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Jesus + Nothing = Everything
Matt Johnson, the Manager of Re:lit had the opportunity to talk with Tullian Tchividjian about his new book, Jesus + Nothing = Everything. We didn’t want you to miss anything so, we’re breaking it down into three posts. Below is the first.
Matt: Today we’re interviewing our friend Tullian Tchividjian, he’s the senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale Florida, and he’s also Visiting Professor of Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary and a grandson of Billy and Ruth Graham. Tullian was the founding pastor of the former New City Church that merged with Coral Ridge in April of 2009. His book Jesus + Nothing = Everything is his first book since his devastating year in the loss of his father and being called to pastor at Coral Ridge.
What is God Teaching Me?
There are a few powerful sentences in the beginning of this book that really stood out to me, and I think it will set up the context of what you went through at Coral Ridge when your churches merged, so I wanted to read that and maybe you could comment.
In the first chapter you say, “Never had I experienced something so tough. I could hardly eat, had trouble sleeping, and was continually battling nausea. I felt at the absolute end of myself. God! What in the world are you doing? I need resurrecting.” That’s a pretty powerful way to start a book. What were you experiencing? What were you recounting when you wrote that?
Tullian: As I spell out in the book, 2009 was by far the most painful year of my life. That was the year my father got sick and ended up dying, it was also the year the church I had planted 5½ years earlier, New City Church, merged with Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, which was a well-established, well-known church about 10 miles south of where New City was.
A Church Merger Under God’s Lead
Coral Ridge was founded in 1959 by Dr. D. James Kennedy. The services at Coral Ridge were televised, and Dr. Kennedy was a real pioneer when it came to radio and all of those things, so when he died in 2007, Coral Ridge approached me and asked if I would consider being their pastor. I said, “I’m humbled, I’m honored, but I’m not interested.” They came back a couple months later and asked again, and again I said, “I’m humbled, I’m honored, but I’m not interested.” Five months later they came back and that’s when we started talking about possibly merging the two churches.
A group of men from New City and a group of men from Coral Ridge and me met once a week for months and went through a meticulous due diligence process to see if a merger could work. God’s leading was unambiguous, it was very clear. So in April of 2009 – Easter Sunday to be exact – the two churches came together as one new church. There was a small but vocal minority of long-time people at Coral Ridge who opposed the merger before it happened, and then once it happened, they started to attack my leadership and the leaders around me. It created so much unrest and division inside the church and I was faced, for the very first time, with a situation that I had never been faced with before.
Public Attack and a Challenge to God
There were all sorts of things happening inside the church and there was an all out character assassination on me. Because my family is well-known and because the church is well-known, the papers and Associated Press picked up on it. It seemed like everybody in the country knew there was fighting taking place at Coral Ridge and it was a terrible, terrible time for about six months.
In the middle of that time, my family and I had to get away just to maintain some measure of sanity. We went to the southwest coast of Florida where we vacation every year and I was looking over the Gulf of Mexico one morning with my Bible opened to Colossians chapter 1 and had it out with God. I was frustrated with God. I was afraid. I was angry. I kept asking God why he had done what he had done.
It was hard enough putting this church plant that was doing remarkably well on the altar and merging it with Coral Ridge. Even if everyone at Coral Ridge had welcomed us with open arms, it would have still been difficult, and so here I was bargaining with God basically saying I had put my baby on the altar and this is what I get in return? And I finally just lashed out and said, “Just give me my old life back.”
God’s Challenge to Me
And it was through Colossians 1, which is really the birth of this book in my heart and mind, that God gently but firmly showed me it really wasn’t my old life that I wanted back but my old idols and he loved me too much to give them to me. I was just floored by the fact that I had for so long, unknowingly, depended on human approval and human acceptance to make me feel like I mattered, to validate me, to make me feel important.
For the first time in my life, human approval and human acceptance was being stripped away and God was revealing to me all the things I was depending on that were smaller than Jesus, trying to make my life worth living. It didn’t take the pain away, but it really showed me the source of my pain. It wasn’t what other people were saying about me and it wasn’t that my reputation was being soiled, it was that things were being taken away from me graciously by God. I was holding onto those more dearly than him and I was being stripped. God was breaking my legs and teaching me grace. He was teaching me the gospel. I tell people all the time, I never ever want to go through anything like that again, but I would never trade that experience for all the money in the world because of the way God taught me the gospel.
Living Out What I’d Been Preaching
It was during that time that I really rediscovered functionally the NOW power of the gospel. I had been preaching the gospel with great passion for many years. I had been preaching it with great conviction and yet it wasn’t genuinely functional until God brought me through the crucible of pain and suffering. I began rediscovering the reality and beauty and the brightness of the gospel.
Everything I needed and longed for in Christ, I already possessed.
It was during that time that God was helping me connect the dots between what I was experiencing and what Christ had already accomplished for me. And it was specifically in Colossians chapter 1, second part of verse 12-14 where Paul says you’ve already been transferred, you’ve already been qualified, you’ve already been forgiven, you’ve already been redeemed, everything you could possibly want, everything you could possibly desire, is already yours in Christ. It’s a done deal.
It Really Is Finished
Now I live my life under a banner that reads, “IT IS FINISHED”, and it is that reality gripping my heart that’s set me free in ways that I had never ever been free before and it radically changed me. I tell people all the time that my focus is singular; my passion is myopic now. I don’t care as much as I used to what other people think about me, both good and bad. I’m freer than I’ve ever been and my preaching has radically changed. Everything about me has changed. I’m still learning, obviously, and will until the day I die, but I really, really learned how the power of Christ’s finished work intersects with my daily grind in a brand new way.
Matt: That is powerful. Just to have your character maligned and be under the pressure cooker of life in that way; that would just seem like such a nightmare. It’s really interesting that in the middle of that pain and that crisis that God shows up in that way.
Next post: Tullian talks about idols.