Top 100 Michael S. Horton Quotes
#1. Martin Luther put it well: "I have held many things in my hands, and have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess."84
Michael S. Horton
#2. The problem is that our children increasingly have not been given enough of the Christian faith even to apostatize from it properly.
Michael S. Horton
#3. It is still through the foolishness of preaching that God gives repentance and faith.
Michael S. Horton
#4. Saving faith is not the enemy of good works, but their only possible source.
Michael S. Horton
#5. As Earl Lautenslager writes, "A minister without theology is like an engineer without physics or a doctor without anatomy. He'll kill you."[
Michael S. Horton
#6. Facing another day, with ordinary callings to ordinary people all around us is much more difficult than chasing my own dreams that I have envisioned for the grand story of my life.
Michael S. Horton
#7. Bad law-preaching levels some of us; Osteen's omission of the law levels none of us; biblical preaching of the law levels all of us.
Michael S. Horton
#8. The gospel isn't just enough to justify the ungodly; it's enough to regenerate and sanctify the ungodly. However, only because (in the narrower sense) the good news announces our justification are we for the first time free to embrace God as our Father rather than our Judge.
Michael S. Horton
#10. However, the power of God unto salvation is not our passion for God, but the passion he has exhibited toward us sinners by sending his own Son to redeem us.
Michael S. Horton
#11. If you are always looking for an impact, a legacy, and success, you will not take the time to care for the things that matter.
Michael S. Horton
#13. Where the first Adam sought to break free of his created rank and ascend to the throne of God, the last Adam - who is God in his very nature - left his throne and descended to our misery.
Michael S. Horton
#14. Out of the lavishness displayed in the marvelous variety and richness of creation itself, God continues to pour out his common blessings on all people. Therefore, we neither hoard possessions as if God's gifts were scarce nor deny ourselves pleasures as if God were stingy.
Michael S. Horton
#15. It is the preaching of God's commands that brings conviction, while the proclamation of Christ in the gospel creates and keeps on creating faith and its fruit.
Michael S. Horton
#16. Where evangelical spiritualities tend to move from the individual to the family to the church, Reformed piety moves in the other direction: from the public means of grace to the family to the individual.
Michael S. Horton
#17. The same word that is faith-producing and life-generating for some is for others an occasion to become more resolute in unbelief.
Michael S. Horton
#18. Start with Christ (that is, the gospel) and you get sanctification in the bargain; begin with Christ and move on to something else, and you lose both.
Michael S. Horton
#19. We rise up to God in pride, while God descends to us in humility.
Michael S. Horton
#20. If we think the main mission of the church is to improve life in Adam and add a little moral strength to this fading evil age, we have not yet understood the radical condition for which Christ is such a radical solution.
Michael S. Horton
#21. In his bestseller, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that in the Internet age we are losing our capacity for deep thinking, reading, and conversation.
Michael S. Horton
#22. We are not called to live the gospel but to believe the gospel and to follow the law in view of God's mercies.
Michael S. Horton
#24. Pragmatism, consumerism, self-help moralism, and narcissism are simply the symptoms of a disease that is, at its heart, theological:
Michael S. Horton
#25. We've forgotten that God showers his extraordinary gifts through ordinary means of grace, loves us through ordinary fellow image bearers, and sends us out into the world to love and serve others in ordinary callings.
Michael S. Horton
#26. If the focus of our testimony is our changed life, we as well as our hearers are bound to be disappointed.
Michael S. Horton
#28. The Bible knows nothing of any contrast between truth and experience, head and heart, theology and practical living.
Michael S. Horton
#29. We are justified through faith in Christ, not through doctrinal precision.
Michael S. Horton
#30. The fact that makes sin so utterly sinful is that it is ultimately against God.
Michael S. Horton
#31. Faith in Christ is able to endure doubts - it's able to endure temptations - because it faces [them], not because it pretends [they're] not there.
Michael S. Horton
#32. So get on with life, with love, with service - fully realizing that God already has the perfect service he requires of us in his Son and now our neighbor needs our imperfect help.
Michael S. Horton
#33. The power of our activism, campaigns, movements, and strategies cannot forgive sins or raise the dead.
Michael S. Horton
#35. Doctrine severed from practice is dead; practice severed from doctrine is just another form of self-salvation and self-improvement. A disciple of Christ is a student of theology.
Michael S. Horton
#36. An implication of God's independence from the world is that he is who he is eternally and will always be. All of God's acts are consistent with his nature. God determines the world's course; the world does not determine God's course.
Michael S. Horton
#37. Only a misunderstanding of Calvin's theology could prompt the question Why pray if God is sovereign? The Reformer himself might turn the question back on us: Why pray if God isn't sovereign?
Michael S. Horton
#38. Paul never encouraged Timothy to contemplate his personal "legacy.
