Russell D. Moore Quotes & Sayings

The kingdom of God is vast and tiny, universal and exclusive. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That's why one could speak of "God and country" with great reception in almost any era of the nation's history but would create cultural distance as soon as one mentioned "Christ and him crucified." God was always welcome in American culture. He was, after all, the Deity whose job it was to bless America. The God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Christ, however, was much more difficult to set to patriotic music or to "Amen" in a prayer at the Rotary Club. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

The temptation for a new generation, however, could be to see Baptist identity as a nuisance in the quest for converts. The effort to minimize an offensive "denominational brand name" will be counterproductive if we produce a generation of "anonymous Baptists," those whom we believe cannot handle the truth about Christ's design for His church. It will be tragic indeed if a future Broadman and Holman catalog includes a book titled, "Why I Am a Community Church (SBC) member."
But it will be equally tragic if the volume is titled, "Why I Want to Be a Presbyterian, but the Bible Won't Let Me. — Russell D. Moore

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

Total disengagement is itself a privilege of a cultural Christendom that is fast passing away. — Russell D. Moore

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

A prosperity gospel applied to a nation is no more biblical than a prosperity gospel applied to a person. — Russell D. Moore

Every (Christian) generation has a choice: to go out like [King] Saul or to go out like Paul. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

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

Moreover, seeing ourselves as a majority led at times to both a theological downgrade and a counter-productive public stance. The application of the promises to Israel to the United States of America, for example, caused many to miss, as we will see in the next chapter, the meaning of the kingdom of God, and thus to bypass Jesus Christ himself. The idea of America as a Christian nation is able to get "Amens" in the churches only as long as the churches believe America is, at least in some ways, with us and not against us. But what happens when the cultural climate starts to shift in obvious ways? If the church believes the United States is a sort of new Israel, then we become frantic when we see ourselves "losing America." We then start to speak in gloomy terms of America as, at best, Babylon, a place of hopeless exile, or, at worst, Gomorrah, slouching toward the judgment of God. — Russell D. Moore

Pastors, we have to ask ourselves honestly whether the divorce culture and family breakdown inside the churches have not been fueled in part by our own preaching and teaching. When we reduce marriage to endless sermon series on "Putting the Sizzle Back in Your Spouse" and "Ten Tips for Couples for a Hotter, Holier Romance," are we not contributing to the very same emphasis on hormonally-driven acquisitiveness as the culture, rather than on the model of a Christ who displays not just affection but cross-carrying fidelity to his Bride? — Russell D. Moore

One cannot coerce faith into being, or out of being, — Russell D. Moore

In you the orphan finds mercy" (Hos. 14:3). — Russell D. Moore

We need more worship wars, not fewer. What if the war looked like this in your congregation
the young singles petitioning the church to play more of the old classics for the sake of the elderly people, and the elderly people calling on the leadership to contemporize for the sake of the young new believers? This would signal a counting of others more important than ourselves (Phil 2:3), which comes from the spirit of the humiliated, exalted King, Christ (Phil 2:5-11). — Russell D. Moore

The church now has the opportunity to bear witness in a culture that often does not even pretend to share our "values." That is not a tragedy since we were never given a mission to promote "values" in the first place, but to speak instead of sin and of righteousness and judgment, of Christ and his kingdom. We — Russell D. Moore

When Christians sing about the wrath of God, we are singing about ourselves. — Russell D. Moore

Not everything that offends us should offend us, and not everything that offends us is persecution. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

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

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

It's easy to shake our heads in disgust at Pharaoh or Herod or Planned Parenthood. — Russell D. Moore

Temptation - for the entire human race, for the people of Israel, and for each of us personally - starts with a question of identity, moves to a confusion of the desires, and ultimately heads to a contest of futures. In short, there's a reason you want what you don't want to want. Temptation is embryonic, personality specific, and purpose directed. — Russell D. Moore

