David Platt Quotes

Every saved person this side of heaven owes the gospel to every lost person this side of hell. ~ David Platt

The driver believed that he would pay for his sin for a little while in hell, but then he would surely go to heaven after that. After all, he hadn't done too many bad things. So Azeem said to him, "If I slapped you in the face, what would you do to me?" The driver replied, "I would throw you out of my taxi." "If I went up to a random guy on the street and slapped him in the face, what would he do to me?" "He would probably call his friends and beat you up." "What if I went up to a policeman and slapped him in the face? What would he do to me?" "You would be beat up for sure, and then thrown into jail." "And what if I went to the king of this country and slapped him in the face? What would happen to me then?" The driver looked at Azeem and awkwardly ~ David Platt

As multitudes of babies are dismembered and destroyed daily, this is clearly an issue where the gospel requires us to counter culture. ~ David Platt

The purpose of God's Word is to transform people in every country and every century into the image of God. ~ David Platt

God creates, blesses and saves each of us for a radically global purpose ~ David Platt

And as we meet needs on earth, we are proclaiming a gospel that transforms lives for eternity. The point is not simply to meet a temporary need or change a startling statistic; the point is to exalt the glory of Christ as we express the gospel of Christ through the radical generosity of our lives. ~ David Platt

For God to be holy does not just mean He is without error. It means He is without equal. May it not be said of any one of us that there is not respect for the author of the universe. He is sovereign over all nature, over all nations and over every single one of our lives. ~ David Platt

God is committed to providing abundant resources in support of those who are living in accordance to his purpose. ~ David Platt

How many of us are embracing the comforts of suburban America while we turn a deaf ear to inner cities in need of the gospel? ~ David Platt

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

The sovereignty of God is the only foundation for worship in the midst of tragedy. ~ David Platt

Our perspective on our possessions radically changes when we open our eyes to the needs of the world around us. When we have the courage to look in the faces of brothers and sisters whose bodies are malnourished and whose brains are deformed because they have no food, Christ will change our desires, and we will long to sacrifice our resources for the glory of his name among them. ~ David Platt

At the cross of Christ, God fully expressed his holy judgment upon sin. ~ David Platt

This is the gospel. The just and loving Creator of the universe has looked upon hopelessly sinful people and sent His Son, God in the flesh, to bear His wrath against sin on the cross and to show His power over sin in the resurrection so that all who trust in Him will be reconciled to God forever. ~ David Platt

The journey begins, though, with understanding what it means to be a christian. To say you believe in Jesus apart from conversion in your life completely misses the essence of what it means to follow him. Do not be deceived. ~ David Platt

God involves us in his mission not because he needs us but because he loves us. ~ David Platt

What if followers of Christ stopped looking for work in places where the MOST number of Christians Christians lived and started looking for work places where the LEAST Christians lived? ~ David Platt

As I looked at material and spiritual poverty in the world around me, including approximately 2 billion people who haven't even heard the gospel, I knew that I needed to make some major changes in my life. ~ David Platt

I believe that the gospel and the American Dream have fundamentally different starting points. The American Dream begins with self, exalts self, says you are inherently good and you have in you what it takes to be successful so do all you can, work with everything you have to make much of yourself. The gospel begins with God, the reality that we were created to exalt his name to the ends of the earth. ~ David Platt

Making disciples by going, baptizing, and teaching people the Word of Christ and then enabling them to do the same thing in other people's lives - this is the plan God has for each of us to impact nations for the glory of Christ ~ David Platt

Do you realize the weight of the one who has invited us to follow him? He is worthy of more than church attendance and casual association; he is worthy of total abandonment and supreme adoration. ~ David Platt

I think the one thing that is abundantly clear from these statistics is that there are a whole lot of people in the world who think they are Christians but are not. ~ David Platt

My biggest fear, even now, is that I will hear Jesus' words and walk away, content to settle for less than radical obedience to Him. ~ David Platt

The modern-day gospel says, 'God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Therefore, follow these steps, and you can be saved.' Meanwhile, the biblical gospel says, 'You are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, & 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. ~ David Platt

Multitudes of men and women at this moment think that they are saved from their sins when they are not. ~ David Platt

The author describes the adoption process in which he and his wife participated as "a paperwork pregnancy". ~ David Platt

