffering. When the economy tanks and you lose your job of thirty years, or when, God forbid, your child gets into a car accident (or is exposed to something damaging). When you simply can’t keep your mouth shut about your in-laws even though you promised you would. When the waters rise and the levee breaks. Suddenly, the mask comes off, and the glory road reaches a dead end. We come to the end of ourselves, in other words, to our ruin, to our knees, to the place where if we are to find any help or comfort, it must come from somewhere outside of us. Much to our surprise, this is the precise place where the good news of the gospel—that God did for you what you couldn’t do for yourself—finally makes sense. It finally sounds good!

Yet the message hasn’t changed, and neither have the facts. They were there all along. Indeed, He was there all along. It might even be that He is communicating the same thing He communicated once for all on Calvary, what Fyodor Dostoyevsky paraphrased so beautifully in the fourth chapter of The Brothers Karamazov: “You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”

Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free

On October 1, my next book Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free will be released. This is by far the most important book I’ve written to date.

But it begs the question, what need is there for another book on suffering?

Certainly we have enough works on the topic already, books that attempt to explain why God allows suffering, presumably in a way that ultimately lets God off the hook. And while much smarter people than me have constructed elaborate systems in this pursuit—the fancy word for such a theory is theodicy—they are all by definition exercises in speculation. To know the Why would be to grasp the mind of God, which is something none of us can do.

We also have enough books tackling the How. That is, how suffering can and will transform our lives, how we can leverage pain and tragedy to make us better people. Results, results, results! Underneath this hopeful veneer, such philosophies tend to fall flat when things don’t go according to plan, when we find out that our power, especially in the face of suffering, is a lot more limited than we thought. Pain would not be pain if we could harness it for personal gain, though the tendency to attempt to do so is a universal one.

This is not one of those books either.

This is not to say that How and Why are not honest questions. Of course they are! And Glorious Ruin explores a few common attempts to answer them. But How and Why can also be a prison. They can leave us cold and confused, just as they left Job cold and confused when his friends tried to formulate their own tedious answers. Information is seldom enough to heal a wounded heart.

The question I  emphasize instead—and the only one that will ultimately point us toward the truth—is the Who amid our suffering. Which is the only question that God has seen fit to answer, concretely, in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Answers to prayers for help are a problem only when you look on God as a divine vending machine programmed to dispense Cokes, Camels, lost keys, and freedom from gall-bladder trouble to anyone who has the right coins. It isn’t that [God] has a principle about not starting cars—or about starting them. What he has a principle about is you…. He loves you; his chief concern is to be himself for you. (Robert Capon)

Do you see it? We may not ever fully understand why God allows the suffering that devastates our lives. We may not ever find the right answers to how we’ll dig ourselves out. There may not be any silver lining, especially not in the ways we would like. But we don’t need answers as much as we need God’s presence in and through the suffering itself.

For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God’s chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be Himself for you. In other words, our ruin may not ultimately spell our undoing. It may in fact spell the beginning of faith. And in the end, that is enough. Gloriously so.

(I’ll be traveling extensively this fall to speak about the book. Check here to see how you and your church can participate.)

The Sermon On The Mount For Those Who Have Crashed And Burned

Last week I finished a nine week series on the Sermon on the Mount entitled “The Glorious Impossibility.” I opened the series by saying that we naturally treat the Sermon on the Mount like we typically treat the rest of the Bible–like it’s a divine self-help manual, a blueprint for having your best life now. But actually the Sermon on the Mount is intended to show that the Christian life is a glorious impossibility.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus wants to set us free by showing us our need for a rightness we can never attain on our own–an impossible righteousness that’s always out of our reach. The purpose of the Sermon on the Mount is to demolish all notions that we can reach the righteousness required by God–it’s about exterminating all attempts at self-sufficient moral endeavor.

So, in the deepest sense, the Sermon on the Mount is not a goal, but a wall we crash into so that we finally cry out “I can’t do it!”

You can watch/listen to the entire series here.

Here is part 1:

The Glorious Impossibility: Part 1 | Tullian Tchividjian from Coral Ridge | LIBERATE on Vimeo.

Dating Your Wife?

I was walking down a street in New York City last year when my good friend Justin Buzzard called to tell me that he was writing a book (in his exact words) on “how to date your wife.” Somewhat taken aback, I stopped walking and said, “Your writing a book on how to date my wife?” He laughed and assured me that it wasn’t my wife he was trying to date. Rather, he explained that he was writing a book to help men think about how the gospel empowers them to be the romantic leaders in their marriages.

I know, I know. Why do we need another book on marriage? Why do we need another guy telling us already-struggling husbands what we’re not doing well? Telling me to do more and try harder only makes me want to do and try less. Been there, done that. Give me a break!

Ahh, but this is the genius of Justin’s book: he understands and clearly articulates the radical difference between a religious approach to marriage and a gospel approach to marriage.

A religious approach to marriage is the idea that if we work hard enough at something, we can earn the acceptance, approval, and life we think we deserve because of our obedient performance. Justin rightly points out that religion governs how most of us approach God and our wives: “If we live as a basically good person, we can earn God’s favor and get the decent life we deserve. If we stay committed to our wives and don’t go anywhere, God will give us a decent marriage with decent sex in a decent American town with a decent church down the street.” In other words, in arguing for becoming the romantic leaders of our marriages, Justin argues against a guilt-driven, performance-oriented, approval-seeking, “do more, try harder”, approach to marriage.

Instead, he argues for a gospel-empowered approach to marriage. Justin writes, “A man comes alive when he finally feels in his guts that religion can’t fuel his life or his marriage, when he makes the painfully sweet discovery that there is only one fuel source can get the engine running again: Grace.” Right on! See, I told you he “gets it.” He understands that since we already have all of the affection, approval, and favor we could possibly crave in Christ, we are now free to love our wives without fear or reservation.

Sadly, the fear that our love will not be reciprocated is something that paralyzes many of our marriages. It prevents husbands from loving their wives “as Christ loved the church.” We come to this conclusion: I will love you only to the degree that you love me. It’s an attitude that enslaves us. But the gospel frees us from that.

I enjoy receiving love from my wife. I’m ecstatic when Kim loves me and expresses affection toward me. Something in me comes alive when she does that. But I’ve learned this freeing truth: I don’t need that love, because in Jesus, I receive all the love I need. This in turn liberates me to love her without apprehension or condition. I get to revel in her enjoyment of my love without needing anything from her in return. I get love from Jesus so that I can give love to her.

This is what Justin is talking about. The gospel sets us free to become the romantic leaders of our marriages without fright or hesitation. Because we have been forever wooed by Jesus, we are now free to forever woo our wives.

This small book is biblically sound, theologically rich, sensitively illustrated, and profoundly practical. If you read it prayerfully, God will show you his heart for you which will in turn enlarge your heart for your wife.

Read it. It’s good. It’s really good.

The Gospel For Christians

At LIBERATE 2012, I sat down to talk with my two good friends Mike Horton and Rod Rosenbladt (The Rod Father) about the Gospel for Christians. Enjoy…

ROUNDTABLE ON THE GOSPEL: Tullian Tchividjian , Mike Horton, Rod Rosenbladt | LIBERATE 2012 from Coral Ridge | LIBERATE on Vimeo.

Discipleship Depends on God

The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment that God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous. Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasm.

- Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, 128-129