Carnage & Grace: Confessions of an Adulterous Heart

by Tullian Tchividjian

But that truly is my desire—that at the conclusion of this book you’d still feel uncomfortable, if not outright uneasy, about human beings like me but ultimately hopeful when it comes to God.

when I honestly acknowledge those ways in which 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 clearly a sign that I’ve gotten worse.

The truth is, my life over the years doesn’t look like a strong person getting stronger or a good person getting better—it looks like a weak and lost person who needs the strength and goodness of God.

having the self-awareness to admit that while I am far weaker and more screwed up than I may have initially thought, God has proven to be far stronger and more merciful than I could’ve ever dreamed. Knowing that is freedom.

these aren’t parables about found people pursuing lost people. These are parables about God pursuing found people who get lost.

God’s love and forgiveness are big enough to cover the fact that your greatest failure may be ahead of you.

What made the religious fit-ins furious was Jesus’ derelict habit of loving sinners.

Sensible people, of course, should need only about thirty seconds of careful thought to realize that getting off scot-free is the only way any of us is going to get off at all.

what keeps us connected to God is not that we hold tightly to him, but that he holds tightly to us even when, and possibly especially when, we let go.

Therein lies the beauty of grace. It sets you free to talk truthfully about yourself without fear because the only person’s approval you ultimately need is God’s, and you already have it.

If you’ve made a mess of your life (like I have), then you probably struggle with a lot of guilt, shame, and regret (like I do). And if you’re a parent and the mess you’ve made has hurt your kids, then the guilt, shame, and regret you probably feel is often paralyzing (like mine is).

rather than reveling in and resting on the fact that I was already fully known, fully loved, and fully affirmed by God—thereby setting me free from needing anything more from anyone else—I went lookin’ for more in all the wrong places.

My family and I needed our church family now more than ever, and it felt like they were abandoning us.

Sin unravels the lives of those who care for you; it always does. But most of all it unravels you, until you find yourself unrecognizable.

I wonder sometimes if deep down that’s what I wanted to happen all along . . . to finally get caught . . . so maybe the treadmill would finally just stop . . . just dyin’ to get off.

So, while repeated ruinous behavior is foolish, hurtful, and inexcusable, it shouldn’t be shocking. It shouldn’t surprise us when fallen people keep falling down, and broken people keep breaking things. We should expect sinners to sin. Hell, even Saint Paul lamented that the things he knew he shouldn’t do, he kept on doing (see Romans 7).

Eugene Peterson summed it up best: “When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God does not go off and leave us—he enters into our trouble and saves us.”19 So he does. Every time.

when our faith (or lack thereof) feels like a fight against the realities of our faults and pains instead of a resource for accepting them, we are on the wrong track.

Our hope is not that we will (in this life) get past our guilt, shame, and regret. Rather, it is that God promises to be with us when we struggle with our guilt, shame, and regret.

But here’s what I learned during that time: we like our leaders to admit screwed-upness in theory. But screwed-upness in practice? That’s a different animal. I’ve noticed, for instance, that people love it when leaders say they are fallen and broken just like the rest of us, until that leader does something that the rest of us fallen and broken people do.

In his book The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, William Hale White describes Mr. Rutherford’s childhood pastor, Brother Holderness, and his willingness to confess publicly that he was a sinner, a broken man just like everybody else. But, White says, if the pastor would have confessed one actual indiscretion, he “would have been visited by suspension or expulsion.”30

it is one thing to admit that you’re a sinner; it is another thing altogether to admit your sins.

attaching our identity to our activity will put us on a roller coaster of misery because we spend all our time working toward an identity rather than from one.

we can say: “I’m the one God loves.” That’s our identity.

while I have to live the rest of my life with the consequences of my choices during that season—the most painful being watching those I love suffer the lifelong effects of decisions I made— I never have to deal with God being against me because of my screwups. Ever.

Those large-hearted, beautifully busted-up people learned of what I’d done and essentially said, “Welcome. You’re one of us.” They never blinked, not once. Grace was there, on the house.

Fallen people ought to be able to fall, when they inevitably do (again and again), into the hands of a loving people.

No condemnation (Romans 8:1) does not mean no consequences. But what’s equally important is that the inescapable reality of consequences does not mean the presence of condemnation.

The grace of God is not reserved for the “well-behaved.” Full stop.

If we want to reduce our life story down to one adjective, if we want to whittle our biography down to a single word, then let’s take a cue from Christ when he calls us Beloved.

Before Jesus spoke, before anything else, “he stretched out his hand and touched him” (Matthew 8:3 ESV). Jesus touched the untouchable. Solidarity with the unclean preceded everything else. We are to do likewise; that’s the church’s calling. Before we preach, before we teach, before we do anything else, we stretch out our hands and touch the sinner.

The medicine of mercy works both ways, for the giver and the receiver.

a place where sin doesn’t shock, and grace still amazes.

In “cancel culture,” any failure renders a final verdict: banned for life. Our countercultural Savior, however, will have none of it. Jesus had a word for “canceled” people: friends.

he befriended, loved, and touched the outcast, the misfit, the leper, the liar, the sexually deviant. He refused to dismiss those who had been dismissed, reject those who had been rejected, denounce those who had been denounced, and shame those who had been shamed.

“Our drug of choice these days,” tweeted Nadia Bolz-Weber, “seems to be knowing who we’re better than.”

while our culture (including the church) cancels people who have done terrible things, Jesus cancels the terrible things that people are canceled for.

Have I arrived? Ha!—that’s funny. No, not by a long shot.

God and his grace meets us in our shit-fuckery, not outside of it.