Surprised by Grace Quotes

“God's ability to clean things up is infinitely greater than our ability to mess things up.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“God's capacity to forgive is greater than our capacity to sin; while our sin reaches far, God's grace reaches farther. It's a message revealing the radical contrast between the sinful heart of mankind and the gracious heart of mankind's Creator.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“The gospel doesn’t make bad people good; it makes dead people alive. That’s the difference between the gospel of Jesus Christ and every other world religion.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“The gospel doesn’t make bad people good; it makes dead people alive.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted do not bother coming to our churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.2”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Jesus came to show us that the gospel explains success in terms of giving, not taking; self-sacrifice, not self-protection; going to the back, not getting to the front. The gospel shows that we win by losing, we triumph through defeat, we achieve power through service, and we become rich by giving ourselves away.

In fact, in gospel-centered living we follow Jesus in laying down our lives for those who hate us and hurt us. We spend our lives serving instead of being served, and seeking last place, not first. Gospel-centered people are those who love giving up their place for others, not guarding their place from others--because their value and worth is found in Christ, not their position.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“A tribal mindset is antithetical to the gospel. The gospel demands that we be missional, because the gospel is the story of God sacrificing himself for his enemies.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“As C. S. Lewis reminded us in Surprised by Joy, “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Grace can be defined as unconditional acceptance granted to an undeserving person by an unobligated giver.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“in God’s city, the inhabitants love people and walk on gold, while in man’s city, the inhabitants love gold and walk on people.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Living for anything else besides God leads to death, not freedom.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Cheer up; you’re a lot worse off than you think you are, but in Jesus you’re far more loved than you ever could have imagined.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“God ensures that his unworthy servant is made fully aware of this undeserved deliverance.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Like Adam and Eve, each time we sin we’re choosing to be our own deity. We’re placing ultimate trust in ourselves, not in our Creator and Savior and Lord.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make good people good; it makes dead people alive. That's the difference between the gospel of Jesus Christ and every other world religion. All the others exhort their followers to save themselves by being good, by conforming their lives to whatever their worshiped deity is. But the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Flight from God always leads downward. It culminates not in the vivacious life we imagined but in what amounts only to stagnant sleep. It's why so many people seem to exist without ever really living. In fact, they aren't really living; they're only going through the motions—rarely if ever experiencing the internal shalom they were designed to enjoy from God, because they're running from him.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“There is but one good,” C. S. Lewis writes in The Great Divorce; “that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Nineveh represented the sin center of the world. Everything godless happened there; by all accounts its people were perverse, sadistic, and evil. The very fact that Jonah was even sent to such a place reveals that God’s capacity to forgive is greater than our capacity to sin.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Submitting self to God is the only real freedom—because the deepest slavery is self-dependence, self-reliance. When you live your life believing that everything (family, finances, relationships, career) depends primarily on you, you’re enslaved to your strengths and weaknesses. You’re trying to be your own savior. Freedom comes when we start trusting in God’s abilities and wisdom instead of our own. Real life begins when we transfer our trust from our own efforts to the efforts of Christ.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of on my own performance is a very freeing and joyous experience.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Through the gospel God counts your sins against Christ, not against you. He offers us acceptance based not on what we do or don’t do, but on what Christ has already done. It’s an acceptance that can be neither gained by our achievements nor forfeited by our failures.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Jonah is a storied presentation of the gospel, a story of sin and grace, of desperation and deliverance. It reveals the fact that while you and I are great sinners, God is a great Savior, and that while our sin reaches far, his grace reaches farther. This story shows that God is in the business of relentlessly pursuing rebels like us and that he comes after us not to angrily strip away our freedom but to affectionately strip away our slavery so we might become truly free. It’s a truth reflected well in an opening line from a nineteenth-century hymn by the blind Scottish pastor George Matheson: “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“Countless millions of people live in self-protective mode every day. They’re afraid to love and to be loved because they’re terrified of being taken. They’re desperately afraid of getting trampled, since all of us, to one degree or another, have been trampled in the past.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“God’s ability to clean things up is infinitely greater than our ability to mess things up.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“There’s just as much sin inside the church as outside.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“most idols are good things in our lives that we turn into ultimate things,”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“When true repentance is offered, God promises to forgive and restore.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“God’s capacity to forgive is greater than our capacity to sin.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“In the end, in the bigger story, God emerges as the sole superstar, the sole hero.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels

“The gospel is for the strong and mighty (like the Ninevites) only when they’re humbled and repentant.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels