Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

by David Platt

We are not evil, we think, and certainly not spiritually dead. Haven’t you heard of the power of positive thinking? I can become a better me and experience my best life now. That’s why God is there—to make that happen. My life is not going right, but God loves me and has a plan to fix my life. I simply need to follow certain steps, think certain things, and check off certain boxes, and then I am good.

culture that exalts self-sufficiency, self-esteem, and

“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.”

have taken the infinitely glorious Son of God, who endured the infinitely terrible wrath of God and who now reigns as the infinitely worthy Lord of all, and we have reduced him to a poor, puny Savior who is just begging for us to accept him.

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.

To this point, we have seen how the American dream radically differs from the call of Jesus and the essence of the gospel.

The dangerous assumption we unknowingly accept in the American dream is that our greatest asset is our own ability.

As long as we achieve our desires in our own power, we will always attribute it to our own glory.

While the goal of the American dream is to make much of us, the goal of the gospel is to make much of God.

This is how God works. He puts his people in positions where they are desperate for his power, and then he shows his provision in ways that display his greatness.

can so easily deceive ourselves, mistaking the presence of physical bodies in a crowd for the existence of spiritual life in a community.