In the Now

Tullian Tchividjian closes his book, Jesus + Nothing = Everything with two great chapters, but I wanted to share some thoughts specifically from Chapter 11.  In this chapter, he challenges us not to just know this information, but live it.  I again recommend this book to all of you.  Here are my final quotes from this book:

"It's one thing to affirm the gospel; it's something altogether different to experience its power where the rubber meets the road of life."

"my passion, as a preacher and a pastor and a Christian, is to show others how the gospel of grace really speaks with practical hope into everything that fallen people will face in this broken world."

"Paul doesn't pray that the Colossians will find something they don't have; rather he prays they'll grow in their awareness and understanding of what they already have."

"Bad behavior happens when we fail to believe that everything we need, in Christ we already have; it happens when we fail to believe in the rich provisional resources that are already ours in the gospel. Conversely, good behavior happens when we daily rest in and receive the finished work of Christ in deeper and deeper ways, smashing any sense of need to secure for ourselves anything beyond what Christ has already secured for us."

"The key to Christian growth, then, is not first behaving better; it's believing better . . ."

"Growth always happens "in grace." In other words, the truest measure of our growth in not our behavior; it's our grasp of grace-a grasp which involves coming to deeper and deeper terms with the unconditionality of God's love."

"In short, I spend way too much time thinking about me and what I need to do and far too little time thinking about Jesus and what he's already done."

"We're no longer sin-centered at our core. At our core, we're now God-centered."

"Identity (who we are) precedes practicality (what we do)."

"I need to be told by those around me that every time I sin, I'm momentarily suffering from an identity crisis: forgetting who I actually belong to, what I really want at my remade core, and all that is already mine in Christ."

"one of the marks of a truly maturing Christian-is that we begin to love the things God loves, and to want the things God wants, and to hate the things God hates. In this regard, the law guides us well, and it guides wisely. It tells us what God wants and who God is. Yes the law is good. But while the law guides, it does not give. "

"The fact is, however, that the only way licentious people start to obey is when they get a taste of God's radical, unconditional acceptance of sinners."