Tag Archives: Radical
Radical Review
I read “Radical” in the winter of 2010/2011 and about six months afterwards I began calling it “orange crack”, “the evil book that will ruin your life” and other such descriptive titles, all the while passing it out (hence the orange crack title) to anyone who might possibly read it. I blame David Platt for a lot of my spiritual growth and “Radical” was the tip of the spear so to speak. The book is about “Taking your faith back from the American Dream” and could have been titled “Biblical!” because Dr. Platt not only loves his Bible, but knows it better than 99% of Americans! That being said it should cause us to wince when we’re faced with the truth of God’s Word standing in stark contrast to what most Christians would say we believe.
Platt points out that, “While the goal of the American dream is to make much of us, the goal of the gospel is to make much of God.” A fact that is all too absent in many of our lives and churches where we argue about worship styles and dress codes and what color the carpet should or shouldn’t be. It’s the colorful insight combined with vivid illustrations that bring “Radical” to life and hopefully to the conclusion, along with Platt that, “The gospel does not prompt you to mere reflection; the gospel requires a response.” Get ready, my guess is there will be so many responses that you find yourself needing to make that you’ll have to make a list and get started. This book can quite possibly shake up your life in a way you’ve never experienced and trust me it’ll be worth it!
David Platt ruined my life
Last fall my pastor told me I should read a book called Radical, written by a punk kid named David Platt. Oops my bad Dr. David Platt! I do one on one discipleship at the greatest place on earth, McDonalds, several times a week with different young men walking through different books. So at my pastors recommendation I bought a couple of copies of Radical and my senior high boys and me started tackling it a chapter a week. It will mess you up. And what frustrates me is that he’s so Biblically grounded that it feels like Jesus sat you down to explain how you’ve been missing the point. Dr. Platt messed me up or rather God did through this guy.
It started cause I’m prideful. In turn my dad gave me the link to a message called “outside the camp” that Platt preached to the SBC pastors convention in like 2009, I honestly watched it to attempt to figure out what separated me from guys like David Platt, it took all of 15 seconds to know why (You watch that message and read my post on answering that question here Tiger Woods & David Platt). For the record, while Radical is a very challenging book that demands personal reflection, it was not the book that God used to shake my life it was Platt himself. Again because I’m prideful, I read the stories in Radical about what the church at Brook Hills was doing to impact the kingdom and I was challenged to move my local body of teenagers to that kind of radical living. Just one problem, I had no idea how you move people that way, so I did what most people would do, I emailed him. After a couple days of anticipation, I got one back; Dear Matt, Dr. Platt is very honored that you have taken time to correspond with him however, due to his ridiculously high volume of email he is not ever going to be shown yours. Thanks. Ok, so it wasn’t exactly like that but you get the picture.
Having been unable to answer the question how do you take people to that place, I found the Brook Hills podcast and I went back to the earliest one and began to take the Sunday morning journey with their family of faith, some 5 years after they did. To date I have listened to the first 20 something messages of Dr. Platt, and find myself walking further away from the complacent, business as usual faith that I had just three months ago. God has used a young man who I have never met, to completely shake my way of thinking. And its contagious, I’ve been passing out this evil orange book like crack to anyone who will take it. I’m not content to be the only guy that God is working in so if ya want an evil orange book I’ve got three ways you can get one for free.
OPERATION FREE RADICAL
Ok, here’s the three ways you can win a copy of radical.
#1 – Follow me on twitter (@mrothacher) We’re going to be using twitter a bunch in the future so get on board. For the next ten days all new followers will be entered in the drawing and I’ll pick one name at random and mail ya a orange book.
#2 – Tweet this post with the hash tag #freeradical (Your already on twitter simply tweet the link to the post here’s a short one so you can save on characters http://bit.ly/mD95MF ) in ten days, on June 4th, I’ll randomly pick one name from those who retweeted. Side note you can have your name entered every time you tweet the link with the hashtag
#3 – Comment on the post letting me know that you posted it on facebook, or tweeted it. Same thing; ten days, one name, evil orange book.
There is no limit to how many times you enter, you can qualify all three ways and if your fortunate win three books (so you could pass out your own orange crack).
Let’s do this.
