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

— Russell D. Moore

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

— 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. “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

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

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Russell D. Moore

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

— Russell D. Moore

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Russell D. Moore

25. “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

26. “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

27. “How often do I rage rather than lament?”

— Russell D. Moore

28. “The devil wishes to assure some people that there’s no need for repentance, and others that there’s no hope for mercy. Some people are deceived into thinking they are too good for the gospel while others are accused into thinking they are too bad for the gospel.”

— Russell D. Moore

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

— Russell D. Moore

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “But sometime before dawn on a Sunday morning, a spike-torn hand twitched. A blood-crusted eyelid opened. The breath of God came blowing into that cave, and a new creation flashed into reality. God was not simply delivering Jesus – and with him all of us – from death, he was also vindicating him – and with him all of us.”

— Russell D. Moore

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “We are Americans best when we are not Americans first.”

— Russell D. Moore

42. “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

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

— Russell D. Moore

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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