Paul David Tripp
Paul was born in Toledo, Ohio to Bob and Fae Tripp on November 12, 1950. Paul spent all of his growing years in Toledo until his college years when his parents moved to Southern California.
At Columbia Bible College from 1968-1972, (now Columbia International University) Paul majored in Bible and Christian Education. Although he had planned to be there for only two years and then to study journalism, Paul more and more felt like there was so much of the theology of Scripture that he did not understand, so he decided to go to seminary. Paul met Luella Jackson at College and they married in 1971. In 1971, Paul took his first pastoral position and has had a heart for the local church ever since. After college, Paul completed his Master of Divinity degree at the Reformed Episcopal Seminary (now known as Philadelphia Theological Seminary) in Philadelphia (1972-1975). It was during these days that Paul’s commitment to ministry solidified. After seminary, Paul was involved in planting a church in Scranton, Pennsylvania (1977-1987) where he also founded a Christian School. During the years in Scranton, Paul became involved in music, traveling with a band and writing worship songs. In Scranton, Paul became interested in biblical counseling and decided to enroll in the D.Min program in Biblical Counseling at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. Paul then became a faculty member of the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation (CCEF) and a lecturer in biblical counseling at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. Paul has also served as Visiting Professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
In 2009, Paul joined the faculty of Redeemer Seminary (daughter school of Westminster) in Dallas, Texas as Professor of Pastoral Life and Care.[1]
Beginning in June, 2006, Paul became the President of Paul Tripp Ministries, a non-profit organization, whose mission statement is "Connecting the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life." In addition to his current role as President of Paul Tripp Ministries, on January 1, 2007, Paul also became part of the pastoral staff at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, PA where he preached every Sunday evening and lead the Ministry to Center City through March, 2011 when he resigned due to the expanding time commitments needed at Paul Tripp Ministries.
Paul, Luella, and their four children moved to Philadelphia in 1987 and have lived there ever since. Paul is a prolific author and has written twelve books on Christian living which are sold internationally. Luella manages a large commercial art gallery in the city and Paul is very dedicated to painting as an avocation.[2] Paul’s driving passion is to help people understand how the gospel of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ really does speak with practical hope into all the things they will face in this broken world. Paul is a pastor with a pastor’s heart, a gifted speaker, his journey taking him all over the world, an author of numerous books on practical Christian living, and a man who is hopelessly in love with Luella.
“True restoration takes patience, subtlety, skill, and grace.”
“The fact that you live in a broken-down house in the midst of restoration makes everything more difficult. It removes the ease and simplicity of life. It requires you to be more thoughtful, more careful. It requires you to listen and see well. It requires you to look out for difficulty and to be aware of danger. It requires you to contemplate and plan. It requires you to do what you don;t really want to do and to accept what you find difficult to accept. You want to simply coast, but you can't. Things are broken and they need to be fixed. There is work to do.”
“God is not willing for this broken-down world to stay in its sorry condition. As Creator, he is able to look at it and see promise, the promise of a total restoration of its beauty. And he has asked you to move in with him to be one of his tools of restoration.While it is hard to live in a house that needs to be restored in some ways it is even harder to live there while the restoration takes place.”
“The brokenness around you affects you in different ways at different times. .................... . At every point and every moment, your life is messier and more complicated than it really ought to be because everything is so much more difficult in such a terribly broken world.But let us also see that this world of ours is more than a broken-down house. It is a broken-down house in the process of being restored.”
“The world you live in is a lot like that broken-down house. Every single room has been dirtied and damaged by sin. Not one part of it shines with anything like the pure glory that was so evident when it was first made. Sin has left this world in a sorry condition. You see it everywhere you look.”
“If your hope disappoints you, it is the wrong kind of hope. You see, hope in God never disappoints, precisely because it is hope *in God.* This means that hope placed in any other thing will always end up disappointing.”
“Every time you ask for forgiveness, you recognize that the biggest problems you face in life exist inside of you, not outside of you.”
“It is a sweet thing that we serve a dissatisfied God who has destinations in mind for us that we would never choose for ourselves. It really is a good thing that he will not be satisfied until he has gotten us exactly where he created us and re-created us to be. Most of us would have been satisfied to stay at home, and many of us would have quit the journey long before it was completed. But our heavenly Father won't give up until each one of his children has completed the journey.”
“Being truly biblical means that my counsel reflects what the entire Bible is about. The Bible is a narrative, a story of redemption, and its chief character is Jesus Christ. He is the main theme of the narrative, and he is revealed in every passage in the book. This story reveals how God harnessed nature and controlled history to send his Son to rescue rebellious, foolish, and self-focused men and women. He freed them from bondage to themselves, enabled them to live for his glory, and gifted them with an eternity in his presence, far from the harsh realities of the Fall.”
“Every day you preach to yourself a gospel of your loneliness, inability, and lack of resources or you faithfully preach to yourself the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“The minute you hear a sermon on materialism, you're glad somebody else is there to hear it.”
“We forget that God's primary goal ia not changing our situations or relationships so that we can be happy, but changing us through our situations and relationships so that we will be holy.”
“Harboring bitterness against people is actually confessing their sin to myself, over and over again. Anger is akin to confessing their sin to God, dissatisfied that he hasn't done something and placing myself in his position as judge.”
