Radical Review

March 29, 2011 By revheff in Books, Uncategorized Tags: Books, discipleship, sacrifice, sanctification, spiritual life Leave a comment

At least twice now I have referenced in a message David Platt’s book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream.

Today I received an email from someone with a link to a Gospel Coalition review of Platt’s book by Kevin DeYoung.

DeYoung expresses some helpful push back to some of the potentially more extreme aspects of Radical or at least they way certain things might be taken along the way by the less mature, more emotionally stirred, less critically insightful reader.

Uniquely it includes a response in turn from Platt, something you don’t see/read every day. It’s worth the read. Here’s a sample from DeYoung’s critique:

We must do more to plant the plea for sacrificial living more solidly in the soil of gospel grace. Several times David talks about the love of Christ as our motivation for radical discipleship or the power of God and the means for radical discipleship. But I didn’t sense the strong call to obedience was slowly marinated in God’s lavish mercy. I wanted to see sanctification more clearly flowing out of justification.

I commend this interchange to the reader as an example of redemptive debate. Would that more of God’s people engaged in this kind of critique/response with such gospel grace. You can read the entire piece here.

In the end result, risks notwithstanding to some of Platt’s bold and passionate pleas, I personally want to embrace the five-fold practical challenge of application with which Platt leaves his readers and pray for a church full of folks who will do the same.

How People Change – Our Real Problem

March 15, 2011 By revheff in Spiritual Life Tags: Books, change, reading, sanctification, vacation Leave a comment

Vacation for me, among other things, means time to read. Lots of leisurely, lovely, luxurious time to devour a book from cover-to-cover without lots of stops and starts.

I got to do that this past week in NC with How People Change (Tim Lane & Paul Tripp, New Growth Press, 2006, 258 pages).

I liked it and I hated it at the same time.

I liked it because of its practical aim. The goal of this book is to help you grasp the implications of the good news of Jesus Christ for your identity and the daily trials and temptations you face (p. 36). Who doesn’t face daily trials and temptations? Who doesn’t at times feel stuck within a malaise of difficulties that seem to leave a believer powerless and decidedly unspiritual? I know I do.

I found lots of good stuff here, biblically-based and practically-applied principles for addressing how God works through the heat of trials to reveal the thorns of our flesh to lead us to the cross of Christ to bring forth the fruit of the gospel. That’s the book in a nutshell.

I hated it because it put me on a path of examining my heart that revealed way too much of its sinfulness. Don’t you hate that?

This book reminded me of one of the truths I have struggled most to accept in the process of my personal sanctification. In the immortal words of Pogo, We have met the enemy and he is us!

While external conditions can be very influential in our lives and should not be ignored, the Bible says that they are only the occasion for sin, not the cause. Difficulties in life do not cause sin. Our background, relationships, situation, and physical condition only provide the opportunity for the thoughts, words, and actions to reveal whatever is already in our hearts. Our hearts are the ultimate cause of our responses, and where the true spiritual battle is fought … [while] we must never minimize our suffering – ours or anyone else’s … we must make the important distinction between the occasion for sin and the ultimate cause of sin. This will determine what you think the solution to the problem will be …The bible says that my real problem is not psychological (low self-esteem or unmet needs), social (bad relationships and influences), historical (my past), or physiological (my body). They are significant influences, but my real problem is spiritual (my straying heart and my need for Christ). I have replaced Christ with something else, and as a consequence, my hearts is hopeless and powerless. Its responses reflect its bondage to whatever it is serving instead of Christ. Ultimately my real problem is a worship disorder.

So during my week of vacation in NC the Lord confronted me with my impatience, my hero-worship, my love of comfort, my sense of entitlement, oh I could go on. But how depressing a thought is that?

Thank God Lane and Tripp take the reader to the gospel, my only hope and your only hope.

If you are feeling stuck and won’t mind the pain to get to the gain of the gospel, get a copy of this book and read it before you go on vacation so you don’t ruin your vacation.

A Book You Won't Want to Read If

February 8, 2011 By revheff in Books Tags: Books, discipleship 2 Comments

Generally I prefer to recommend books folks might want to read.

This one you want to avoid like the plague . . . IF you prefer to remain mired in a mediocre north American version of following Jesus.

I am referring to David Platt’s dangerous little ditty entitled Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (Multnomah, 2010, 230 pages). And obviously I wax facetious.

You want to read this book if you desire to rescue your faith from the kind of perverted counterfeit version American affluence often deceives us into accepting as if it were the real deal.

Here is a sample of the kind of hard-hitting content you will encounter in Radical:

We are, by nature, receivers. Even if we have a desire to learn God’s Word, we still listen from a default self-centered mind-set that is always asking, What can I get out of this? But as we have seen, this is unbiblical Christianity. What if we changed the question whenever we gathered to learn God’s Word? What if we began to think, How can I listen to his Word so that I am equipped to teach this Word to others? ….When we realize that we have the responsibility to teach the Word, it changes everything about how we hear the Word (p. 102).

Platt concludes the book with an extremely practical five-point, one-year plan for a life turned upside down. I struggle to dare believe what might happen in a church like ours if everyone read a book like this and put the author’s one-year challenge into action with God’s help.

You will rarely find a resource so biblical in its content and yet practical in its approach.

Dangerous? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.

Unless you prefer to remain mired in the you-know-what.