Top 100 Russell D. Moore Quotes
#1. The kingdom of God ought to reshape our vision of what matters and who matters,
Russell D. Moore
#2. If we do not have a vision before us of where we are headed, we will assume that the status quo is normal, and that we and our cultures and our societies are "only human," without ever realizing that we have never seen normal humanity, in our lives.
Russell D. Moore
#3. The shaking of American culture is no sign that God has given up on American Christianity. In fact, it may be a sign that God is rescuing American Christianity from itself.
Russell D. Moore
#4. But it would be a tragedy to get the right president, the right Congress, and the wrong Christ.
Russell D. Moore
#5. The effective evangelist must engage not only at the level of the answers, but also at the level of the questions themselves.13
Russell D. Moore
#6. Before we're Americans, we're Christians. And so we have to be informed by a certain moral sense, which means that we need to speak up for moral principle and for gospel principle regardless of who that offends.
Russell D. Moore
#7. If we believe, though, in the sovereignty of God, then we believe that we were not born at this time, and in this culture, by accident. If we belong to Christ, then this is our assigned mission field.
Russell D. Moore
#8. Soul competency is not the voice of a dean celebrating the latest lesbian at his divinity school; it is the voice of R. G. Lee thundering 'Payday Someday!
Russell D. Moore
#9. The future of Christian social witness cannot assume the gospel, but must articulate it explicitly and coherently.
Russell D. Moore
#10. If the apostles reminded even Paul himself to remember the poor (Galatians 2:10), then surely the rest of us need such a reminder.
Russell D. Moore
#12. Whatever you're concerned about will lead you to what you'll worship. And on what you worship hinges your destiny.
Russell D. Moore
#13. If we come to God, it will be through one Jewish mediator-king, or it will not be at all.
Russell D. Moore
#14. We should not seek an angry, quarrelsome cultural presence, but neither should we seek to engage the culture with the sort of gospel that the culture would want, if they, or we, were making it up.
Russell D. Moore
#15. The Bible Belt is collapsing. The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, 'you can have everything you ever wanted and Heaven too,' is soon to be gone. Good riddance.
Russell D. Moore
#16. Our task as the people of God is to recognize this culture where we see it, to know where this comes from, and to speak a different story.
Russell D. Moore
#17. There's something about patience that God deems necessary for our life in the age to come and so, whether through agriculture or discipleship or bodily development or eschatology or procreation, God makes us wait
Russell D. Moore
#18. A prosperity gospel applied to a nation is no more biblical than a prosperity gospel applied to a person.
Russell D. Moore
#19. The devil wishes to assure some people that there's no need for repentance, and others that there's no hope for mercy. Some people are deceived into thinking they are too good for the gospel while others are accused into thinking they are too bad for the gospel.
Russell D. Moore
#20. The future of the church is incandescently bright. That's not because of promises made at Independence Hall, but a promise made at Caesarea Philippi - "I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matt. 16:18). I believe
Russell D. Moore
#21. Too often, our concept of pastors and church leaders reinforces rather than obliterates the sad state of family life in our current context.
Russell D. Moore
#22. Our end goal is not a Christian America, either of the made-up past or the hoped-for future. Our end goal is the kingdom of Christ, made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language. We are, in Christ, the heirs of this kingdom.
Russell D. Moore
#23. In this fallen world, the devil is normal; it's the gospel that's strange
Russell D. Moore
#24. Once Christianity is no longer seen as part and parcel of patriotism, the church must offer more than "What would Jesus do?" moralism and the "I vote values" populism to which we've grown accustomed.
Russell D. Moore
#25. We find it difficult to distinguish between spiritual combatants ... and their hostages.
Russell D. Moore
#26. Total disengagement is itself a privilege of a cultural Christendom that is fast passing away.
Russell D. Moore
#27. The followers of Jesus, though, did not kill their offspring, even when it would have made economic or social sense to do so.6 This is still distinctively Christian in a world that increasingly sees children as, at best, a commodity to be controlled and, at worst, a nuisance to be contained.
Russell D. Moore
#28. Not everything that offends us should offend us, and not everything that offends us is persecution.
Russell D. Moore
#29. We know, then, what human father-hood ought to look like on the basis of how our Father God behaves toward us. But the reverse is also true. We see something of the way our God is fatherly toward us through our relationships with human fathers.
Russell D. Moore
#30. The gospel makes us strange, but the gospel doesn't make us actually crazy. In
Russell D. Moore
#32. A Christian understanding of the world sees a child's character not as genetically determined but as shaped to a significant degree by parental discipleship and discipline.
Russell D. Moore
#34. It is one thing when the culture doesn't "get" adoption. What else could one expect when all of life is seen as the quest of "selfish genes" for survival? It is one thing when the culture doesn't "get" adoption and so speaks of buying a cat as "adopting" a pet.
