Book Review: Radical

     Radical by David Platt has been on the market for a while now.   I had heard good things about it from others, so I decided to check it out myself.  I have to say that i was not disappointed!  Platt, a pastor in Alabama, takes a serious, objective look at how the American Dream has influenced our faith.  Then he issues a no-holds-barred challenge to all American believers to return to the biblical gospel, leaving comfort, cultural norms, and self-focus behind. 
     It is refreshing to hear any Christian leader urging the faith community to go beyond themselves in pursuit of God and His will, and Pastor Platt does so in a way that is as conversational and inspiring as it is challenging.  The book reads more like a brother calling out to family than a superior railing or criticizing subordinates.  It is obvious that his heart is in his message, and that he himself is pursuing the heart of God. 
    I highly recommend this book to all believers.  We need this challenge in our church culture today, and we need to be asking ourselves the questions this book raises!  

Selected Quotes from Radical:  (I read on a Nook, so page number may not match printed book.)

"This brings us to the crucial question for every professing or potential follower of Jesus:  Do we really believe he is worth abandoning everything for?  Do you and I really believe that Jesus is so good, so satisfying, and so rewarding that we will leave all we have and all we own and all we are in order to find our fullness in him?  Do you and I believe him enough to obey him and follow him wherever he leads, even when the crowds in our culture - and maybe in our churches - turn the other way?

In this book I want to show you that, with the best of intentions, we have actually turned away from Jesus.  We have in many areas blindly and unknowingly embraced values and ideas that are common in our culture but are antithetical to the gospel he taught.  Here we stand amid an American dream dominated by self-advancement, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency, by individualism, materialism, and universalism.  Yet I want to show you our desperate need to revisit the words of Jesus, to listen to them, to believe them, and to 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."  (page 21)

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"Fundamentally, the gospel is the revelation of who God is, who we are, and how we can be reconciled to Him.  Yet in the American dream, where self reigns as king (or queen), we have a dangerous tendency to misunderstand, minimize, and even manipulate the gospel in order to accommodate our assumptions and our desires"  (page 25)

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"Meanwhile, the biblical gospel says, 'You are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, and in your present state of rebellion, you are not even able to see that you need life, much less to cause yourself to come to life.  Therefore, you are radically dependent on God to do something in your life that you could never do.... In the gospel God reveals the depth of our need for him.  He shows us that there is absolutely nothing we can do to come to him.  We can't manufacture salvation.  We can't program it.  We can't produce it.  We can't even initiate it.  God has to open our eyes, set us free, overcome our evil, and appease his wrath.  He has come to us.  Now we are getting to the beauty of the gospel." (p.28)

Radical Official Webpage:  Here

Radical at Barnes and Noble: Here

Radical at Amazon: Here