Amazing Grace

Michael Horton speaks prophetically in 1991 in Putting Amazing Back into Grace. His words ring as true today (or more so) than they did almost 20 years ago:

The Reformation produced an era of great thinkers, artists and workers because it raised God high and bowed low the human head before His majesty. Now, we have evangelical ditties instead of Bach’s or Handel’s exuberant and reverent masterpieces. Our services are often celebrations of ourselves more than they are of God, more entertainment than worship… Never before, not even in the medieval church, have Christians been so obsessed with themselves. Never before have people entertained such grandiose notions about humans and such puny views about God. Evangelists talk about God as though He were to be pitied rather than worshipped, as though He were crying His eyes out in heaven, hoping things would go better, that people would “let Him have His way.” Never before, perhaps, has God been so totally forgotten and lowered in our estimation. Self-esteem, self-image, self-confidence, self-this and self-that have replaced talk of God and His attributes…. Without the knowledge of the God in whose image we have been created, and the grace which has made of children of God, narcissism (self-love) quickly evolves into depression (self-hate).