Ordinary Michael Horton Quotes

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.

Christ’s body is not a stage for my performance,

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.

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).

The gospel makes us extrospective, turning our gaze upward to God in faith and outward to our neighbor in love.

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.

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.

In a digital age, blogs are often more authoritative than sermons.

The problem is that our children increasingly have not been given enough of the Christian faith even to apostatize from it properly.

The power of our activism, campaigns, movements, and strategies cannot forgive sins or raise the dead.

In an economy of grace, there is enough to go around. The Father’s love and generosity are not scarce. His table is brimming with luxurious fare. That is why we invite those who cannot repay us. After all, it is not our table, but his.

Loving Neighbors Is Tougher Than Loving Causes

Our families, including us, do not need more quality time, but more quantity time.

We’re not building a kingdom, but receiving one.

Martin Luther put it well: “I have held many things in my hands, and have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.”84

In his bestseller, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that in the Internet age we are losing our capacity for deep thinking, reading, and conversation.

If your personal relationship with Jesus is utterly unique, then it is not properly Christian.

The Next Big Thing is Christ’s return. Until then, we live in hope that changes our ordinary lives here and now.

The Next Big Thing is not another Pentecost or another apostle or another political or social cause. It is Christ’s return.

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.

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.

Where the biblical message calls us to the cross, to die to self and to be raised in Christ, the new message calls the old Adam to an improved self, empowered to fulfill more easily his own life project.

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.

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.

No longer a star in my own movie, I can take my place in this gift exchange. The gifts that I have are not only for my private use, but for me to pass along to others. And the weaknesses I have are important because they make me more dependent on others.

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.

Our life has to count! We have to leave our mark, have a legacy, and make a difference. And all of this should be something that can be managed, measured, and maintained. We have to live up to our Facebook profile. It’s one of the newer versions of salvation by works.

Christians should be some of the most conflicted people in the world. It is far simpler to be dead to God and to live for oneself. But Christians must struggle against their selfish ambition because they are alive to God in Christ Jesus, and the indwelling Spirit turns on the lights to enable them to see their sin.

Despite the touching sentimentality of my grandmother’s favorite hymn, “In the Garden,” it is simply not true that you come to the garden alone with Jesus and “the joy we share as we tarry there none other has ever known.” If your personal relationship with Jesus is utterly unique, then it is not properly Christian.

What would it say to our youth group if, instead of inviting the former NFL star, we had a couple visit who had been married for forty-five years to talk honestly about the ups and downs of growing together in Christ? What if we held up those “ordinary” examples of humble and faithful service over the worldly success stories?

There are two kinds of prosperity gospels. One promises personal health, wealth, and happiness. Another promises social transformation. In both versions, the results are up to us. We bring God’s kingdom to earth, either to ourselves or to society, by following certain spiritual laws or moral and political agendas. Both forget that salvation comes from above, as a gift of God. Both forget that because we are baptized into Christ, the pattern of our lives is suffering leading to glory in that cataclysmic revolution that Christ will bring when he returns. Both miss the point that our lives and the world as they are now are not as good as it gets. We do not have our best life or world now.

We are living as though God and our neighbors were made for us. In other words, we are living unnatural lives — living as if we were or could become someone other than the image of God, created to love God and each other. That is why the drive for achievement is no longer a virtue, why our pursuit of meaning and significance is so confusing and futile.

To be clear, it’s not as if all of the values being promoted today by calls to be “radical” or invitations to change the world are wrong-headed or unbiblical. Taking a summer to build wells in Africa is, for some, a genuine calling. But so is fixing a neighbor’s plumbing, feeding one’s family, and sharing in the burdens and joys of a local church. What we are called to do every day, right where God has placed us, is rich and rewarding.