Russell D. Moore
#35. A church can only stand for religious liberty if it knows that the Judgment Seat of Christ is more ultimate than the state.
Russell D. Moore
#36. What's important is something other than I'm proven to be right. What's important is truth and hope and, and above all these, love.
Russell D. Moore
#37. We need to create the kind of kingdom-shaped culture within our churches that constantly shines the light of Christ wherever these false gods exist in our own affections.
Russell D. Moore
#38. Adoption would become a priority in our churches if our churches themselves saw our brotherhood and sisterhood in the church itself rather than in our fleshly identities.
Russell D. Moore
#39. What if our foster care systems, in every one of our communities, knew that the churches are the first place willing to help families and children in crisis?
Russell D. Moore
#40. Whatever the desire - for food, for attention, for admiration, for adventure, for fame, for security, for whatever it is that you crave at the moment - once it's redirected away from its intended end, it becomes a master.
Russell D. Moore
#41. Courage is walking forward and embracing others in love even though you may suffer greatly in ways you could never imagine now. Jesus walked that way before you, and he walks that way now with you. That's the way of the cross.
Russell D. Moore
#42. A church can ignore the culture only until, as the divorce culture did in the past, that culture reshapes the church in a way that obscures the gospel itself.
Russell D. Moore
#43. In the New Testament, we don't find our gift through self-examination and introspection and then find ways to express it. Instead, we love one another, serve one another, help one another, and in so doing we see how God has equipped us to do so.
Russell D. Moore
#44. We must repent of the way that we, sometimes without even knowing it, have prized the powerful over the powerless.
Russell D. Moore
#45. We have to be the people who stand up and say look, vigilance is good and prudence is good. But a kind of irrational fear that leads itself to demagogic rhetoric is something that we have to say no - no, we're not going to go there.
Russell D. Moore
#46. A crossless Christianity isn't just a deficient Christianity; it's the same old satanism of human striving.
Russell D. Moore
#47. We do not see orphaned children as just another social problem, but we recognize that we were once orphans, received into a family by the adopting grace of God. Their story is our story too. We
Russell D. Moore
#48. The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances, parents want to make up for lost time, to speed up a process that takes time.
Russell D. Moore
#49. The first step to a kingdom-focused cultural engagement is the recovery of a church that practices church discipline.
Russell D. Moore
#50. If politics drives the gospel, rather than the other way around, we end up with a public witness in which Mormon talk-show hosts and serially-monogamous casino magnates and prosperity-gospel preachers are welcomed into our ranks,
Russell D. Moore
#51. When Christians sing about the wrath of God, we are singing about ourselves.
Russell D. Moore
#52. Whenever we are tempted to despair about the shape of American Christianity, we should remember that Jesus never promised the triumph of the American church. He promised the triumph of the church.
Russell D. Moore
#53. Temptation only works if the possible futures open to you are concealed. Consequences, including those of Judgment Day, must be hidden from view or outright denied.
Russell D. Moore
#54. I think we can remember our past without valorizing parts of our past that we ought to see as wrong.
Russell D. Moore
#55. Every (Christian) generation has a choice: to go out like [King] Saul or to go out like Paul.
Russell D. Moore
#56. The path of temptation is gradual and intelligent, not as sudden and random as it seems.
Russell D. Moore
#57. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identities as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of 'groanings too deep for words'.
Russell D. Moore
#58. I believe that we're all created in the image of God and we're all fallen sinners. And I think we can recognize that as we look backward in history.
Russell D. Moore
#59. We overcome, not because we're a moral majority or a righteous remnant, but because we're blood-covered sinners who know that if the gospel can change us, it can change anyone.
Russell D. Moore
#60. Turning the other cheek often leaves you with two broken jaws, but Jesus is still King, and still right.
Russell D. Moore
#61. In Christ Jesus, God joins deity to humanity, permanently, in the human heir of the universe. It is not that Jesus was human, but rather that Jesus is human.
Russell D. Moore
#62. Kindness is not "niceness." Kindness does not avoid conflict; kindness engages conflict, but with a goal of reconciliation.
Russell D. Moore
#63. Without the theological aspect, the emphasis on adoption too easily is seen as mere charity. Without the missional aspect, the doctrine of adoption too easily is seen as mere metaphor.
Russell D. Moore
#64. A church that loses its distinctiveness is a church that has nothing distinctive with which to engage the culture. A worldly church is of no good to the world.
Russell D. Moore
#65. The culture around us knows what it means when they see a church in perpetual bluster and outrage. They know that we are scared.
Russell D. Moore
#66. The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues. After all, the church bears the Spirit of God, who gifts the Body with discernment and wisdom. But too often we do.