God loves me so that I might make him - his ways, his salvation, his glory, and his greatness - known among all nations. ~ David Platt

God really is in the business of blessing his people in unusual ways so his goodness and his greatness will be declared among all peoples. ~ David Platt

James 1:22 is the theme verse of the entire book of James. It says, But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. ~ David Platt

BECAUSE SELF IS NO LONGER OUR GOD,
SAFETY IS NO LONGER OUR CONCERN. ~ David Platt

In other words, for these 1.5 billion unreached and unengaged peoples, almost every individual within them is born, lives, and dies without ever hearing the gospel. Even ~ David Platt

As American Christians, we celebrate the idea that "all men are created equal." This statement from our Declaration of Indepenence is grounded in the biblical teaching that every person in the world has been formed in the image of God and therefore has instrinsic worth. it's a beautiful idea.
Subtly, however, this equality of persons shifts into an equality of ideas. Just as every person is equally valued, so every idea is equally valid. Applied to faith, this means that in a world where different people have different religious views, all such views should be treated as fundamntally equal.
In this system of thinking, faith is a matter of taste, not of truth ...
Then I implore you to consider the urgent need before us to forsake the American dream now in favor of radical abandonment to the person and purpose of Christ. ~ David Platt

Suppose another time you are making a big decision in your life, and you need help. You have a couple of different options before you, and you need guidance to decide which way is best. So you ask God for help. But he doesn't answer with guidance. Instead he answers by sending the Holy Spirit, who is our Guide.12 God sends the Helper, who will live in you and not only tell you what decision to make but also enable you to make that decision. Yet ~ David Platt

Our greatest need is not to try harder. Our greatest need is a new heart. ~ David Platt

We owe Christ to the world
to the least person and to the greatest person, to the richest person and to the poorest person, to the best person and to the worst person. We are in debt to the nations. ~ David Platt

Though you and I find ourselves surrounded by the lure of temporary pleasure, we must fasten our affections on the one who promises eternal treasure that will never spoil or fade. If your life or my life is going to count on earth, we must start by concentrating on heaven. For then, and only then, will you and I be free to take radical risk, knowing that what awaits us is radical reward. ~ David Platt

The boss says that games in hand are no good unless you turn them into points. What he's getting at is that games in hand aren't much good unless you turn them into points. ~ David Platt

You and I can choose to continue with business as usual in the Christian life and in the church as a whole, enjoying success based on the standards defined by the culture around us. Or we can take an honest look at the Jesus of the Bible and dare to ask what the consequences might be if we really believed him and really obeyed him. ~ David Platt

Disciple making also involves teaching people to obey all that Christ has commanded us. Now some might say, "Isn't that what preachers are supposed to do?" And in one sense, the answer to this question is yes. God has clearly called and gifted some people in the church to teach his Word formally. At the same time, he has commanded every follower of Jesus to teach his Word relationally. ~ David Platt

God blesses his people with extravagant grace so they might extend his extravagant glory to all peoples on the earth. ~ David Platt

And what if Christ's call in our lives is not to comfort in our culture? What if Christ in us actually compels us to counter our culture? ~ David Platt

Clearly, people who claim to believe in Jesus are not assured eternity in heaven. On the contrary, only those who obey Jesus will enter his Kingdom. ~ David Platt

The author holds up for inspection the fallacy of The Closed-Door Method wherein Christ's followers assume that if a decision is difficult to make it is not His will for us to make it because He would obviously not want us to do anything difficult. ~ David Platt

May even the concept of unreached peoples be totally intolerable to us. ~ David Platt

We have nothing to fear, because God is sovereign. ~ David Platt

If we are going to accomplish the global purpose of God, it will not be primarily through giving our money, as important as that is. It will happen primarily through giving ourselvs. This is what the gospel represents and this is what the gospel requires. ~ David Platt

The purpose of prayer is not for the disciple to give information to God. The purpose of prayer is intimacy with God. ~ David Platt

When we delight in something, we declare our delight. When we adore someone, we announce our adoration. Isn't this, then, the essence of worship - lifting up with our lips and our lives the one we love above everything else? ~ David Platt