Walking away from our own lordship - or from the tyranny of our desires - has always been a narrow way. The rich young ruler who once encountered Jesus wanted a religion that would promise him his best life now, extended out into all eternity. But Jesus knew that such an existence isn't life at all, just the zombie corpse of the way of the flesh - always hungry but unable to die. Jesus came to do something else; he came to wreck our lives, so that he could join us to his. We cannot build Christian churches on a sub-Christian gospel. People who don't want Christianity don't want almost-Christianity. — Russell D. Moore

We are all broken shards of glass, rejected building stones, being fitted into a temple we cannot fully even imagine. — Russell D. Moore

Christian attempts at social witness have often swung wildly back and forth between chest-beating optimism to withdrawal and despair. One minute we are "reclaiming America for Christ," the next we pronounce that American culture is "slouching toward Gomorrah." We lose sight both of the fact that all of human history - from Eden onward - is a war zone, and that God's kingdom triumph is proven not by our electoral success or our cultural influence - as important as that is in being obediently "salt" and "light" in our culture. Our triumph is proven in the resurrection of the world's rightful ruler. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

The future of Christian social witness cannot assume the gospel, but must articulate it explicitly and coherently. — Russell D. Moore

If we come to God, it will be through one Jewish mediator-king, or it will not be at all. — Russell D. Moore

Maybe such questions bothered me so much because they are being asked about me, all the time, within the echo chamber of my own fallen psyche and by unseen rebel angels all around. Are you really a son of the living God? Does your God really know you? Does this biblical story really belong to you? Are these really your brothers and sisters? Do you really belong here? ... — Russell D. Moore

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

If we belong to Christ, then this is our assigned mission field. To rail against the culture is to say to God that we are entitled to a better mission field than the one he has given us. At the same time, if we simply dissolve into the culture around us, or refuse to leave untroubled the questions the culture deems too sensitive to ask, we are not on mission at all. — Russell D. Moore

You will be tempted exactly as Jesus was, because Jesus was being tempted exactly as we are. You will be tempted with consumption, security, and status. You will be tempted to provide for yourself, to protect yourself, and to exalt yourself. And at the core of these three is a common impulse - to cast off the fatherhood of God. — Russell D. Moore

Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It's about what it means to be human. — Russell D. Moore

As such, we must oppose torturing human beings for the same reason we oppose "choice" in abortion rights, because torture dehumanizes both the tortured and the torturer. We ought to be those insisting that capital punishment, where it exists, is not discriminatory against the poor or racial minorities and that it not exist as part of a system in which innocent persons are mistakenly executed. A death penalty that exempts the white and the affluent, while putting to death those without the power to evade such justice, is hardly what God set forth in the covenant with Noah or in the sword-wielding delegated authority to Caesar to punish evildoers. And, even short of the death penalty, we should care about impartiality before the law, in the making and in the enforcement of laws for all persons, regardless of race or ethnicity or background. — Russell D. Moore

How often do I rage rather than lament? — Russell D. Moore

Finding Jesus was his way of asking America into his heart, as his personal lord and savior. He was one of many, those who recognized that to be good citizens, to be good neighbors, to be at home in America, one needed to be a Christian. This Christianity didn't require one to carry a cross, just to say a prayer and to agree to certain values and norms. — Russell D. Moore

The child with Down syndrome on the fifth row from the back in your church, he's not a "ministry project." He's a future king of the universe. The immigrant woman who scrubs toilets every day on hands and knees, and can barely speak enough English to sing along with your praise choruses, she's not a problem to be solved. She's a future queen of the cosmos, a joint-heir with Christ. — Russell D. Moore

If our principal means of differentiation is politics or culture, then we have every reason to see those around us as our enemies, and to see ourselves as somehow morally superior. But if what differentiates us is blood poured out for our sins, then we see ourselves for what we are: hell-deserving sinners in the hands of a merciful God. — Russell D. Moore