Russell D. Moore
#67. The contemporary Planned Parenthood movement was started by a woman named Margaret Sanger, who defended abortion rights on the basis of eugenics, the search for "good genes" based on the racist and evolutionary notions of "social Darwinism" prevalent in her day.
Russell D. Moore
#68. Now we don't celebrate divorce, of course. But we see it as a personal tragedy, not as a scandal in our witness to the gospel.
Russell D. Moore
#69. Resistance to temptation means taking desire seriously. Both Jesus and Satan do.
Russell D. Moore
#70. Those who would pretend to enforce the kingdom with tanks or guns or laws or edicts do not understand the nature of the kingdom Jesus preached.
Russell D. Moore
#71. The kingdom of God is vast and tiny, universal and exclusive.
Russell D. Moore
#73. For a long time, the church in America has assumed that its cultural conservatism was American, that most people at least ideally wanted to live up to our conception of the good life. Those with eyes to see ought to recognize that if those days ever existed, they are no more.
Russell D. Moore
#74. We don't persuade our neighbors by mimicking their angry power-protests. We persuade them by holding fast to the gospel, by explaining our increasingly odd view of marriage, and by serving the world and our neighbors around us, as our Lord does, with a towel and a foot-bucket.
Russell D. Moore
#75. A religion that needs state power to enforce obedience to its beliefs is a religion that has lost confidence in the power of its Deity.
Russell D. Moore
#76. We're a divided country on sexual issues. That's why every news cycle brings more controversy.
Russell D. Moore
#77. But wouldn't we see more women willing to give their children life if they'd seen with their own eyes what an adoption culture looks like? And wouldn't these mothers and fathers, who may themselves feel unwanted, be a bit more ready to hear our talk about a kingdom where all are welcomed?
Russell D. Moore
#78. For too long, we've called unbelievers to "invite Jesus into your life." Jesus doesn't want to be in your life. Your life is a wreck. Jesus calls you into his life. And his life isn't boring or purposeless or static. It's wild and exhilarating and unpredictable.
Russell D. Moore
#80. It's easy to shake our heads in disgust at Pharaoh or Herod or Planned Parenthood.
Russell D. Moore
#81. A Christianity that is walled off from the culture around it is a Christianity that dies. The
Russell D. Moore
#82. The kingdom to come includes not just worship but righteousness (ethics), communion (society), authority (politics), and "the glory and honor of the nations" (culture).
Russell D. Moore
#83. It's not that Jesus is the copy of Israel coming out of Egypt, but that Israel coming out of Egypt was the copy - in advance - of Jesus.
Russell D. Moore
#84. The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn't surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake.
Russell D. Moore
#85. Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It's about what it means to be human.
Russell D. Moore
#86. Charleston was where America split apart in 1861. Maybe it's where America comes together in 2015.
Russell D. Moore
#87. A Christianity that is without friction in the culture is a Christianity that dies. Such religion absorbs the ambient culture until it is indistinguishable from it, until, eventually, a culture asks what the point is of the whole thing.
Russell D. Moore
#88. A church that assumes the gospel is a church that soon loses the gospel. The church now must articulate, at every phase, the reason for our existence, because it is no longer an obvious part of the cultural ecosystem.
Russell D. Moore
#90. If outrage were a sign of godliness, then the devil would be the godliest soul in Creation.
Russell D. Moore
#91. The church is not built on the rock foundation of geniuses and influencers but of apostles and prophets.
Russell D. Moore
#92. The kingdom of God cannot be entered into by the way of the flesh, Jesus tells us, only by the supernatural work of the new birth.
Russell D. Moore
#93. The church is a signpost of God's coming kingdom (Eph. 3:10), a preview to the watching world of what the reign of God in Christ is to look like, a colony of the kingdom coming.
Russell D. Moore
#94. We are all broken shards of glass, rejected building stones, being fitted into a temple we cannot fully even imagine.
Russell D. Moore
#95. much of our rhetoric is less about persuading unbelievers, or maintaining the faith of believers, than about, as Thomas Merton put it a generation ago, our search for "an argument strong enough to prove us 'right.'"9
Russell D. Moore
#96. The problem with carnal anger and outrage is that it's one of the easiest sins to commit while convincing oneself that one is being faithful. The
Russell D. Moore
#98. And yet, if we were to inject truth serum into the communion wine in our churches, I think we might find that many of us dread life in the kingdom of God, not because we find it terrifying but because we find it boring.
Russell D. Moore
#99. We ought to be listening to see who the world-system wants to devalue and degrade, most often first with words, so that we can know for whom we should be speaking and standing.
Russell D. Moore
#100. We must learn to be strange enough to have a prophetic voice, but connected enough to prophesy to those who need to hear. We
Russell D. Moore
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
