God is not calling us to a comfortable, mediocre, safe, “normal” American life, but rather to a radical, abandoned, risk-taking life of surrender, sacrifice and eternal significance. Over the last few weeks I’ve been devouring David Platt’s book “Radical.” This book is singing my song, preaching a message that is deeply embedded within my heart and soul.
Yet many, if not most, American Christians have sold out to the “American dream,” allowing our culture to shape our understanding of the Scriptures rather than the other way around. When Jesus tells us to believe and obey, how far is he expecting us to go? Discipleship in the New Testament appears to be a rather radical pursuit that envelopes every aspect of your life. Yet it is so easy for us to compartmentalize our Christianity, and subjugate it to our definition of the “successful life” that God undoubtedly wants us to enjoy. Really???
Platt makes statements like, “The will of God is for you and me to give our lives urgently and recklessly to making the gospel and the glory of God known among all peoples, particularly those who have never heard of Jesus.” (p.160) He bases this off sound theology from Romans, that all men stand guilty before God, and only through Christ can they be saved, and we have the message of Christ to share with them. There are no alternatives. He uses the illustration of the SS United States, an enormous, fast military ship designed to carry 15,000 troops into battle, but which was transposed into a luxury liner for celebrities and dignitaries to travel in maximum comfort across the Atlantic. It never served its primary calling. Has the American church forgotten her primary calling, that we are at war, and we are to be deploying troops into battle instead of making wealthy American Christians comfortable so they feel good about themselves? Instead of giving away the excess off the top for the work of God, shouldn’t we set a modest target of what we “need” to live, and then give everything over this away to God’s work, since wealth is a gift from God not to be used on our comfort but for spreading God’s glory? Ouch!
We must “determine not to waste our lives on anything but uncompromising, unconditional abandonment to a gracious, loving Savior who invites us to take radical risk and promises radical reward.” (p.21) Friends, that truth is what has catapulted us out of America, and into the polluted, poverty-ridden, disease-infested, spiritually-confused foreign land of East Africa. The calling of Jesus to His followers in Luke 9-10 and throughout the Gospels is not just for the few, super-Christians, but for each one of us. So how will YOU fight against the strong current of culture and the “American dream,” and instead pursue a radical call of absolute abandonment to the Savior who radically loved you all the way through the cross?
May God give us the grace, wisdom and courage to hear and obey the call to engage in the battle for the love and glory of our God. Souls are perishing, entering an eternity apart from Christ, and we have been committed with the message of reconciliation (2 Cor.5:14-21). Join me in pressing on in a radical, purposeful pursuit of God’s glory among all nations. Eric