Radical thinking, or not?

One of the most important books I read in 2011 was David Platt‘s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream.

Radical has plenty of concepts to chew over, but the one that is sticking with me today has to do with our willingness to come to Jesus and die.

I’ve long wondered what it was like to be a Hebrew slave in Egypt 235 years into the 400 years they worked the adobe pits for Pharaoh before Moses liberated them.

How did they sustain their faith, particularly since they didn’t know it would be another 165 years before freedom would beckon them from the mire?

How do you press forward if you didn’t grow up with a mother who admonished, “you can be anything you want to be. The world is open to you?”

Obviously, faith is the key, but so is a willingness to recognize your life is not your own when you are a follower of the Creator of the Universe.

God put you in a time and a place for His purposes, whether you know what they are or not. (And whether you like it or not).

Faith’s radical goal

Our goal as Christians is to line up our faith with the calling of Jesus on our life–which includes our past, our present and our future.

Why do bad things happen to good people? So that God can be glorified.

Think about what Jesus said in the Garden of Gethsemane, calling upon God, if it were in His will, to take the cup away.

When the Lord left that cup–the coming grisly death on the cross–in Jesus’ hands, Jesus accepted the calling and faced his bodily end.

The point was not Jesus’ comfort, but God’s plan.

Sometimes I think we’ve convinced ourselves that our dreams and ideas–often born of our lives in 21st century USA–are the same ones God has for us.

Since God loves us (just the way we are? No, that’s Mr. Rogers), He’ll agree with us that whatever we desire is what He thinks we should have.

I don’t think so.

God created us for communication and as reflections of His glory. Our lives should be lived within that framework–and it’s really the only one that makes sense in the grand sweep of eternity.

Radical stories from the book

Which brings me back to Radical. Platt weaves stories into his book and among them are references to missionary to India William Carey and the well-known martyr Jim Elliot.

Platt points out that Carey’s ministry to India came out of the most unlikely series of events and through a host of horrible family losses.

Even after the family finally landed in India, Mrs. Carey went mad, children died and the first Indian convert was seven years away.

Yet, most of the major evangelistic successes occurring today in India, one hundred years later, can be traced back to the Carey family’s sacrifice. You can read about them here.

Jim Elliot’s death at the hands of the Waodani Indians in 1956, along with four others, has been well documented in his wife Elisabeth’s book Through Gates of Splendor and in the  film End of the Spear.

Elliot famously said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose,” in reference to the risks he took as a missionary.

After he died, his widow, toddler daughter and sister became missionaries to the Waodani, forgiving even the man who murdered Jim Elliot, and many Waodoni became Christians.

Elliot, his colleagues and the Carey family chose to sacrifice their lives for the sake of unknown people hearing the truth of the gospel.

In Elliot’s case, he was not the one who brought the good news, but by laying down his life for the Waodani, he opened the way for Elisabeth to share the forgiveness of sins offered by Jesus’ death on the cross.

Come and die?

Which takes me to Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s reminder that “Christ bids us come and die.”

How many of us are willing to chose obscurity, death, troubles, embarrassment or inconvenience for the sake of the gospel? Especially if someone else builds on our loss and/or obscurity?

Jesus explained it to his disciples just prior to his death in John 12:23-26:

“The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified.  Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.  He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

Jesus loves me, this I know. Thanks to David Platt’s Radical, I’m struggling with how much I, personally, love Jesus.

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