Saturday, February 2, 2013

Radical.

So I mentioned in this post a few weeks ago that Kley and I had finished reading the book Radical by David Platt. I said I would do a separate post on that later, and honestly I forgot. Whoops. I should have done it earlier, because now I've forgotten some of the things I wanted to write about it!

It was such a thought-provoking, challenging, and interesting read. It mainly just talked about being radical for Jesus. He talked a lot about underground churches in China that he'd visited and how on fire they were for Jesus and they would spend hours on end just studying the Bible together. Are we like that here in the US? Not usually. He talked about how people drive their cars to church, having everything they need, sit through a service, and judge it on how they "liked it" or how it "suited their needs." He talked about how it's crazy that there are millions of dollars worth of cars sitting in church parking lots, while other people in the world are starving and living on nothing.

One of the most interesting things he talked about was how the church handles this; mainly talking about how little churches give to needy causes, but how they raise so much money to build themselves a new building. I am not saying building a new building is bad, and neither was the author, but it definitely is an interesting concept to think about. He talked about a church article that had two articles featured on the front page, one where the church spent millions on building a new building, and the other about how great it was that they raised $5,000 dollars to send to a need overseas. Why such a discrepancy in the amounts?

He ended the book with challenging the readers to participate in a year long challenge, doing five things:
1. Pray for the entire world. He gave books/websites that could help you do this, to be praying for different needs and countries all around the entire world.
2. Read through the whole Bible.
3. Commit your lives to multiplying community- such as being really involved in your church, and specifically in participating in a small group.
4. Sacrifice your money for a specific purpose. He talked about setting a cap on your lifestyle so you can free up as much of your money as you can for helping the lost/needy and advancing the Kingdom.
5. Give your time in another context- spend one week on a mission trip somewhere outside of your community.

I would recommend it! You should check it out- you will definitely be thinking!

You can check out the Radical Experiment here.

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