Michael S. Horton
#39. The gospel is not something you can just tack on to another worldview. On the contrary, it makes you rethink everything from the ground up, from the center out.
Michael S. Horton
#40. We want big results-sooner rather than later. And we've forgotten that God showers his extraordinary gifts through ordinary means of grace, loves us through ordinary fellow image bearers, and sends us into the world to love and serve others in ordinary callings. Michael Horton, Ordinary, 14
Michael S. Horton
#41. As a receiving instrument, faith comes by hearing, while idolatry is engendered by the impatient demand for that which is seen and experienced directly by the senses.
Michael S. Horton
#42. Theologies of glory ascend to heaven with humanly devised methods for bringing Christ down or for descending into the depths to make him living and real to us, but a theology of the cross receives him in the humble and weak form of those creaturely means that he has ordained.3
Michael S. Horton
#43. Preaching is necessary not because it's a magic but because God has ordained it for the justification and sanctification of sinners.
Michael S. Horton
#44. I expect that Calvin would evaluate our worship today not as too emotional, but as too narrow in its emotional repertoire.
Michael S. Horton
#45. Like every other area of life, we have come to believe that growth in Christ - as individuals or as churches - can and should be programmed to generate predictable outcomes that are unrealistic and are not even justified biblically. We want big results - sooner rather than later.
Michael S. Horton
#46. Patient dedication to the ordinary and often tedious disciplines of corporate and family worship, teaching, prayer, modeling, and mentoring have been eroded by successive waves of enthusiasm.
Michael S. Horton
#47. It is nothing new when young people want churches to pander to them. What is new is the extent to which churches have obliged.
Michael S. Horton
#48. The Next Big Thing is Christ's return. Until then, we live in hope that changes our ordinary lives here and now.
Michael S. Horton
#49. What we moderns call "addictions" God calls "idols," and all of God's good gifts are meant to raise our eyes in thanksgiving to our benevolent heavenly Father, not to fix our eyes on the gifts themselves.
Michael S. Horton
#50. God's downward descent to us in grace reversed by our upward ascent in pragmatic enthusiasm, we are increasingly becoming a sheep without a Shepherd - and all in the name of mission. Instead of churching the unchurched, we are well on our way to even unchurching the churched.
Michael S. Horton
#51. The Next Big Thing is not another Pentecost or another apostle or another political or social cause. It is Christ's return.
Michael S. Horton
#52. Nothing comes close to the wisdom that God has displayed in the salvation of sinners.
Michael S. Horton
#53. The Old Testament cannot really be understood apart from Jesus Christ, it is true, but neither can Jesus Christ be truly understood apart from the history of Israel.
Michael S. Horton
#54. Often, this cry for more practical preaching is the call of the old Adam for more self-help.
Michael S. Horton
#56. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.
Michael S. Horton
#57. If the eternal Son could become fully human without sin (Heb 4:15), then surely God can communicate his truth through thoroughly human ambassadors while preserving their writings from error.
Michael S. Horton
#58. We are passive receivers of the gift of salvation, but we are thereby rendered active worshipers in a life of thanksgiving that is exhibited chiefly in loving service to our neighbors.
Michael S. Horton
#59. Wherever Reformed convictions gained a foothold, there was a revival of classical learning and interest in the arts and sciences - not only among the highly educated, but even among the daily laborer, who also had more access to basic education.
Michael S. Horton
#60. Religion is, for the most part, our way of covering ourselves, a means of sewing respectability, morality, and charity into a patchwork garment that can hide our nakedness.
Michael S. Horton
#61. So it is not simply by understanding doctrine that we uproot narcissism and materialism. It is by actually taking our place in a local expression of that concrete economy of grace instituted by God in Christ and sustained by his Word and Spirit.
Michael S. Horton
#62. Our righteousness" - never mind our sins! - "is like filthy rags" (Isa. 64:6 NKJV;
Michael S. Horton
#63. Well, it was one more nail in the coffin of the old Adam" or "God absolved me" or maybe something as simple as, "It's been good to understand the Gospel of John a little better over these past few months.
Michael S. Horton
#64. Our families, including us, do not need more quality time, but more quantity time.
Michael S. Horton
#65. Works are witnesses to, not the basis of, our right standing before God.
Michael S. Horton
#66. If you make every sentence an exclamation or put every verb in 'bold,' then nothing stands out.
Michael S. Horton
#67. Regardless of the official theology held on paper, moralistic preaching (the bane of conservatives and liberals alike) assumes that we are not really helpless sinners who need to be rescued but decent folks who need good examples, exhortations, and instructions.
Michael S. Horton
#68. The church isn't a circle of friends, but the family of God. The covenant of grace connects generations, rooting them in that worshiping community with the "cloud of witnesses" in heaven as well as here and now (Heb 12:1).