“Personal ministry is not about always knowing what to say. It is not about fixing everything in sight that is broken. Personal ministry is about connecting people with Christ so that they are able to think as he would have them think, desire what he says is best, and do what he calls them to do even if their circumstances never get "fixed." It involves exposing hurt, lost, and confused people to God's glory, so that they give up their pursuit of their own glory and live for his.”
“Your theology won't always work toward your obedience, because your use of theology is dictated by the condition of your heart. If your heart is not submitting to the plan of God, you will actually use your theology to justify things that should not be justified.”
“Could it be that desire for a good thing has become a bad thing because that desire has become a ruling thing?”
“Running from the presence of God has the futility of "trying to shovel smoke with a rake".”
“An instrument s a tool that is actively used to change something, and God has called all of his people to be instruments of change in his redemptive hands”
“You will treat the weaknesses and failures of others with grace when you humbly admit that you’re more like them than unlike them.”
“If I am seeking to get identity from you ,I will watch you too closely, listen to you too intently, and need you to fundamentally. I will ride the roller coaster of your best and worst moments and everything in between. And because I am watching you too closely, I will become acutely aware of your weaknesses and failures. I will become overly critical, frustrated, disappointed, hopeless, and angry. I will be angry not because you are a sinner but because you have failed to deliver the one thing I seek from you: identity. But none of us will ever get the well-being that comes from knowing who we are from our relationships. Instead we will be left with damaged relationships filled with hurt, frustration and anger.”
“Our purpose (in relationship) is to get what we want but God's purpose is to give us what we really need. We think things are going well only if we are getting along with others. But God says that it is also when we are not getting along with others that he is accomplishing his purpose.God has designed our relationship to function as both a diagnosis and a cure.”
“We all look for strategies or techniques that will free us from the pain of relationships and the hard work good relationships demand. We hope that better planning, more effective communication, clear role definitions, conflict resolution strategies, gender studies, and personality typing--to name just a few -- will make the difference. There may be value in these things, but if they were all we needed, Jesus' life, death, and resurrection would be unnecessary or, at best, redundant. Skills and techniques appeal to us because they promise that relational problems can be fixed by tweaking our behavior without altering the bent of our hearts. But the Bible says something very different. It says that Christ is the only real hope for relationships because only he can dig deep enough to address the core motivations and desires of our hearts.Most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship.”
“The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.Every painful thing we experience in relationships is meant to remind us of our need for God. And every good thing we experience is meant to be a metaphor of what we can only find in Him.... We settle for the satisfaction of human relationships when they were meant to point us to the perfect relational satisfaction found only with God.”
“We rarely do anything with on single motive.”
“We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.”
“People struggling with life in a fallen world often want explanations when what they really need is imagination.”
“Embedded in the larger story of redemption is a principle we must not miss: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things in the lives of others.”
“The Bible says that our core problem, the fundamental reason we do what we do, is sin.”
“The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness and sanctification center, where flawed people place their faith in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he designed.”
“When I come to the Lord after I’ve blown it, I’ve only one argument to make. It’s not the argument of the difficulty of the environment that I am in. It’s not the argument of the difficult people that I’m near. It’s not the argument of good intentions that were thwarted in some way.I come to the Lord with only one appeal; his mercy. I’ve no other defense. I’ve no other standing. I’ve no other hope. I can’t escape the reality of my biggest problem; me! So I appeal to the one thing in my life that’s sure and will never fail. I appeal to the one thing that guaranteed not only my acceptance with God, but the hope of new beginnings and fresh starts. I appeal on the basis of the greatest gift I ever have or ever will be given.I leave the courtroom of my own defense, I come out of hiding and I admit who I am. But I’m not afraid, because I’ve been personally and eternally blessed. Because of what Jesus has done, God looks on me with mercy. It’s my only appeal, it’s the source of my hope, it’s my life. Mercy, mercy me!”
“Only love for Christ has the power to incapacitate the sturdy love for self that is the bane of every sinner, and only the grace of Christ has the power to produce that love.”
“Human beings by their very nature are worshipers. Worship is not something we do; it defines who we are. You cannot divide human beings into those who worship and those who don’t. Everybody worships; it’s just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.”
“Sin makes us moral quadriplegics.”
“Foolishness is more than being stupid, that deadly combination of arrogance and ignorance.”
“The good news of the kingdom is not freedom from hardship, suffering, and loss. It is the news of a Redeemer who has come to rescue me from myself. His rescue produces change that fundamentally alters my response to these inescapable realities. The Redeemer turns rebels into disciples, fools into humble listeners. He makes cripples walk again. In him we can face life and respond with faith, love, and hope. And as he changes us, he allows us to be a part of what he is doing in the lives of others. As you respond to the Redeemer’s work in your life, you can learn to be an instrument in his hands.”
“Becaise I love God, I want to handle his truth with accuracy, clarity, and specificity. I want to build bridges of understanding from the wisdom of the Word to the details of people's lives. And because I love people, I will not be satisfied with lobbing grenades of general truth at them. Rather, through good questions, committed listening, and careful interpretation, I will enter their world with the understanding necessary to bring Christ's help to where it is really needed.”