I hate it when inspiration fizzles. Yesterday, I had a brilliant (if I do say so myself) blog post about the cost of discipleship burning burning a hole in my psyche, but couldn’t find the time to type it out. Today, I tried to write it up, but it just. Wasn’t. Happening.

I HATE it when that happens.

So, instead of my planned post (which is sitting half-written in my drafts folder), I will post my review of “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream,” which I wrote when the book was released in 2010, but somehow never published. Just pretend it’s a year ago, and that Platt hasn’t already released his follow-up to this book (which I have yet to read, but will get to once I finish my Carolyn Custis James and Scot McKnight kick), okay? Seriously, “Radical” is a great book, and you should read it.

So without further ado:

“Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream”

Think of David Platt as the Southern Baptist answer to Shane Claiborne—a clean-cut, thirty-something mega-church pastor with the chutzpa to challenge prosperous suburbanites who would “just as soon God annihilate all those people and send them to hell” (one church leader’s quote about the inner-city folks Platt worked with) to lay down their worldly possessions and follow Christ into all the world. Even more impressive, he does this without ever quoting Mahatma Ghandi, mentioning Doris Day, uttering the words “social justice,” or otherwise offending conservative sensibilities.

Less whimsical than Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution, and harder-hitting than Francis Chan’s excellent manifesto Crazy Love, Platt issues a stern warning against the Western tendency to trade the authentic Jesus for “a nice, middle-class, American Jesus” who doesn’t mind materialism, who would never ask us to give away everything we have, who wants us to be “balanced” because, after all, He loves us just the way we are. We have a choice to make, Platt insists: we can stand with the starving or with the overfed, identify with poor Lazarus on his way to heaven, or the rich man on his way to hell. There is no comfortable middle ground, not in a world where 26,000 helpless children die every day of starvation and preventable disease.

Platt couches his message in stories about Christians suffering joyfully for the gospel in places like China, Indonesia, and Uganda, and provides plenty of examples of how everyday Americans are getting radical about their faith: families trading suburban McMansions for modest inner-city housing so they have more to give, doctors abandoning successful medical careers to practice overseas, retirees spending their golden years traveling around the world doing disaster relief, sleeping under trucks while rebel bullets whizz over their heads.

Toward the end of the book, Platt offers a startling commentary on Matthew 9, where Jesus is moved by compassion for the crowds, and tells the disciples to pray that God will send workers into the harvest field. “Why do you think Jesus would look at the crowds around him, with all their deep needs, and then turn to his disciples and tells them to pray for themselves? The answer is humbling. When Jesus looked at the harassed and helpless multitudes, apparently his concern was not that the lost would not come to the Father. Instead his concern was that his followers would not go to the lost.”

Ouch.

Platt’s challenge to Christians is simple: commit to believing what Jesus says, and commit to obeying it. A simple proposition with staggering implications. Now that is radical.