Michael S Horton quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Michael S Horton

Top Michael S Horton Quotes

Browse top 43 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Michael S Horton.

Favorite Michael S Horton Quotes

1. "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

2. "In the doctrine of the Trinity," wrote Herman Bavinck, "beats the heart of the whole revelation of God for the redemption of humanity." As the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, "our God is above us, before us, and within us." The doctrine of the Trinity — God as one in essence and three in person — shapes and structures Christian faith and practice in every way, distinguishing it from all world religions." ~ Michael S. Horton

3. "When the focus becomes ‘What would Jesus do?' instead of ‘What has Jesus done?' the [conservative/liberal] labels no longer matter." ~ Michael S. Horton

4. "Only when we start with the gospel — the most controversial point of Christian faith — are we ready to talk about who God is and how we know him." ~ Michael S. Horton

5. "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

6. "We do not read the Bible somewhere off by ourselves in a corner; we read it as a community of faith, together with the whole church in all times and places." ~ Michael S. Horton

7. "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

8. "All of our faith and practice arise out of the drama of Scripture, the "big story" that traces the plot of history from creation to consummation, with Christ as its Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. And out of the throbbing verbs of this unfolding drama God reveals stable nouns — doctrines. From what God does in history we are taught certain things about who he is and what it means to be created in his image, fallen, and redeemed, renewed, and glorified in union with Christ. As the Father creates his church, in his Son and by his Spirit, we come to realize what this covenant community is and what it means to belong to it; what kind of future is promised to us in Christ, and how we are to live here and now in the light of it all. The drama and the doctrine provoke us to praise and worship — doxology — and together these three coordinates give us a new way of living in the world as disciples." ~ Michael S. Horton

9. "The object is evident in the name of the discipline. Similarly, theology (theologia) is the study of God. The object of theology is not the church's teaching or the experience of pious souls. It is not a subset of ethics, religious studies, cultural anthropology, or psychology. God is the object of this discipline." ~ Michael S. Horton

10. "As Paul argues, it is the righteousness of God that is revealed in the law, and this condemns us all (Ro 1:18 – 3:20), while the gospel reveals the righteousness from God, namely, that we "are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Ro 3:24)." ~ Michael S. Horton

11. "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

12. "Finally, Lutheran and Reformed traditions distinguish (without separating) three uses of the law: the first (pedagogical), to expose our guilt and corruption, driving us to Christ; the second, a civil use to restrain public vice; and the third, to guide Christian obedience. Believers are not "under the law" in the first sense. They are justified. However, they are still obligated to the law, both as it is stipulated and enforced by the state (second use) and as it frames Christian discipleship (third use). We never ground our status before God in our obedience to imperatives, but in Christ's righteousness; yet we are also bound to Christ, who continues to lead and direct us by his holy will." ~ Michael S. Horton

13. "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

14. "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

15. "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

16. "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

17. "We rise up to God in pride, while God descends to us in humility." ~ Michael S. Horton

18. "It is ironic that we have more technology to make our lives more efficient, ostensibly reducing our workload, and we work harder than we ever have. I was dragged into email kicking and screaming. On most issues technological I'm wrong, but I think I had this one nailed. Given the way emails come like baseballs from a machine in a batting cage, I spend more time responding to them than I spent manually opening and responding to letters. My friends from England write beautiful letters: bonded correspondence paper, elegant penmanship, and prose that reads like poetry. I shoot back an email. To the equivalent of a well-prepared feast I reciprocate with the equivalent of a bag of chips." ~ Michael S. Horton

19. "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

20. "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

21. "a religion of human goodness will never sustain a people in times of disaster and threat." ~ Michael S. Horton

22. "the gospel is good news for losers, that in fact we are all losers if we measure ourselves by God's interpretation of reality rather than our own. The demand for glory, power, comfort, autonomy, health, and wealth creates a vicious cycle of craving and disillusionment. It even creates its own industry of therapists and exercise, style, and self-esteem gurus—and churches—to massage the egos wounded by this hedonism. When crisis hits, the soul is too effete to respond appropriately. We become prisoners of our own felt needs, which were inculcated in us in the first place by the very marketplace that promises a "fix." We become victims of our own shallow hopes. We are too easily disappointed because we are too easily persuaded that the marketplace always has something that can make us happy." ~ Michael S. Horton

23. "Election does not exclude anybody from the kingdom of God who wants in. Rather, it includes in God's kingdom those whose direction is away from the kingdom of God and those who would otherwise remain forever in the kingdom of sin and death." ~ Michael S. Horton

