Tullian Tchividjian, the grandson of famed evangelist Billy Graham, has admitted that "everything my former life was built on, is dead" and said that over the past few years, he's come "face to face" with both the "crushing power of the law and the curing power of love."
Tchividjian, who two years ago lost his church and his wife to an adultery scandal, reflected on sin and God's unconditional love in a blog post.
"Over the last two and half years, I have come face to face with the crushing power of the law and the curing power of love in ways I never thought possible," he said. "In the form of well-deserved, far-reaching, devastating, life-altering consequences for my willful sin against God and others, the law did what the law was created to do: kill."
"Everything my former life was built on, is dead," he continued. "Dead. Thankfully, lawful consequences have a way of putting to death everything in us that needs to die. But (and this is very important) they do not carry the power to make us alive. Love-and love alone-can do that."
The Jesus + Nothing = Everything author said that a person loved in weakness blossoms.
"You and I both know this is experientially true," he said. "Love-not law-makes dead things alive."
"The ultimate expression of this, of course, is the One who came into our messiness with His mercy," he added. "He came to meet our failures with His forgiveness. Our guilt with His grace. Our badness with His goodness. Our rebellion with His redemption. This undeserved, unconditional love meets us at the bottom of our guilt and shame to replace our heart of stone with a heart of flesh-raising us from death to life."
As reported, Tchividjian stepped down in June of 2015 from his position as pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after admitting to an extramarital affair. The South Florida Presbytery later stripped him of his pastoral credentials.
Tchividjian, who subsequently divorced his wife, Kim, and last year remarried, earlier said his website, launched in August, is for those who, like him, have fallen, and are in desperate need of a Savior.
"If you can identify with a status of 'Sinner' that is awful, and costly, and destructive of your life and the lives of others, then I invite you to 'come along with me,'" he said in an earlier blog post.
"Come with me to your deepest bottom, and together, there, let us find hope and comfort and love and forgiveness and grace and mercy. Because the bad news that we are all guilty is met with the best news that God loves, forgives, and heals the broken hearts of guilty people. After all, God's office of grace IS at the end of our rope."
He concluded: Therefore, I want all of us, together, to discover that we can still have hope amidst the ruins of our lives because Jesus plus nothing still equals everything."
Read Tchividjian's full blog post here.