This has been the vicious cycle of evangelical revivalism ever since: a pendulum swinging between enthusiasm and disillusionment rather than steady maturity in Christ through participation in the ordinary life of the covenant community. The regular preaching of Christ from all of the Scriptures, baptism, the Supper, the prayers of confession and praise, and all of the other aspects of ordinary Christian fellowship are seen as too ordinary.

We need fewer Christians who want to stand apart from their neighbors, doing something that will really display God’s kingdom in all of its glory. We need more Christians who take their place alongside believing and unbelieving neighbors in the daily gift exchange. The thief is not expected to become a monk or a famous evangelist, but to “labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need” (Eph 4:28).

Like every other area of life, we have come to believe that growth in Christ — as individuals or as churches — can and should be programmed to generate predictable outcomes that are unrealistic and are not even justified biblically. We want big results — sooner rather than later. And 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.

In many ways, it’s more fun to be part of movements than churches. We can express our own individuality, pick our favorite leaders, and be swept off our feet at conferences. We can be anonymous. Although encouraged by like-minded believers, we are not bound up with them so that we should feel compelled to bear their burdens or suffer their rebukes. Yet this movement mentality keeps us restless and makes ordinary life in and submission to an actual church seem intolerably confining. And terribly ordinary.

Being “ordinary” means that we reject the idolatry of pursuing excellence for selfish reasons. We aren’t digging wells in Africa to prove our worth or value. We aren’t serving in the soup kitchen or engaging in spiritual disciplines because we long to be unique, radical, and different. When we do these things for selfish reasons, God becomes a tool for winning our lifetime achievement award. Our neighbors become instruments in the crafting of our sense of meaning, impact, and identity. What we do for God is really for ourselves.

We need to take the pressure off of both parents, let them take a breath, and, resting in God’s grace, let them revel in the ordinary chat in the car, the normal conversation over family devotions, and the countless moments that add up. Our families, including us, do not need more quality time, but more quantity time. That’s when most of the best things happen. We think that such events are spontaneous — and to a certain extent they are. But they are really the things that bubble up when people are living ordinary lives together.

American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for the Next Big Thing. We're growing bored with the ordinary means of God's grace, attending church week in and week out. Doctrines and disciplines that have shaped faithful Christian witness in the past are often marginalized or substituted with newer fashions or methods. The new and improved may dazzle us for a moment, but soon they have become "so last year".

The gospel . . . is the power of God for salvation,” and, with Paul, we have no reason to be ashamed of it (Rom 1:16). That is why phrases like “living the gospel,” “being the gospel,” and “being partners with Jesus in his redemption of the world” are dangerous distortions of the biblical message of good news. The gospel is not about what we have done or are called to do, but the announcement of God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor 4:5).

many Christians wonder if it is good for children to have them in the regular service. After all, they cannot understand what is going on. But imagine saying that you’re not going to have toddlers sit at the table for meals with the family because they do not understand the rituals or manners. Or keeping infants isolated in a nursery with nothing but mobiles and squeaky toys because they cannot understand the dialogue of the rest of the family around them. We know, instinctively, that it’s important for our children to acquire language and the ordinary rituals of their family environment in order to become mature.

In other words, the canon is inspired; the community is illumined to understand, embrace, interpret, and obey it. Jesus taught that there is a qualitative distinction between the prophets and the tradition of the elders who were Israel’s teachers after the Old Testament canon was closed (Mt 15:2, 6). Similarly, Paul distinguishes between the foundation-laying era of the apostles and the building-erecting era of the ordinary ministers who follow after them (1Co 3:11 – 12). Although Paul could appeal to no human authority higher than his own office, he encouraged Timothy to recall the gift he received at his ordination, “when the council of elders [presbyteriou] laid their hands on you” (1Ti 4:14). None of us, today, is a Moses. None is a Paul or a Peter. We are all “Timothys,” no longer adding to the apostolic deposit, but guarding and proclaiming it (1Ti 6:20). The apostolic era has now come to an end; the office was a unique one, for a unique stage of redemptive history, a period of time used by God for the drafting of the new covenant constitution.

Millions of people around the world will turn out for a prosperity evangelist’s promise of signs and wonders. But how many of us think that God’s greatest signs and wonders are being done every week through the ordinary means of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper?

So get on with life, with love, with service — fully realizing that God already has the perfect service he requires of us in his Son and now our neighbor needs our imperfect help.

God’s commands are focused on what it means to be in a relationship with others: to trust in God alone and to love and worship him in the way he approves and to look out for the good of our fellow image bearers.

Then the “teenager” was invented as a unique demographic in society. As a result, the youth group was created, offering adolescent-friendly versions of church. “In the second stage, a new adulthood emerged that looked a lot like the old adolescence. Fewer and fewer people outgrew the adolescent Christian spiritualities they had learned in youth groups; instead, churches began to cater to them.” Eventually, churches became them.18

Saving faith is not the enemy of good works, but their only possible source.

I am convinced that we have drifted from the true focus of God’s activity in this world. It is not to be found in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary, the everyday.

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31). Eating and drinking are fairly common aspects of daily life, and yet even ordinary meals become significant when they draw our attention once again to glorifying and enjoying the God who provides them.

Instead of living in monasteries, committing their lives in service to themselves and their own salvation, or living in castles, commanding the world to mirror the kingdom of Christ, Luther argues, believers should love and serve their neighbors through their vocations in the world, where their neighbors need them.101 “God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does.

The challenge here is that we have been trained to read even the Bible as a catalog of heroes to emulate. Moses is the great model of leadership, Joshua is the ideal warrior, and we should “dare to be a Daniel,” as the old hymn exhorts. This is a little odd, when you actually read the narratives and discover that Abraham, Noah, Moses, David, and all the rest were ordinary sinners like the rest of us who had received an extraordinary calling. They fell short of that calling, but God was faithful. And they too needed a Savior — and this is the central plot unfolding in Scripture. In our ambition, we trip over the central character and the central meaning of the whole story.

Finney himself wondered if this endless craving for ever-greater experiences might lead to spiritual exhaustion.42 In fact, his worries were justified. The area where Finney’s revivals were especially dominant is now referred to by historians as the “burned-over district,” a seedbed of both disillusionment and the proliferation of esoteric sects.43

There is no community without consensus: a basic, shared agreement about the things that define it. You have to show up in order to belong. And shared agreements have to be patrolled (disciplined) in order to be maintained and to endure through the various crises that individual members might provoke.

Patient dedication to the ordinary and often tedious disciplines of corporate and family worship, teaching, prayer, modeling, and mentoring have been eroded by successive waves of enthusiasm.

God does not need our good works; our neighbor does.”12

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.

Protestantism today is being shaped by the cult of perpetual novelty.

Where the first Adam sought to break free of his created rank and ascend to the throne of God, the last Adam — who is God in his very nature — left his throne and descended to our misery.

everything that the Bible identifies as sin and our nature recognizes as such is something essentially good gone wrong. More precisely, it is something God has made that we have corrupted. Augustine defined the essence of sin as being curved in on ourselves

Furthermore, repentance and faith are not a one-time experience, but are part of a lifelong process that has ups and downs along the way. The most important thing to keep our eye on is not religious experience itself, but the faithful ministry of God’s means of grace.

In the covenant of grace, God says to us, “I’m with you to the end, come what may.” Only from this position of security can we say the same to our spouse, children, and fellow believers. And from this deepest contentment we can fulfill our covenants in the world “as unto the Lord,” even when others break their contracts.

One of the prominent Christian “traditions” today is nondenominational evangelicalism. To deny that this is a tradition is to cut off the possibility of internal evaluation, critique, and reform. Ironically, it tends to create the most resistant sort of traditionalism.

The Internet is the quarry from which younger generations craft their own selves and then advertise a desired persona on Facebook.

As Luther said, “God does not need our good works; our neighbor does.

In many ways, it’s more fun to be part of movements than churches. We can express our own individuality, pick our favorite leaders, and be swept off our feet at conferences. We can be anonymous. Although encouraged by like-minded believers, we are not bound up with them so that we should feel compelled to bear their burdens or suffer their rebukes. Yet this movement mentality keeps us restless and makes ordinary life in and submission to an actual church seem intolerably confining.

The real problem is that our values are changing and the new ones are wearing us out. But they're also keeping us from forming genuine, long-term, and meaningful commitments that actually contribute to the lives of others. Over time, the hype of living a new life, taking up a radical calling, and changing the world can creep into every area of our life. And it can make us tired, depressed, and mean. Michael Horton, Ordinary, 13-14

We want big results-sooner rather than later. And we've forgotten that God showers his extraordinary gifts through ordinary means of grace, loves us through ordinary fellow image bearers, and sends us into the world to love and serve others in ordinary callings. Michael Horton, Ordinary, 14

Even now, the rays of the age to come are piercing this present age.

If ambition has been converted from a vice to a virtue, contentment has been transformed from a virtue into a vice.

So it is not simply by understanding doctrine that we uproot narcissism and materialism. It is by actually taking our place in a local expression of that concrete economy of grace instituted by God in Christ and sustained by his Word and Spirit.

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

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.

Well, it was one more nail in the coffin of the old Adam” or “God absolved me” or maybe something as simple as, “It’s been good to understand the Gospel of John a little better over these past few months.

Paul never encouraged Timothy to contemplate his personal “legacy.

Tragically, self-control is increasingly relinquished among older adults in our shock-jock society.

Whenever a new generation announces its radical and totally unprecedented culture shift, there is an evangelical movement that pressures churches to get on board if they want to adapt and survive the next wave. It’s doubtful that cultures actually work like that. But it is especially disruptive for the ordinary growth of believers in a covenant of grace that extends to every culture and “to a thousand generations.” There is change, to be sure, but what kind of change, to what end, and through what means? For that, Scripture rather than culture must provide the ultimate answer.

We are passive receivers of the gift of salvation, but we are thereby rendered active worshipers in a life of thanksgiving that is exhibited chiefly in loving service to our neighbors.

Where did we get the idea that older folks need to be given a “kid-free” environment with other “golden oldies,” and that men’s groups and women’s groups are more meaningful than the communion of saints?

Perhaps we do not really think that Americans are pagans. That is our first mistake.

Answer: “First, so that the longer we live the more we may come to know our sinfulness and the more eagerly look to Christ for forgiveness of sins and righteousness.” Even in the Christian life we need this first use of the law to drive us out of ourselves to cling to our Savior. “Second, so that we may never stop striving, and never stop praying to God for the grace of the Holy Spirit, to be renewed more and more after God’s image, until after this life we reach our goal: perfection.”16 “Because

It is nothing new when young people want churches to pander to them. What is new is the extent to which churches have obliged.

The church isn’t a circle of friends, but the family of God. The covenant of grace connects generations, rooting them in that worshiping community with the “cloud of witnesses” in heaven as well as here and now (Heb 12:1).

The church isn’t a circle of friends, but the family of God.

If you are always looking for an impact, a legacy, and success, you will not take the time to care for the things that matter.

If this is true, then neither the past nor the present is normative. It is the canon of Scripture that renders both relative and open to correction.

If you make every sentence an exclamation or put every verb in ‘bold,’ then nothing stands out.

Ordinary” has to be one of the loneliest words in our vocabulary today. Who wants a bumper sticker that announces to the neighborhood, “My child is an ordinary student at Bubbling Brook Elementary”? Who wants to be that ordinary person who lives in an ordinary town, is a member of an ordinary church, and has ordinary friends and works an ordinary job? Our life has to count! We have to leave our mark, have a legacy, and make a difference. And all of this should be something that can be managed, measured, and maintained. We have to live up to our Facebook profile. It’s one of the newer versions of salvation by works.

It is all too easy to turn other people in our lives into a supporting cast for our life movie. The problem is that they don’t follow the role or the lines we’ve given them. They are actual people with actual needs that get in the way of our plot, especially if they’re as ambitious as we are. 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.

The gospel is truly radical: “the power of God for salvation” (Rom 1:16). Through this gospel, the Holy Spirit creates the faith to embrace Christ with all of his benefits. We are delivered from condemnation and are made part of the new creation in Christ. Filled with grateful hearts, we look for ways to glorify God and to love and serve our neighbors. We are eager to grow. Fueled by gratitude, we look for opportunities to glorify God and to love and serve others. Yet it is easy to take the gospel for granted. Then we find ourselves running out of that high-octane fuel, running out of gas in the middle of the busy highway of myriad calls to get in the fast lane. In the zeal created by the gospel itself, we can leave the gospel behind as we gravitate toward various calls to “something more.

Over time, the hype of living a new life, taking up a radical calling, and changing the world can creep into every area of our life. And it can make us tired, depressed, and mean.

Like every other area of life, we have come to believe that growth in Christ — as individuals or as churches — can and should be programmed to generate predictable outcomes that are unrealistic and are not even justified biblically. We want big results — sooner rather than later.

We’re all adolescents now,” writes Thomas Bergler. “When are we going to grow up?”17 Bergler explains that churches and parachurch organizations first began to provide youth-oriented programs — mainly to help at-risk kids in the cities (e.g., the YMCA). Then the “teenager” was invented as a unique demographic in society. As a result, the youth group was created, offering adolescent-friendly versions of church. “In the second stage, a new adulthood emerged that looked a lot like the old adolescence. Fewer and fewer people outgrew the adolescent Christian spiritualities they had learned in youth groups; instead, churches began to cater to them.” Eventually, churches became them.

All of this means that the call to contentment is a summons to realize and accept our place in Christ and his body — and, more broadly, our place in the gift exchange in society through common grace. This cuts off at the root the discontentment — ambition — to change our station in life not only in the direction of prosperity, but also in a self-imposed poverty. “I know how to be brought low,” Paul says, “and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:12 – 13). Restless

God uses means. Natural laws and human ingenuity are his tools, even when we do not see his hand. He didn’t just establish these laws and then step away. As contemporary science reminds us, apparent chaos is ubiquitous. Things should fall apart, but they don’t. Not for one moment could the cosmos sustain itself apart from the Father’s loving word, which he speaks in his Son and by his Spirit.

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. Whatever gifts may spill over into other activities and venues, it is by sharing in the ordinary service of Christ to his people each week that we become heirs of eternal life and draw others into his everlasting kingdom. Christ is the host and the chef. It is his event. His ministers are simply waiters delivering to his guests some savory morsels of the Lamb’s everlasting wedding feast.

You pursue excellence when you care about something other than your own excellence.

the tendency of the evangelical movement has always been to prioritize extraordinary methods and demands over the ordinary means that Christ instituted for sustainable mission.

There always had to be a cause du jour to justify our engagement. Otherwise, life in the church would simply be too ordinary. Like every other area of life, we have come to believe that growth in Christ — as individuals or as churches — can and should be programmed to generate predictable outcomes that are unrealistic and are not even justified biblically. We want big results — sooner rather than later. And 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.

The camp meeting set the pattern for credentialing Evangelical ministers. They were validated by the crowd’s response. Organizational credentialing, doctrinal purity, personal education were useless here — in fact, some educated ministers had to make a pretense of ignorance. The minister was ordained from below, by the converts he made. This was an even more democratic procedure than electoral politics, where a candidate stood for office and spent some time campaigning. This was a spontaneous and instant proclamation that the Spirit accomplished. The do-it-yourself religion called for a make-it-yourself ministry.