Tag: David Platt

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DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY // THE FUEL OF DEATH-DEFYING MISSIONS

At St Faith’s we have a one week break from our normal preaching program. So last night at our Young Adults small group we took a week off from our Matthew 22-25 series. In Matthew 24:14 it says that the “gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” I thought it would be worthwhile thinking a bit more about mission to the Nations. So we watched the above Together for the Gospel sermon from David Platt.

Our group found this talk particularly compelling and fuelled some fervent prayer for the Nations.

Justin Taylor has a solid summary of the talk on his blog. Here is the basic outline…
Continue reading “DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY // THE FUEL OF DEATH-DEFYING MISSIONS”

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Sick of half-hearted Christianity?

Below is a 50 word book plug I wrote for Thirteen Three to use for some upcoming events. Radical is my favourite book of 2010 written by David Platt. Stay tuned for more reflections on Radical, including an exciting event coming up in July: Soulies Underground.

Sick of half-hearted Christianity? Read RADICAL by David Platt. No other book (outside of the Bible) has challenged me to take seriously the radical call to follow Jesus. His stories about persecuted Christians have encouraged me to be bolder, more hungry for the Word and prayerful for the world.

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In other Thirteen Three news, SOULIES is raising money for underground Bible school students in Vietnam. More info here.

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Do We Really Believe What We’re Saying?

I recently blogged on the controversy surrounding the release of Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins and the Harsh Reality of Hell. As yet, I haven’t read Bell’s book, but from reading other reviews and watching his interview and book launch, it seems that Bell has stepped away from an orthodox, historical understanding of hell. See all of Justin Taylor’s recent posts mentioning “hell” and also read Kevin DeYoung’s comprehensive review of the book.

No-one in the Reformed Evangelical camp is particularly rattled by Bell’s denial of historic Christianity. It has been argued that Bell has been on this theological trajectory for some time. That’s what makes the following video from David Platt so useful. In it he argues that while we may be opposed to “intellectual universalism”, in reality we often live as “functional universalists”. We say we believe in the reality of hell yet our lives look no different. See it below (or click here if you can’t see it).

What a challenge!

We don’t have time to play games with our lives
We don’t have time to play games in the church
We have a mission that demands radical urgency

Check out David Platt’s blog and his incredible book Radical.

Vid from this blog post.

Find out more about what Christians believe.

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Operation World – Praying For Every Nation

I recently picked up the latest edition of Operation World – The Definitive Prayer Guide to Every Nation. After reading David Platt’s Radical last year, I was convicted to spend 2011 praying for the whole world using Operation World as a guide.

I’ve started. It’s a big task. But I’m praying to a big God who can do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). The book is set out with dates to be able to use as a year long prayer journal, or you can just read and pray about random countries (I’ve used it to pray during the past 2 soccer World Cups).

The official Operation World website has a stack of useful pages to help fuel your prayer if you don’t own the book (click here to buy it).

If you join me praying through the world this year, use the hashtag #OperationWorld if you plan on tweeting what you learn to help others pray with you.

And they sang a new song, saying,
“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.”
(Revelation 5:9-10 ESV)

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Worth Losing Everything

My favourite book of 2010 was Radical: Taking back your faith from the American Dream by David Platt from Brook Hills. I tweeted about it during 2010 (“Just finished @RADICALbook by @PlattDavid. Maybe best book on discipleship since Bonhoeffer’s ‘Discipleship’? Check it: http://bit.ly/cX9xNC“), but don’t think I’ve blogged on it. At it’s heart, it’s a challenge to take Jesus seriously! I’ll return to it again in 2011, look out for some blog posts. In the meantime, here’s a solid quote that Of First Importance blogged today:

“This is the picture of Jesus in the gospel. He is something — someone — worth losing everything for. And if we walk away from the Jesus of the gospel, we walk away from eternal riches. The cost of nondiscipleship is profoundly greater for us than the cost of discipleship. For when we abandon the trinkets of this world and respond to the radical invitation of Jesus, we discover the infinite treasure of knowing and experiencing him.”

From here