Michael Scott Horton > Quotes

“Jesus was not revolutionary because he said we should love God and each other. Moses said that first. So did Buddha, Confucius, and countless other religious leaders we've never heard of. Madonna, Oprah, Dr. Phil, the Dali Lama, and probably a lot of Christian leaders will tell us that the point of religion is to get us to love each other. "God loves you" doesn't stir the world's opposition. However, start talking about God's absolute authority, holiness, ... Christ's substitutionary atonement, justification apart from works, the necessity of new birth, repentance, baptism, Communion, and the future judgment, and the mood in the room changes considerably.”
― Michael S. Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“When the focus becomes ‘What would Jesus do?’ instead of ‘What has Jesus done?’ the [conservative/liberal] labels no longer matter.”
― Michael S. Horton

“The gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God’s help. Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father.”
― Michael S. Horton

“If the focus of our testimony is our changed life, we as well as our hearers are bound to be disappointed.”
― Michael S. Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“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, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over half a century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia (the city where Barnhouse pastored), all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am," and the churches would be full every Sunday...where Christ was not preached.”
― Michael S. Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“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, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“Many Christians assume that we can just experience God in a personal relationship apart from doctrine, but that’s impossible. You cannot experience God without knowing who he is, what he has done, and who you are in relation to him. Even our most basic Christian experiences and commitments are theological. “I just love Jesus,” some say. But who is Jesus? And why do you love him?”
― Michael S. Horton, Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples

“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, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“The gospel is unintelligible to most people today, especially in the West, because their own particular stories are remote from the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that is narrated in the Bible. Our focus is introspective and narrow, confided to our own immediate knowledge, experience, and intuition. Trying desperately to get others, including God, to make us happy, we cannot seem to catch a glimpse of the real story that gives us a meaningful role.”
― Michael S. Horton

“Sometimes, chasing your dreams can be “easier” than just being who we are, where God has placed you, with the gifts he has given to you.”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“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, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way

“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, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“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

“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, Gospel Commission, The: Recovering God's Strategy for Making Disciples

“Christ’s body is not a stage for my performance,”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“The gospel makes us extrospective, turning our gaze upward to God in faith and outward to our neighbor in love.”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“Contentment is the virtue that contrasts with restlessness, ambition, avarice. It means realizing, once again, that we are not our own — as pastors or parishioners, parents or children, employers or employees. It is the Lord’s to give and to take away. He is building his church. It is his ministry that is saving and building up his body. Even our common callings in the world are not really our own, but they are God’s work of supplying others — including ourselves — with what the whole society needs. There is a lot of work to be done, but it is his work that he is doing through us in daily and mostly ordinary ways.”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“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, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“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, The Gospel-Driven Life: Being Good News People in a Bad News World

“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, Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples

“Secularization—that is, the gradual conformity of our thinking, beliefs, commitments, and practices to the pattern of this fading age—is not just something that happens to the church; it is something that happens in the church. In fact, it’s difficult to think of secularism as anything other than a Christian heresy.”
― Michael S. Horton, Gospel Commission, The: Recovering God's Strategy for Making Disciples

“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, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“CNN will not be showing up at a church that is simply trusting God to do extraordinary things through his ordinary means of grace delivered by ordinary servants. But God will. Week after week. These means of grace and the ordinary fellowship of the saints that nurtures and guides us throughout our life may seem frail, but they are jars that carry a rich treasure: Christ with all of his saving benefits.”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“The greatest threat to Christ-centered witness even in churches that formally affirm sound teaching is what British evangelical David Gibson calls ‘the assumed gospel.’ The idea is that the gospel is necessary for getting saved, but after we sign on, the rest of the Christian life is all the fine print: conditional forgiveness.”
― Michael S. Horton

“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 or asking a farmer how the crops did this week. “How was the sermon?” “Was it a good service?” Same blank stare from the ancestors. In those days, churches didn’t have to be rockin’ it, nobody expected the preacher to hit it out of the park, and the service was, well, a service.”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“But I’ve come to the point where I’m not sure anymore just what God counts as radical. And I suspect that for me, getting up and doing the dishes when I’m short on sleep and patience is far more costly and necessitates more of a revolution in my heart than some of the more outwardly risky ways I’ve lived in the past. And so this is what I need now: the courage to face an ordinary day — an afternoon with a colicky baby where I’m probably going to snap at my two-year old and get annoyed with my noisy neighbor — without despair, the bravery it takes to believe that a small life is still a meaningful life, and the grace to know that even when I’ve done nothing that is powerful or bold or even interesting that the Lord notices me and is fond of me and that that is enough.”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“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, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World

“Whether you realize it or not, you are a theologian. You come to a book like this with a working theology, an existing understanding of God. Whether you are an agnostic or a fundamentalist — or something in between — you have a working theology that shapes and informs the way you think and live. However, I suspect that you are reading this book because you’re interested in examining your theology more closely. You are open to having it challenged and strengthened. You know that theology — the study of God — is more than an intellectual hobby. It’s a matter of life and death, something that affects the way you think, the decisions you make each day, the way you relate to God and other people, and the way you see yourself and the world around you.”
― Michael S. Horton, Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples

“Although it is a bit of a caricature, I think that there is some truth in the generalizations I’m about to make. The tendency in Roman Catholic theology is to view the kingdom of Christ as a cosmic ladder or tower, leading from the lowest strata to the hierarchy led by the pope. Anabaptists have tended to see the kingdom more as a monastery, a community of true saints called out of the world and a worldly church. Lutheran and Reformed churches tend sometimes to see the kingdom as a school, while evangelicals (at least in the United States) lean more toward seeing it as a market.”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World