Top 100 Michael Horton Quotes
#1. We have so many churches these days that instead of reaching the unchurched are unchurching the churched"
~ Dr. Michael Horton
Anna Sofia Botkin
#2. 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
#3. Nothing comes close to the wisdom that God has displayed in the salvation of sinners.
Michael S. Horton
#4. When we meet God in the gospel, we first encounter him as a stranger, come to rescue us from a danger we did not even realize we were in.
Michael S. Horton
#5. In such a therapeutic, pragmatic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps society as ours, the message of God having to do all the work in saving us comes as an offensive shot at our egos.
Michael Horton
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Ask the proficient athlete, artist, businessperson, or homemaker what creates excellence and they'll all agree: a commitment to long-term goals - and with a community of mentors and fellow "disciples."
Michael Horton
#11. When salvation is viewed as man's program, it is left up to man as to whether he will let God do this or that, but when it is viewed as God's program, there is a confidence and a certainty that no one whom God regenerates will be a carnal Christian.
Michael Horton
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Where did we get the idea that older folks need to be given a "kid-free" environment with other "golden oldies," and that men's groups and women's groups are more meaningful than the communion of saints?
Michael S. Horton
#15. 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
#16. I expect that Calvin would evaluate our worship today not as too emotional, but as too narrow in its emotional repertoire.
Michael S. Horton
#17. 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
#18. We cannot find God for the same reason that a thief can't find a police officer.
Michael Horton
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. This is what God requires of us: to fulfill our obligations, to be faithful to our contracts, to pay our debts, and to honor our word. Anything short is fraud, regardless of how much we think the other party "deserves" what we owe.
Michael S. Horton
#22. When you are trying to sell a product like therapeutic transformation, there can be no ambiguity, no sense of anxiety, tension, or struggle.
Michael S. Horton
#23. 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
#24. Paul never encouraged Timothy to contemplate his personal "legacy.
Michael S. Horton
#25. Theology, not morality, is the first business on the church's agenda of reform, and the church, not society, is the first target of divine criticism.
Michael Horton
#26. 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
#27. No one has to be taught to trust in themselves. No one has to be taught that what you experience inside yourself is more authoritative than what comes to you externally, even if it comes from God. Since the Fall, it has been part of our character to look within ourselves.
Michael Horton
#28. We need more Christians who take their place alongside believing and unbelieving neighbors in the daily gift exchange
Michael Horton
#29. Christians must return to the great story that has its fulfillment in life after death, so we may live and die well in the light of our extraordinary hope that enables us to embrace the ordinary lives God gives us here and now.
Michael Horton
#30. A good day's filming at last ... John Horton's rabbit effects are superb. A really vicious white rabbit, which bites Sir Bor's head off. Much of the ground lost over the week is made up. We listen to the Cup Final in between fighting the rabbit
Liverpool beat Newcastle 3-0.
Michael Palin
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. If you make every sentence an exclamation or put every verb in 'bold,' then nothing stands out.
Michael S. Horton
#34. Works are witnesses to, not the basis of, our right standing before God.
Michael S. Horton
#35. Our families, including us, do not need more quality time, but more quantity time.
Michael S. Horton
#36. 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
#37. A church that is deeply aware of it's misery and nakedness before a holy God will cling tenaciously to an all sufficient Savior, while one that is self-confident and relatively unaware of its inherent sinfulness will reach for religion and morality whenever it seems convenient
Michael Horton
#38. Our righteousness" - never mind our sins! - "is like filthy rags" (Isa. 64:6 NKJV;
Michael S. Horton
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. In essence, don't wait for the host to move you to the children's table.
Michael S. Horton
#47. Evangelicalism as a movement is rushing headlong toward theological ambiguity, which is another way of saying apostasy.
Michael Horton
#48. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.
Michael S. Horton
#49. Jesus and spirituality can easily become therapies that merely help us cope with life. They can serve us if we chose Him over other service providers. We even talk about "making Jesus my personal Lord and Savior," as if we could make Him anything!
Michael Horton
#51. Often, this cry for more practical preaching is the call of the old Adam for more self-help.
Michael S. Horton
#52. The goal of Christian mission is not success, but faithful witness; not power, but proclamation; not technique, but truth; not method, but message.
Michael Horton
#53. We rise up to God in pride, while God descends to us in humility.
Michael S. Horton
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. How was church today?" In most times and places of the church, this would have been an unlikely question. In fact, the hearer might have been confused. Why? Because it's like asking how the meals at home have been this week
Michael S. Horton
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. But the heart of Christianity is Good News. It comes not as a task for us to fulfill, a mission for us to accomplish, a game plan for us to follow with the help of life coaches, but as a report that someone else has already fulfilled, accomplished, followed, and achieved everything for us.
Michael Horton
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Saving faith is not the enemy of good works, but their only possible source.
Michael S. Horton
#72. It is still through the foolishness of preaching that God gives repentance and faith.
Michael S. Horton
#73. Long before genetics became a flourishing field, Christians have spoken about sin as an inherited condition.
Michael Horton
#74. A religion of human goodness will never sustain a people in times of disaster and threat.
Michael S. Horton
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. We are justified through faith in Christ, not through doctrinal precision.
Michael S. Horton
#78. 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
#79. Does Scripture forbid homosexual behavior? Of course it does. Jesus and his apostles taught that God's intention in marriage is for a man to leave his parents and join himself to one woman.
Michael Horton
#80. 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
#82. The power of our activism, campaigns, movements, and strategies cannot forgive sins or raise the dead.
Michael S. Horton
#83. A ministry based on pragmatism is built on sand regardless of whether it is more traditional or contemporary.
Michael S. Horton
#84. Christians are driven by God's promises, and directed by God's purposes.
Michael Horton
#85. 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
#86. If you want to be an athlete, there's no way around it: You have to go to the gym. You can't Google your way to it.
Michael Horton
#87. 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
#88. The fact that makes sin so utterly sinful is that it is ultimately against God.
Michael S. Horton
#89. Our weaknesses are an opportunity for God to show his strength.
Michael Horton
#90. God's church is not a stage for us to perform on but a garden for us to grow in.
Michael Horton
#91. The Bible knows nothing of any contrast between truth and experience, head and heart, theology and practical living.
Michael S. Horton
#92. The more we understand God's truth, the more we are struck by the mystery.
Michael S. Horton
#94. We are not saved by sound church order and discipline but we are served by it.
Michael Horton
#95. If the focus of our testimony is our changed life, we as well as our hearers are bound to be disappointed.
Michael S. Horton
#96. 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
#97. Pragmatism, consumerism, self-help moralism, and narcissism are simply the symptoms of a disease that is, at its heart, theological:
Michael S. Horton
#99. 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
#100. 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
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