Russell D. Moore > Quotes

“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

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch "Christian" cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right "worldview" talking points. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity 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" (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“In the world of the Bible, one’s identity and one’s vocation are all bound up in who one’s father is. Men are called “son of” all of their lives (for instance, “the sons of Zebedee” or “Joshua, the son of Nun”). There are no guidance counselors in ancient Canaan or first-century Capernaum, helping “teenagers” decide what they want “to be” when they “grow up.” A young man watches his father, learns from him, and follows in his vocational steps. This is why “the sons of Zebedee” are right there with their father when Jesus finds them, “in their boat mending the nets” (Mark 1:19-20).

The inheritance was the engine of survival, passed from father to son, an economic pact between generations. To lose one’s inheritance was to pilfer for survival, to become someone’s slave.”
― Russell D. Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“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, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“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, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Not everything that offends us should offend us, and not everything that offends us is persecution.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“kindness is not “niceness.” Kindness does not avoid conflict; kindness engages conflict, but with a goal of reconciliation.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.”
― Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America

“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, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“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, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches

“Our problem now, though, is that, increasingly, we are called not just to argue about what is true, but to say things that we know to be false, just to prove that we are part of the tribe to which we belong.”
― Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America

“Many of those old controversies were polarized by “slippery slope” arguments. What many of us never realized is that every side of an issue has slippery slopes and if one only sees one of them, one is probably sliding down another”
― Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America

“The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“How often do I rage rather than lament?”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“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

“Years ago, I happened upon a television program of a “prosperity gospel” preacher, with perfectly coiffed mauve hair, perched on a rhinestone-spackled golden throne, talking about how wonderful it is to be a Christian. Even if Christianity proved to be untrue, she said, she would still want to be a Christian, because it’s the best way to live. It occurred to me that that is an easy perspective to have, on television, from a golden throne. It’s a much more difficult perspective to have if one is being crucified by one’s neighbors in Sudan for refusing to repudiate the name of Christ. Then, if it turns out not to be true, it seems to be a crazy way to live. In reality, this woman’s gospel—and those like it—are more akin to a Canaanite fertility religion than to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the kingdom she announces is more like that of Pharaoh than like that of Christ. David’s throne needs no rhinestone. But the prosperity gospel proclaimed in full gaudiness in the example above is on full display in more tasteful and culturally appropriate forms. The idea of the respectability of Christian witness in a Christian America that is defined by morality and success, not by the gospel of crucifixion and resurrection, is just another example of importing Jesus to maintain one’s best life now. Jesus could have remained beloved in Nazareth, by healing some people and levitating some chairs, and keeping quiet about how different his kingdom is. But Jesus persistently has to wreck everything, and the illusions of Christian America are no more immune than the illusions of Israelite Galilee. If we see the universe as the Bible sees it, we will not try to “reclaim” some lost golden age. We will see an invisible conflict of the kingdoms, a satanic horror show being invaded by the reign of Christ. This will drive us to see who our real enemies are, and they are not the cultural and sexual prisoners-of-war all around us. If we seek the kingdom, we will see the devil. And this makes us much less sophisticated, much less at home in modern America.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“We are Americans best when we are not Americans first.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Conservative evangelicals don't want government support for our faith, because we believe God created all consciences free and a state-coerced act of worship isn't acceptable to God. Moreover, we believe the gospel isn't in need of state endorsement or assistance. Wall Street may need government bailouts but the Damascus Road never does.”
― 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, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“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, Adopted for Life (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney): The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches

“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, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“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, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches