Russell Morre on pride: [Pride] is the primal sin because no other sin is possible without believing that some good gift of God is mine and mine alone to use for my purposes, for my own kingdom and glory. Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ (p. 143)
Tagged: Pride, Russell Moore, sin, Tempted and Tried
Great thought for Easter Wednesday from Russell Moore: In the long run we’re all dead, and in the longer run we’re all raised from the dead. There’s a freedom that comes from seeing that. -Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ
Tagged: death, Freedom, Resurrection, Russell Moore
Jesus’ first temptation “is not just about consuming food; it is about consuming, period. It is about our…appetite for stuff.” -Russell Moore, Tempted and Tried
Tagged: Russell Moore, Temptation
Gorging and getting drunk the day before Ash Wednesday probably wasn’t what the Lord meant when he said to “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” -Russell Moore, Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ
Tagged: Ash Wednesday, Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Russell Moore, Tempted and Tried
The discipline of the body over food, which God designed through cycles of both fasting and feasting, is necessary to recognize God’s fatherly goodness and sovereignty. That’s what Mardi Gras in relation to Lent gets right. No person’s appetite is sovereign. It is balanced out by the larger considerations of worship, life, culture, family, society. A life that is all fast or all feast is disordered to the core. Russell D. Moore, Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ
Tagged: Appetite, Discipline, Fasting, Feast, Food, Lent, Mardi Gras, Russell Moore
Regarding Satan’s quotation of Psalm 91 in the temptation account: The Devil was right, you know. Jesus refused to heed his offer not because the tempter was wrong but precisely because he was quoting an accurate Scripture. God indeed would rescue his anointed. But the anointed is the one who waits on God and who refuses to force his hand. We must suffer with Christ before we are glorified with him (Rom. 8:17). To seek a “security” apart from Christ, a vindication apart from Christ, is to taunt God by asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Russell D. Moore, Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ, pp. 125-126
Tagged: Psalm 91, Russell Moore, Temptation, Tempted and Tried
In order to get to the Father’s table, we must end the grip that death has on us by teaching us to crave more and more of what cannot satisfy. We must starve to death. Russell Moore, Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ
Tagged: death, Russell Moore, Table
Russell Moore justly points an accusing finger at the church and each of us: Too many of our churches, too many of us, have made peace with the sexual revolution and the familial chaos left in its wake precisely because we made peace, long before, with the love of money. We wish to live with the same standard of living as the culture around us (there is no sin in that), but we are willing to get there by any means necessary. Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ
Tagged: Love of money, Russell Moore, Sexual revolution
Self-control is, in this fallen world, counterintuitive and countercultural, so much so that anyone possessing it will seem bizarre if not subversive. That’s especially true for those of us living in an era of unparalleled affluence, in which there is the illusion of a limitlessness of conceivable consumption. This has changed the makeup and witness of our churches, I fear, in ways that are mostly invisible to us. We have become the people Jesus warned us about—fat, upwardly mobile, and politically influential. In the meantime we’ve become accommodated in almost every way to the culture that surrounds us. We must recognize that one of the roots of the family crisis around us—in the pews we sit in or preach to every week—is the wallet…
Tagged: Russell Moore, Self-control
We are able to be free from the love of money when we recognize our identity and our inheritance in Christ and cling to the promise, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5). Russell Moore, Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ
Tagged: Contentment, Love of money, Money, Russell Moore