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. ~ David Platt

We are molding Jesus into our image. He's beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is who we are most comfortable with. The danger now is when we gather in our church buildings to sing, and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshiping ourselves. ~ David Platt

Salvation has absolutely nothing to do with human merit and absolutely everything to do with divine mercy. ~ David Platt

Surely the gospel evokes unconditional surrender of all that we are and all that we have to all that He is. ~ David Platt

Moreover, in removing race and racism from the discussion altogether, we're paving the way for us as one race to call racism what it actually is: sin borne in a heart of pride and prejudice. ~ David Platt

The faith in Christ that saves us from our sins involves an internal transformation that has external implications. ~ David Platt

If there were 1,000 ways to God we would want 1,001. ~ David Platt

On popular issues like poverty and slavery, where Christians are likely to be applauded for our social action, we are quick to stand up and speak out. Yet on controversial issues like homosexuality and abortion, where Christians are likely to be criticized for our involvement, we are content to sit down and stay quiet. ~ David Platt

The very first word out of Jesus; mouth in is ministry in the New Testament is clear: repent. ~ David Platt

But out of this group of "born-again Christians," researchers found that their beliefs and lifestyles are virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the world around them. ~ David Platt

I wonder sometimes, though, if we intentionally or just unknowingly mask the beauty of God in the gospel by minimizing his various attributes. ~ David Platt

We learned that orphans are easier to ignore before you know their names. They are easier to ignore before you see their faces. It is easier to pretend they're not real before you hold them in your arms. But once you do, everything changes. ~ David Platt

God's ultimate concern is not to get you or me from point A to point B along the quickest, easiest, smoothest, clearest route possible. Instead, his ultimate concern is that you and I would know him deeply as we trust him more completely. ~ David Platt

Faith is the realization that God's pleasure in you will never be based upon your performance for him. ~ David Platt

Anyone wanting to proclaim the glory of Christ to the ends of the earth must consider not only how to declare the gospel verbally but also how to demonstrate the gospel visibly in a world where so many are urgently hungry. If I am going to address urgent spriitual need by sharing the gospel of Christ or building up the body of Christ around the world, then I cannot overlook dire physical need in the process. ~ David Platt

We will mulitply the gospel only when we allow others to get close enough to us to see the life of Christ in action. ~ David Platt

So what is the difference between someone who willfully indulges in sexual pleasures while ignoring the Bible on moral purity and someone who willfully indulges in the selfish pursuit of more and more material possessions while ignoring the Bible on caring for the poor? The difference is that one involves a social taboo in the church and the other involves the social norm in the church. ~ David Platt

In direct contradiciton to the American dream, God actually delights in exalting our inability. ~ David Platt

Forgiveness is God's greatest gift because it meets our greatest need. ~ David Platt

We do not follow a health and wealth savior. We follow a homeless and wounded Savior. ~ David Platt

Saturate your preaching with the gospel in the church, so that you people speak gospel in the world. ~ David Platt

Every Sunday we gather in a multimillion-dollar building with millions of dollars in vehicles parked outside. We leave worship to spend thousands of dollars on lunch before returning to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of homes. We live in luxury. Meanwhile the poor man is outside our gate. And he is hungry. In the time we gather for worship on a Sunday morning almost a thousand children elsewhere die because they have no food. If it were our kids starving, they would all be gone by the time we said our closing prayer. We certainly wouldn't ignore our kids while we sang songs and entertained ourselves, but we are content with ignoring other parents' kids. Many of them are our spiritual brothers and sisters in developing nations. They are suffering from malnutrition, deformed bodies and brains, and preventable diseases. At most, we are throwing our scraps to them while we indulge in our pleasures here. ~ David Platt

The road that leads to heaven is risky, lonely, and costly in this world, and few are willing to pay the price. Following Jesus involves losing your life-and finding new life in him. Follow Me, pg. 11 ~ David Platt

When we consider the promises of Christ, risking everything we are and everything we have for His sake is no longer a matter of sacrifice. It's just common sense. ~ David Platt

Being a member of a church means realizing that we are responsible for helping the brothers and sisters around us to grow as disciples of Jesus. In the same way, they are responsible for helping us. We desperately need each other in the daily fight to follow Christ in a world that's full of sin. ~ David Platt

