I just finished David Platt's book, Radical. I have to admit, it was challenging. I'm able to maintain a fairly comfortable status quo as long as I'm not confronted with the Gospel's contradiction of it. This book, in that regard, was quite confrontational.
I won't give a review here (I'm sure you can find one at Amazon). I'll just give an excerpt from the last couple pages.
As Elisabeth Elliot points out, not even dying a martyr's death is classified as extraordinary obedience when you are following a Savior who died on a cross. Suddenly a martyr's death seems like normal obedience.
So what happens when radical obedience to Christ becomes the new normal?
Some missionary friends gave me this book, and told me how great it was. Immediately afterwards, another friend saw it--someone whose life is given to spreading the Gospel and rescuing the oppressed in extraordinary ways. His response to the book was, essentially, "Yeah, it's good! But the title should be Average. Or, Normal Christianity."
I'll end with this quote, which Elisabeth Elliot wrote about her husband, who was martyred by the Auca Indians he spent his life to reach:
He and the other men with whom he died were hailed as heroes, "martyrs." I do not approve. Nor would they have approved.
Is the distinction between living for Christ and dying for Him, after all, so great? Is not the second the logical conclusion of the first? Furthermore, to live for God is to die, "daily," as the apostle Paul put it. It is to lose everything that we may gain Christ.
I won't give a review here (I'm sure you can find one at Amazon). I'll just give an excerpt from the last couple pages.
As Elisabeth Elliot points out, not even dying a martyr's death is classified as extraordinary obedience when you are following a Savior who died on a cross. Suddenly a martyr's death seems like normal obedience.
So what happens when radical obedience to Christ becomes the new normal?
Some missionary friends gave me this book, and told me how great it was. Immediately afterwards, another friend saw it--someone whose life is given to spreading the Gospel and rescuing the oppressed in extraordinary ways. His response to the book was, essentially, "Yeah, it's good! But the title should be Average. Or, Normal Christianity."
I'll end with this quote, which Elisabeth Elliot wrote about her husband, who was martyred by the Auca Indians he spent his life to reach:
He and the other men with whom he died were hailed as heroes, "martyrs." I do not approve. Nor would they have approved.
Is the distinction between living for Christ and dying for Him, after all, so great? Is not the second the logical conclusion of the first? Furthermore, to live for God is to die, "daily," as the apostle Paul put it. It is to lose everything that we may gain Christ.
1 comment:
That was my favorite quote in the book, too! Merry Christmas Brother!!!! Have you read Radical Together?
Post a Comment