The gospel makes us strange, but the gospel doesn't make us actually crazy. In — Russell D. Moore

The closeness of American culture with the church caused many sectors of the American church to read the Bible as though the Bible were pointing us to America itself. That's why endless recitations of 2 Chronicles 7:14 focused on revival in the nation as a means to national blessing, without ever seeming to ask who the "my people" of this text actually are, and what it means, in light of the gospel, to be "blessed. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

If outrage were a sign of godliness, then the devil would be the godliest soul in Creation. — Russell D. Moore

In his temptation of Jesus, Satan quoted Scripture, and he didn't remember, misquote anything. God wants his children to eat bread, not to starve before stones. God will protect his anointed one with the angels of heaven. God will give his Messiah all the kingdoms of the earth. All this is true. What is satanic about all of this, though, is that Satan wanted our Lord to grasp these things apart from the cross and the empty tomb. — Russell D. Moore

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

We should protect our legacy of a free church in a free state. We ought to pray and work for a "quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" (1 Tim. 2:2 kjv). But that is not the ultimate sign of our success. It is better for our future generations to be willing to go to jail - for the right reasons - than to exchange the gospel of the kingdom for a mess of Esau's pottage. Sometimes jails filled with hymn-singing, letter-writing, gospel-preaching Christians can do extraordinary things. — Russell D. Moore

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

Sexuality isn't ancillary to Christianity, in the way some other cultural or political issues are. Marriage and sex point, the Bible says, to a picture of the gospel itself, the union of Christ and his church. This is why the Bible spends so much time, as some critics would put it, "obsessed" with sex. That's why, historically, churches that liberalize on sex tend to liberalize themselves right out of Christianity itself. — Russell D. Moore

The first step to a kingdom-focused cultural engagement is the recovery of a church that practices church discipline. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

Seeing oneself as a prophetic minority does not mean retreat, and it certainly does not mean victim status. It also does not confer faithfulness. Marginalization can strip away from us the besetting sins of a majoritarian viewpoint, but it can bring others as well. We must remember our smallness but also our connectedness to a global, and indeed cosmic, reality. The kingdom of God is vast and tiny, universal and exclusive. Our story is that of a little flock and of an army, awesome with banners. Our legacy is a Christianity of persecution and proliferation, of catacombs and cathedrals. If we see ourselves as only a minority, we will be tempted to isolation. If we see ourselves only as a kingdom, we will be tempted toward triumphalism. We are, instead, a church. We are a minority with a message and a mission. — Russell D. Moore

Jim Crow repeated the old strategies of the reptilian powers of the air: to convince human beings simultaneously and paradoxically that they are gods and animals. In the Garden, after all, the snake approached God's image-bearer, directing her as though he had dominion over her (when it was, in fact, the other way around). He treated her as an animal, and she didn't even see it. At the same time, the old dragon appealed to her to transcend the limits of her dignity. If she would reach for the forbidden, she would be "like God, knowing good and evil." He suggested that she was more than a human; she was a goddess. — Russell D. Moore

When we adopt - and when we encourage a culture of adoption in our churches and communities - we're picturing something that's true about our God. We, like Jesus, see what our Father is doing and do likewise (John 5:19). And what our Father is doing, it turns out, is fighting for orphans, making them sons and daughters. — Russell D. Moore

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

We find it difficult to distinguish between spiritual combatants ... and their hostages. — Russell D. Moore

The church is not built on the rock foundation of geniuses and influencers but of apostles and prophets. — Russell D. Moore

Whatever you're concerned about will lead you to what you'll worship. And on what you worship hinges your destiny. — Russell D. Moore

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

I think we can remember our past without valorizing parts of our past that we ought to see as wrong. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

The last generation's Religious Right activism was, to the contrary, the exact opposite, affirming and reaffirming that they were not a theological movement but a political one. The tent was broad enough to include evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, Latter-day Saints, Orthodox Jews, and even socially conservative agnostics and atheists.7 The rhetoric was focused much less on the kingdom of God or on the gospel of Christ than on "traditional family values" or "our Judeo-Christian heritage. — Russell D. Moore

