Speak For Yourself David Platt
In Which I Fly Off the Handle
I am relieved to report that the autumnal foliage, though excessively late this year, is turning out to be full of splendor. As usual, I have been very anxious about this, though trying not to bring it up every few minutes, perhaps more than usual because everything has been green week after week, but just now the hillsides are turning and it looks like it’s going to be brilliant. I’m trying not to be heartbroken that I’m going to be away traveling next week and will miss a lot, but maybe it will be ok. God must know what he is doing.
Which brings me to my real subject today. I was going to rant about Halloween Decorations being completely over the top this year, but instead, what on earth is going on with David Platt? Don’t know if any of you saw this clip:
He’s going on a trip, he explains, becoming teary, and we’re all invited along, virtually of course, to…well, I transcribed just a bit:
...to three different countries that are filled with unreached people. People just like you and me, men, women, teenagers, kids, the only difference is, nobody's ever told them about who Jesus is and how much he loves them. And I just want you to think with me about why that is. How is it possible that over three billion people, right now, are being born, living, and dying, and going to an eternity apart from God without even hearing about God's love for them in Jesus? And how is it that most Christians are either unaware of this or doing practically little to nothing about it? This just doesn't make sense, does it? With all the resources we have, with the love of Jesus in us, it seems like there's something that's keeping them from being reached with the Gospel. And for the sake of three billion people, it seems like we need to think together about this.
Is it just me, or does Pastor Platt look a little bit unhinged? Also, goodness, there is so much here it’s hard for me to even find all the numbers I’m looking for.
I guess the place to begin is that I really don’t enjoy the accusatory tone. I feel like I’m coming up against it everywhere. If there was one thing I would change about the way Christians are talking in the year of our Lord 2024, it would be the accusations. And the thing is, I don’t think anyone is hearing it as they’re talking. From David French to Richard and Christopher Hays to David Platt—it’s not a political thing, so much as the assumption that it’s possible to see into another person’s soul and know whether they are good or evil. It has a delicate hint of, ‘I’m the first person ever to properly read the Bible’ or ‘You’ve never thought of this before because you’re some rube out in the sticks who doesn’t even know what politics is’ or ‘How is that most Christians are doing nothing about this thing that is very important to me.’
How on earth can Pastor Platt make such a sweeping assumption? Is he aware of any Christian history at all? Is he the first person to get on an airplane to go to an unreached people group? Is he not aware of the thousands and thousands and thousands of missionaries today who are killing themselves for the sake of the Gospel? Are you kidding me?
This is exactly what boils my onion about the state of Christianity today. Ordinary people are trucking along through their lives, trying to do what God calls them to, spiritually under-nourished for a whole host of reasons—one of them being that pastors like David Platt don’t actually preach the Bible in such a way that opens the text up to be fed upon, but instead employ an exegesis of guilt to try to get the faithful to give more and do more—and are yet castigated for not bringing about the eschaton, as it that were even possible. Not to be pedantic, but they do care about the lost. They do care about the world, both near and far. They are working hard. They don’t have as much money as people like Pastor Platt, nor the platform to go off on big trips and film themselves being so caring and wonderful. They have to do it in unseen and ordinary ways, and then endure being scolded for their inadequacy.
I resent the insinuation that it is my fault—nameless Christian that I am—that all the lost are perishing. For that is what he is so broadly hinting at. If you cared more, then all these people would not be going to hell. How did he put it? “It seems like there's something that's keeping them from being reached with the Gospel.” Is there some data on that, Pastor Platt? Do you have statistics? Or is it just the feeling of your particular heart?
I don’t want to be defensive, but, being a missionary kid, it was sometimes the case during my childhood that people like Pastor Platt would come to my boarding school, sometimes for Spiritual Emphasis Week, and make all of us little kiddos feel guilty for not caring about the lost. We who were all there because our parents had given their whole lives for that exact problem. We who had relationships with actual people in the places where we lived, and who were not so dumb as to never tell anyone about Jesus.
This kind of scolding betrays a deep and terrible inability to trust the power of God’s Word in the world. If God is real and communicates for real through the Scriptures—which he promises to do and, indeed, does—then he is powerful enough to organize the spread of his own message around the world and in our own lives. It is not our job to save the lost. It is our job to obey the Lord in all things, to go where he says to go, to speak what he says to speak, to live as he says to live, and to trust him with the results of all those things. He is the one who throws down the mountain of the hard human heart into the sea. He is the one who causes the miracle of belief. He shines his own light into the darkness to bring us to himself. We are not the organizers of this work or this mission. And neither is David Platt.
And on that note, I have got to run a kid back to the eye doctor. Goodness, the minutes are flying by. Have a nice day!
Anne, I might have to post about this separately, because there’s just way too much that a trash video like this brings up. As the son of an Evangelist, who at the age of two was evacuated out of Kabul during the Russian invasion because my mom and dad loved being with the afghan people, who spent the 80’s in a trailer setting up a blue and white circus tent all over the US, who watched his dad preach in the northern mountains of the Philippines and in town squares all over Luzon, but who finally saw his dad lay down the microphone so he could hold orphans, to hear a sanctimonious rant from a man who is enjoying a “sanctified vacation,” just truly, how do you put it, “boils my onion.” We see all this performative and scolding nonsense everywhere and whether liberal or conservative I’ve just started calling it all “praying loudly.” I will not go into the self serving structure of short term missions, or how these self aggrandized notions of jumping in a plane and simply telling people about Jesus when you have not committed yourself to a community are just the kind of the kind of delusions a child might have, but this all this does make me think of my father and how he loved preaching the Gospel, and how he found meaning in it, but never once did he scold his children and guilt them into joining his calling, and never once did he scold people for not being evangelists. He might have scolded them for other things but never that.
I grew up with this hymn…”100 million souls a day are passing one by one away, they are passing to their doom.” I mostly just trembled in the pew and planned on being a missionary so it wouldn’t be on me. And then God changed the plans. I guess now it’s on me. Unless, just possibly, there is a savior who bore all of this.