BOTW: Radical

Reading Time: 4 minutesMost of my life is lived with a sinking realization that the Christianity of America is vastly different from the Christianity of the early church. I find myself unable to pinpoint what it is, or could be, that we’re missing, but when I read the Bible I can’t help but examine my own life and feel that I come up short in comparison. Their faith seems so much stronger than mine and purer than mine. In short, they impacted their culture while much of today’s American church isn’t even intersecting culture, or interested in trying.

So when a friend recommended David Platt’s book, Radical, my wife (my Better 99%) picked it up in a bookstore and brought it home. She read it a couple weeks ago, and since she practically read me half the book in snippets here and there (“Honey, can I read you this?” and “Oh! You have GOT to hear this!”), I decided that it would be Book #3 in my quest to read a book a week in 2011.

The premise of the book boiled down to 2 questions for Platt. The first was the easiest: was I going to believe Jesus? Sure, most of us do. But the second one was what he found to be the hardest: was I going to obey Jesus? Platt wondered if we could:

Take an honest look at the Jesus of the Bible and dare to ask what the consequences might be if we really believed him and really obeyed him.

I sense a growing level of discontent in the American church. It is not a growing number of complainers who rip the preacher apart at the Sunday buffet, or who are always up in arms about the song selection in the worship service. It is a discontent with the gap that many of us see growing between what we read in the Bible and what we see in our own lives. If Jesus called his first disciples to give up everything and follow him, then are we not called to do the same? “But we don’t want to believe it,” Platt writes. “We are afraid of what it might mean for our lives. So we rationalize these passages away.” He continues:

And this is where we need to pause. Because we are starting to redefine Christianity. We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. A nice, middle-class, American Jesus…And the danger now is that when we gather in our church buildings to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead we may be worshiping ourselves.

Yeah, that’s on page 13. If you’re able to make it out of chapter one, you’ll find that it doesn’t get any easier. In response to our unwillingness to obey God, Platt writes this zinger:

We spurn our Creator’s authority over us. God beckons storm clouds, and they come. He tells the wind to blow and the rain to fall, and they obey immediately. He speaks to the mountains,”You go there,” and he says to the seas, “You stop here,” and they do it. Everything in all creation responds in obedience to the Creator…until we get to you and me. We have the audacity to look God in the face and say, “No.” (emphasis added)

This, then, seems to be the heart of where the American church has gone so wrong. We have made much of ourselves – our comforts, our dreams, our hopes – at the expense of the advancement of God’s glory in the most devastated areas of the world. It isn’t so much that any of us woke up one day and said, “Today I stop caring about others,” as much as it has been a slow, gradual turning away from the needy and toward ourselves. This self-centeredness is quite the opposite of the life our Savior led when He said that he’d come to serve, and not to be served.

As Platt says, “If there is no sign of caring for the poor in our lives, then there is reason to at least question whether Christ is in our hearts.” Ouch.

The obvious question is: So what do we do? I’ve attempted to answer that from our family’s perspective in this post, but the short answer in Radical is that we need to begin seeing the excess God has given us as a reason to give more instead of as an excuse to have more, and in order to make the shift in perspective, Platt offers the Radical Experiment. It is a one year commitment to do 5 things:

• pray for the entire world
• read through the entire Bible
• sacrifice your money for a specific purpose
• spend your time in another context
• commit your life to a multiplying community

I could give you the specifics about how to go about tackling those 5, but you’d be much better off getting the book and reading about it for yourself. Just do it with your eyes wide open, because you will be taking your life (as you now know it) into your own hands.

If, as Platt writes, “the goal of the American dream is to make much of us and the goal of the gospel is to make much of God,” then you may find yourself being one of God’s greatest spokespersons a year from now.

Buy this book, but don’t say you weren’t warned. Read Radical at your own peril.

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