When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run ... — Russell D. Moore

The Christian message isn't burdened down by the miraculous. It's inextricably linked to it. A woman conceives. The lame walk. The blind see. A dead man is resurrected, ascends to heaven, and sends the Spirit. The universe's ruler is a Jewish laborer from Nazareth, who is on his way to judge the living and the dead. Those who do away with such things are left with what modernism's dissenting prophet, J. Gresham Machen, rightly identified as a different religion, a religion as disconnected from global Christianity as the New Age religion of Wicca is from the ancient Druidic rites. — Russell D. Moore

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

We are to hold accountable those on the inside, and speak to those on the outside with persuasion and mission.
We tend to do the exact reverse. We rail against the culture outside, and speak in muted and ambiguous terms about what is common among us. We lambaste political and cultural heresies on the outside, but sit silently in the face of doctrinal heresies in the inside. That's because we are seeing the wrong kingdom first. — Russell D. Moore

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

It is not, in Calvin's view, that we sin because we believe the wrong things; it is, rather, that we believe the wrong things because we sin. — Russell D. Moore

If you are not drawing fire from both Pharisees and Sadducees, you are probably saying something other than what Jesus said. And if your message is not drawing both tax collectors (Roman collaborators) and zealots (anti-Roman insurrectionists) to repentance, you are probably speaking with a different voice than does he. Jesus wasn't inconsistent. He saw the Roman Empire, despite all its pretensions to preeminence both in its own mind and in the mind of its opponents, as a temporary obstacle, not the defining point of his agenda. We stand and we speak, with reconciliation in view. We see, therefore, even our most passionate critic not as an argument to be vaporized but as a neighbor to be evangelized. This doesn't mean that we back down one iota from the truth. But we proclaim the whole gospel of truth and grace, never backing down from either. That means taking seriously the arguments of our opponents, not merely caricatures of those arguments. — Russell D. Moore

He didn't believe in God, and found the idea of heaven to be the most boring thing imaginable. At least the Muslims had virgins waiting in Paradise for sex, he said, but who would want to play a harp, at any time, much less for all eternity? And then one day, out of nowhere, he asked me to recommend a church. — Russell D. Moore

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

Every human being is, by definition, a theologian. — Russell D. Moore

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

Our call is to an engaged alienation, — Russell D. Moore

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

The kingdom's advance is set in motion by the Galilean march out of the graveyard. We should then be the last people on earth to skulk back in fear or apathy. And we ought also to be the last people on earth to uncritically laud any political leader or movement as though this were what we've been waiting for. We need leaders and allies, but we do not need a Messiah. That job is filled, and he's feeling fine. — Russell D. Moore

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

We are Americans best when we are not Americans first. — Russell D. Moore

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

Flannery O'Connor's writing is quite dark, but it is so because she believes in the Devil, and in the Fall, and in humanity as it is. Novels that avoid the horror of human existence in this time between Eden and New Jerusalem can reinforce a Christian's tendency to Pelagianism. The Christian gospel isn't "clean" and "safe" and "family-friendly." It comes to its narrative climax at a bloody Place of the Skull and in a borrowed grave. — Russell D. Moore

Kindness is not "niceness." Kindness does not avoid conflict; kindness engages conflict, but with a goal of reconciliation. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

But it would be a tragedy to get the right president, the right Congress, and the wrong Christ. — Russell D. Moore

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

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

The path of temptation is gradual and intelligent, not as sudden and random as it seems. — Russell D. Moore

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

I placed my hand on both of their heads and said, knowing they couldn't understand a word of English, "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." I don't think I consciously intended to cite Jesus' words to his disciples in John 14:18; it just seemed like the only thing worth saying at the time. — Russell D. Moore

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

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