The goal of the disciple of Jesus, then, is not to answer the question, "What is God's will for my life?" The goal, instead, is to walk in God's will on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis. ~ David Platt

Believing in the Jesus of the Bible makes life risky on a lot of levels because it is absolute surrender of every decision we make, every dollar we spend, our lives belong to another. ~ David Platt

And ultimately, If you sin against an infinitely holy and eternal God, you are infinitely guilty and worthy of eternal punishment. ~ David Platt

Satan's strategies to stop the church will ultimately serve to spread the church. And Satan's strategies to inflict earthly pain in your life will ultimately serve to increase eternal glory with your God; 'Light momentary affliction.' ~ David Platt

Craig Bellamy's got pace, but he's also rapid as well ~ David Platt

Let me introduce you to Jesus. ~ David Platt

Consider what it takes for successful businessmen and businesswomen, effective entrepreneurs and hardworking associates, shrewd retirees and idealistic students to combine forces with a creative pastor to grow a "successful church" today. Clearly, it doesn't require the power of God to draw a crowd in our culture. A few key elements that we can manufacture will suffice. ~ David Platt

We have a dangerous tendency to misunderstand, minimize, and even manipulate the gospel in order to accommodate our assumptions and our desires. ~ David Platt

We are starting to redefine Christianity. 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. A Jesus who doesn't mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that he receives all our affection. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts, because, after all, he loves us just the way we are. A Jesus who want us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream. ~ David Platt

Radical obedience to Christ is not easy ... It's not comfort, not health, not wealth, and not prosperity in this world. Radical obedience to Christ risks losing all these things. But in the end, such risk finds its reward in Christ. And he is more than enough for us. ~ David Platt

The gospel beckons our sin-sick souls to simple trust in Christ, the only One who is truly radical enough. ~ David Platt

When you put all these truths in the gospel together, you realize that the most offensive and countercultural claim in Christianity is not what Christians believe about homosexuality or abortion, marriage or religious liberty. Instead, the most offensive claim in Christianity is that God is the Creator, Owner, and Judge of every person on the planet. ~ David Platt

Do you and I believe him (Christ) enough to obey him and to follow him wherever he leads, even when the crowds in our culture - and maybe in our churches - turn the other way? ... For the sake of an increasingly marginalized and relatively ineffective church in our culture, I want to risk it all. For the sake of my life, my family, and the people who surround me, I want to risk it all. ~ David Platt

There is indescribable joy to be found, deep satisfaction to be felt, and an eternal purpose to be fulfilled in dying to ourselves and living for him. ~ David Platt

If our lives do not reflect radical compassion for the poor, there is reason to wonder if Christ is really in us at all ~ David Platt

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. ~ David Platt

The Good News of Jesus spread not through extravagant preachers, but through everyday people whose lives had been transformed by the power of Christ. ~ David Platt

If you claim to be a follower of Christ, I encourage you to consider your present commitment to a local church. ~ David Platt

People who claim to be Christians while their lives look no different from the rest of the world are clearly not Christians ~ David Platt

What if we take away the cool music and the cushioned chairs? What if the screens are gone and the stage is no longer decorated? What if the air conditioning is off and the comforts are removed? Would his Word still be enough for his people to come together? At Brook Hills we decided to try to answer this question. We actually stripped away the entertainment value and invited people to come together simply to study God's Word for hours at a time. We called it Secret Church. We set a date - one Friday night - when we would gather from six o'clock in the evening until midnight, and for six hours we would do nothing but study the Word and pray. We would interrupt the six-hour Bible study periodically to pray for our brothers and sisters around the world who are forced to gather secretly. We would also pray for ourselves, that we would learn to love the Word as they do. ~ David Platt

If people are dying and going to hell without ever even knowing there is a gospel, then we clearly have no time to waste our lives on the American dream. ~ David Platt

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

We are afraid that if we stop and really look at God in his Word, we might discover that he evokes greater awe and demands deeper worship than we are ready to give him. ~ David Platt

We have an incomprehensibly great God! ~ David Platt

When you come to Jesus, you don't come to get health, wealth and prosperity. You come to Jesus to get Jesus ~ David Platt

Don't underestimate what God can do with ordinary people. ~ David Platt

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. ~ David Platt