24. "In short, Calvin has been given too much blame by critics and too much credit by fans. His real genius is to be found in his remarkable ability to synthesize the best thought of the whole Christian tradition and sift it with rigorous exegetical skill and evangelical instincts. His rhetorical rule was "brevity and simplicity," and this, combined with a heart enflamed by truth, draws us back to his wells for refreshment in many times and places—especially when we seem to have lost our way." ~ Michael S. Horton

25. "Pragmatism, consumerism, self-help moralism, and narcissism are simply the symptoms of a disease that is, at its heart, theological:" ~ Michael S. Horton

26. "We are justified through faith in Christ, not through doctrinal precision." ~ Michael S. Horton

27. "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

28. "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

29. "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

30. "Apart from Christ, there can only be a "fleeting knowledge of God" that quickly turns to the vinegar of idolatry and superstition, however much unbelievers (Calvin refers to Moslems here) "proclaim at the top of their lungs that the Creator of heaven and earth is God."46" ~ Michael S. Horton

31. "Our choices are determined by our nature; we choose what we desire and we desire what is most consistent with our nature." ~ Michael S. Horton

32. "My concern with this is not about who owns the trademark. If a label is used chiefly to lionize "us" and demonize "them," we'd be better off without it. Rather, my concern is that the richness and breadth of Reformed faith and practice are being reduced to a few doctrines. In the process, even those doctrines lose much of their supporting rationale. In fact, their meaning changes at crucial points. For example, I believe that the doctrine of election is inextricably bound up with covenant theology and with the covenantal life that is shaped in the New Testament by the means of grace. As I have argued, even "eternal security" is different from the doctrine of perseverance." ~ Michael S. Horton

33. "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

34. "When people call for "deeds, not creeds," asking, "What Would Jesus Do?" without much interest in the query, "What has Jesus done?" identifying themselves as "spiritual but not religious," they are asking for the law without the gospel." ~ Michael S. Horton

35. "As we discussed earlier, the gospel is "folly to Gentiles" (1Co 1:23) not only because of its message (namely, a crucified Messiah crowned King of kings in his bodily resurrection as the beginning of the new creation) but because of its very form." ~ Michael S. Horton

36. "True faith calls on the name of Jesus for salvation from death, hell, sin, and Satan. Therefore, sound theology has its source in a founding drama with its revealed doctrines. Through the drama and the doctrine together the Spirit produces doxology — repentance and trust — and brings us into the unfolding story of God, no longer as spectators, but as disciples on pilgrimage to the everlasting city." ~ Michael S. Horton

37. "12. Historians today rely on classics like Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Caesar's Gallic War, and Tacitus's Histories. The earliest copies we have for these date from 1,300, 900, and 700 years after the original writing, respectively, and there are eight extant copies of the first, ten of the second, and two of the third. In contrast, the earliest copy of Mark's gospel is dated at AD 130 (a century after the original writing), and there are 5,000 ancient Greek copies, along with nearly 20,000 Latin and other ancient manuscripts. The sheer volume of ancient manuscripts provides sufficient comparison between copies to provide an accurate reproduction of the original text. Ironically, a number of fashionable scholars attracted to the so-called gnostic gospels as an "alternative Christianity" have far fewer manuscripts, and the original writings cannot be dated any earlier than a century after the canonical Gospels." ~ Michael S. Horton

38. "The authority of the Scriptures does not depend on the decision of the church or the individual to validate it. To paraphrase the Westminster Confession, we receive it as the word of God because of what it is, not because of what we make of it." ~ Michael S. Horton

39. "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

40. "Throughout God's acts revealed in history, from creation to the exodus to the exile to redemption and on into the consummation, we discern a clear pattern: every good gift comes from the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. The Father is the origin of the Son and the Spirit and therefore of all the works that they accomplish. The Father created and upholds the world in his Son (Jn 1:1 – 3; Col 1:15 – 17; Heb 1:1 – 4; Rev 19:13). The Spirit is at work within creation to bring about its appropriate response." ~ Michael S. Horton

41. "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

42. "We do not have even 1 percent of that kind of power. Rather, we have 100 percent of the natural freedom that God deemed appropriate to the creatures he made in his own image. Instead of pieces rationed between God (a larger portion) and creatures (a smaller portion), God has his "pie" (sovereign, Creator-style freedom) and we have our own as well from him (dependent, creature-style freedom). Our freedom is like his, but always with greater difference. "In him we live and move and have our being" (Ac 17:28), so even our ability to think, will, and act is dependent on God's sovereign gift." ~ Michael S. Horton

43. "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

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