Michael S. Horton
#69. In American religion, as in ancient Gnosticism, there is almost no sense of God's difference from us - in other words, his majesty, sovereignty, self-existence, and holiness. God is my buddy, my inmost experience, or the power source for my living my best life now.
Michael S. Horton
#70. The authority of the Scriptures does not depend on the decision of the church or the individual to validate it. To paraphrase the Westminster Confession, we receive it as the word of God because of what it is, not because of what we make of it.
Michael S. Horton
#71. Our choices are determined by our nature; we choose what we desire and we desire what is most consistent with our nature.
Michael S. Horton
#72. Everything that the Bible identifies as sin and our nature recognizes as such is something essentially good gone wrong. More precisely, it is something God has made that we have corrupted. Augustine defined the essence of sin as being curved in on ourselves
Michael S. Horton
#73. We often assume that the question, "How can I be happy?" can be successfully answered without reference to the love of God and our neighbors. And the irony is that if our biggest question is our own happiness, we can never know the God in whom we find our ultimate joy and rest.
Michael S. Horton
#74. When the focus becomes 'What would Jesus do?' instead of 'What has Jesus done?' the [conservative/liberal] labels no longer matter.
Michael S. Horton
#75. We do not read the Bible somewhere off by ourselves in a corner; we read it as a community of faith, together with the whole church in all times and places.
Michael S. Horton
#76. If we fail to recognize there is a unified whole to Scripture, we will have only a pile of pieces. Simplistic slogans, formulas and catchphrases will not suffice in conveying the richness of the Scriptures.
Michael S. Horton
#77. In every sacrament there are two things: a sign and a thing signified.
Michael S. Horton
#78. Outreach begins with a well-taught laity, stirred by the great truths of Scripture.
Michael S. Horton
#79. God's commands are focused on what it means to be in a relationship with others: to trust in God alone and to love and worship him in the way he approves and to look out for the good of our fellow image bearers.
Michael S. Horton
#80. The gospel makes us extrospective, turning our gaze upward to God in faith and outward to our neighbor in love.
Michael S. Horton
#81. Love is more important than doctrine or holiness, we are told, so we must overlook the differences. But in actuality, whenever love and unity become more important than truth and loyalty to God Himself, they become idols.
Michael S. Horton
#82. Election does not exclude anybody from the kingdom of God who wants in. Rather, it includes in God's kingdom those whose direction is away from the kingdom of God and those who would otherwise remain forever in the kingdom of sin and death.
Michael S. Horton
#83. In an economy of grace, there is enough to go around. The Father's love and generosity are not scarce. His table is brimming with luxurious fare. That is why we invite those who cannot repay us. After all, it is not our table, but his.
Michael S. Horton
#84. This requires a lifetime of divine therapy: having our minds and hearts transformed by God's Word.
Michael S. Horton
#85. You pursue excellence when you care about something other than your own excellence.
Michael S. Horton
#86. As Luther said, "God does not need our good works; our neighbor does.
Michael S. Horton
#87. In a digital age, blogs are often more authoritative than sermons.
Michael S. Horton
#88. Over time, the hype of living a new life, taking up a radical calling, and changing the world can creep into every area of our life. And it can make us tired, depressed, and mean.
Michael S. Horton
#89. The law tells us what to do; the gospel tells us what God has done for us in Christ.
Michael S. Horton
#92. As we discussed earlier, the gospel is "folly to Gentiles" (1Co 1:23) not only because of its message (namely, a crucified Messiah crowned King of kings in his bodily resurrection as the beginning of the new creation) but because of its very form.
Michael S. Horton
#93. An evil and adulterous [idolatrous] generation seeks after a sign (Matt. 12:39 NKJV),
Michael S. Horton
#94. The Internet is the quarry from which younger generations craft their own selves and then advertise a desired persona on Facebook.
Michael S. Horton
#95. God did not become flesh and suffer an ignominious death at our hands so that we could have sprawling church campuses, programs, and budgets.
Michael S. Horton
#96. The most that any of us can do is to say with Isaiah, as he beheld a vision of God in his holiness, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" (Isa. 6:5).
Michael S. Horton
#97. The "unchurching" of the next generation is happening right under our noses, even in the very churches that pride themselves on reaching the unchurched.
Michael S. Horton
#98. If this is true, then neither the past nor the present is normative. It is the canon of Scripture that renders both relative and open to correction.
Michael S. Horton
#99. So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31). Eating and drinking are fairly common aspects of daily life, and yet even ordinary meals become significant when they draw our attention once again to glorifying and enjoying the God who provides them.
Michael S. Horton
#100. Because of Christ alone, embraced through faith alone, for the glory of God and the good of our neighbors alone, on the basis of God's Word alone - and nothing more. This is the slogan of the ordinary Christian (Luke 10:27).
Michael S. Horton
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