David Platt
David Platt
David Joseph Plattis an American pastor. He is currently the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, and he is also the author of the New York Times Best Seller Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. Platt released a follow-up book, Radical Together: Unleashing the People of God for the Purpose of God in April 2011. And in February 2013, he released Follow Me: A Call to Die. a Call to Live, which included an...
ProfessionReligious Leader
Date of Birth11 July 1979
CityAtlanta, GA
When we realize we have the responsibility to teach the word, it changes everything about how we hear the Word.
Good intentions, regular worship, Bible study, do not prevent blindness. Part of our sinful nature instinctively chooses to see what we want to see and to ignore what we want to ignore.
Surrounded by the self -sufficiency of American culture, we can convince ourselves that we have what it takes to achieve something great.
Consider what it takes for successful businessmen and businesswomen, effective entrepreneurs and hardworking associates, shrewd retirees and idealistic students to combine forces with a creative pastor to grow a "successful church" today. Clearly, it doesn't require the power of God to draw a crowd in our culture. A few key elements that we can manufacture will suffice.
So the challenge for us is to live in such a way that we are radically dependent on and desperate for the power that only God can provide.
In our evil we rebel against God. We take the law of God, written in his Word and on our hearts, and we disobey it.
This is the reality about humanity. We are each born with an evil, God-hating heart. Genesis 8: 21 says that every inclination of man's heart is evil from childhood, and Jesus' words in Luke 11: 13 assume that we know we are evil.
God uses sorrowful tragedy to set the stage for surprising triumph-whether in this life or the life to come.
I wonder sometimes, though, if we intentionally or just unknowingly mask the beauty of God in the gospel by minimizing his various attributes.
Ultimate satisfaction is found not in making much of ourselves but in making much of God
This extremely shocking and utterly revolutionary call is the essence of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus: we are not called to simply believe certain points or observe certain practices, but ultimately to cling to the person of Christ as life itself.
A high view of God’s sovereignty fuels death-defying devotion to global missions. Maybe another way to put it, people, and more specifically pastors, who believe that God’s sovereign over all things will lead Christians to die for the sake of all peoples.
In direct contradiciton to the American dream, God actually delights in exalting our inability.
Surely the gospel evokes unconditional surrender of all that we are and all that we have to all that He is.