Wow, I  started this post almost 2 months ago and forgot it… I’m so far behind on posting in my reading notebook category!

David Platt became “the youngest megachurch pastor in history,” a claim he may dispute but likely is true.  At 28, he became the pastor of a  4000+ church.  Amazing story of someone who is living an amazing life.  This book is well worth the read for any Christian in America.  It really makes you question a lot of things about your faith and how that relates (does it?) to the American Dream.

• We live in a church culture that has a dangerous tendency to disconnect the grace of God from the glory of God. Our hearts resonate with the idea of enjoying God’s grace. We bask in sermons, conferences, and books that exalt a grace centering on us. And while the wonder of grace is worthy of our attention, if that grace is disconnected from its purpose, the sad result is a self-centered Christianity that bypasses the heart of God
• Here we stand amid an American dream dominated by self-advancement, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency, by individualism, materialism, and universalism.
• I could not help but think that somewhere along the way we had missed what is radical about our faith and replaced it with what is comfortable. (Emphasis mine)
• We were settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves.
• We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. A nice, middle-class, American Jesus.
• As long as you and I understand salvation as checking off a box to get to God, we will find ourselves in the meaningless sea of world religions that actually condemn the human race by exalting our supposed ability to get to God.
• The dangerous assumption we unknowingly accept in the American dream is that our greatest asset is our own ability. The American dream prizes what people can accomplish when they believe in themselves and trust in themselves, and we are drawn toward such thinking. But the gospel has different priorities. The gospel beckons us to die to ourselves and to believe in God and to trust in his power.