Top 60 Russell D. Moore Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The church is not built on the rock foundation of geniuses and influencers but of apostles and prophets.”

— Russell D. Moore

2. “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

3. “For too long, we’ve called unbelievers to “invite Jesus into your life.” Jesus doesn’t want to be in your life. Your life is a wreck. Jesus calls you into his life. And his life isn’t boring or purposeless or static. It’s wild and exhilarating and unpredictable.”

— Russell D. Moore

4. “If you’d like to grasp the full beauty of God’s creation, see color. Instead of pretending like we are color-blind, let’s celebrate God’s creation. Ethnic differences aren’t the result of the Fall; celebrate the unique beauty of each and look forward to seeing heaven filled with the colors of all nations.”

— Russell D. Moore

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Moral cowardice at the expense of the vulnerable unborn is both wrong and pathetic.”

— Russell D. Moore

9. “Charleston was where America split apart in 1861. Maybe it’s where America comes together in 2015.”

— Russell D. Moore

10. “An ‘almost gospel’ doesn’t raise a corpse.”

— Russell D. Moore

11. “I think we can remember our past without valorizing parts of our past that we ought to see as wrong.”

— Russell D. Moore

12. “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

13. “Turning the other cheek often leaves you with two broken jaws, but Jesus is still King, and still right.”

— Russell D. Moore

14. “When our ultimate goal becomes security and protection, God becomes a means to that security and protection. We “test” him then, to see if he is able to serve as a means to our real god, our sense that everything will be all right.”

— Russell D. Moore

15. “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

16. “What if our foster care systems, in every one of our communities, knew that the churches are the first place willing to help families and children in crisis?”

— Russell D. Moore

17. “The path of temptation is gradual and intelligent, not as sudden and random as it seems.”

— Russell D. Moore

18. “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

19. “At the cross, Jesus aligned himself with those who are abused and maligned and powerless and ashamed. He stood with us, or hanged with us, there. And in that powerless act, he also delivered the deathblow to the reptilian power behind the evil every one of us has experienced. Jesus is not distant from your pain; he is crucified by it – with it and with you.”

— Russell D. Moore

20. “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

21. “Elijah’s fear drove him to the point of being cared for by God, almost as a child – with food to eat, with a place to sleep, with a response to his cries. That’s the direction fear leads when it is leading us away from self-sufficiency and toward the gospel by which we stand. In those cases, fear is not just a reaction but a revelation.”

— Russell D. Moore

22. “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

23. “Total disengagement is itself a privilege of a cultural Christendom that is fast passing away.”

— Russell D. Moore

24. “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

25. “The pattern is fear leading to a word of consolation leading to a revelation.”

— Russell D. Moore

26. “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

27. “The whole universe is now an orphanage. But then there’s Jesus. When we were still orphans, Christ became a substitute orphan for us. Though he was a son, he took on the humiliation of a slave and the horror of death.”

— Russell D. Moore

28. “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

29. “Not everything that offends us should offend us, and not everything that offends us is persecution.”

— Russell D. Moore

30. “But it would be a tragedy to get the right president, the right Congress, and the wrong Christ.”

— Russell D. Moore

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Christianity, historically, has rejected cremation as a false picture of the body. Burial signifies a Christian hope, that the deceased is “sleeping” and thus will be “waked” at the coming of the Lord. Cremation signifies a perspective found in Buddhism and other religions, that the body is consumed into nothingness.”

— Russell D. Moore

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “When we find our identity anywhere other than Christ, our churches will be made up of warring partisans rather than loving siblings.”

— Russell D. Moore

38. “Family is not the gospel. If you think that family is the source of ultimate meaning in your life, then you will expect your family to make you happy, to live up to your expectations.”

— Russell D. Moore

39. “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

40. “Many who are now standing will fall away, unable to bear the scandal that comes with following Christ in a culture that sees such as superstition or hatred. Some who started out well will change their minds. And, at the same time, many who we now see as enemies will see their own lives in the cross of Christ.”

— Russell D. Moore

41. “We must repent of the way that we, sometimes without even knowing it, have prized the powerful over the powerless.”

— Russell D. Moore

42. “The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel.”

— Russell D. Moore

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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.”

— Russell D. Moore

49. “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

50. “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