Radical

Please consider these words from Radical, by David Platt:

A relationship with Jesus requires total, superior, and exclusive devotion. If you follow him, you abandon everything - your needs, yours desires, even your family. Biblical obedience (rather than the church-going, rules-keeping that we like to call "obedience") will require that we abandon all that would hinder. "Give up everything you have, carry your cross (an instrument of torture), and hate your family." This sounds a lot different than "Admit, believe, confess, and pray a prayer after me." Jesus called his disciples to abandon their careers. They were reorienting their entire life's work around discipleship to Jesus. Their plans were being swallowed up in his plans. Ultimately, Jesus was calling them to abandon themselves. They were leaving certainty for uncertainty, safety for danger, self-preservation for self-denunciation. Lets put ourselves in the shoes of these eager followers of Jesus. What if I were the potential disciple being told to drop my nets and abandon my career? What if I were the disciple being told to embrace torture and suffering? What if you were the man whom Jesus told to not even say good-beye to his family? What if I were the disciple being told to hate my family and give up everything I had in order to follow Jesus? This is where we come face to face with a dangerous reality. We do have to give up everything we have to follow Jesus. We do have to love him in a way that makes our closest relationships look like hate. And it is entirely possible that He will tell us to sell everything we have and give it to the poor. But we don't want to believe it. We are afraid of what it might mean for our lives. So we rationalize these passages away. "Jesus wouldn't really tell us not to bury our father or say good-bye to our family. Jesus didn't literally mean to sell all we have and give it to the poor. What Jesus really meant was..." 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 Bile and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. A nice, middle-class, American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn't mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who is content with us gathering in our churches and spending thousands of dollars on nice buildings to drive up to, cushioned chairs to sit in, and endless programs to enjoy for ourselves. A Jesus who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that he receives all our affection. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts, because, after all, he loves us just the way we are. A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger all together. A Jesus who brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream. But do you and I realize what we are doing at this point? We are molding Jesus into our image. He is beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is whom we are most comfortable with. 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. While Christians choose to spend their lives fulfilling the American dream instead of giving their lives to proclaiming the gospel, literally billions in need of the gospel remain in the dark. We desperately need to revisit the words of Jesus in scripture, listen to them, believe them, and obey them. We need to return with urgency to a biblical gospel, because the cost of not doing so is great for our lives, our families, our churches, and the world around us."