The Radical Question: What is Jesus worth to you?

I just feel the need to share from David Platt's "The Radical Question: What is Jesus worth to you?" as it has impacted me greatly. Lest I forget it a few months after I have read it, I want to pen it down.

THE WORLD AS IT IS

Look at the world.

See a world where, over the last few years, more than half a million people have died instantly--in tsunamis in southeast Asia, cyclones in Myanmar, earthquakes in China and Pakistan, or floods in Nepal and Bangladesh--and where most of those half-million people had never once heard the gospel. They are joined today by a billion others who at this moment still have not heard that Christ came to save them from their sins.

See a world where half the population is living on less than two dollars a day while you and I, by contrast, are extremely rich.

See the nation of India, where there are more people living below the poverty line than there are total people in the United States.

See a world where today alone twenty-six thousand children will die either of starvation or a preventable disease.

See our dogs and eats eating better than our brothers and sisters in central Africa.

See a world where last fall, in one week alone, fifty thousand people died of AIDS, more than a hundred thousand children died of hunger-related diseases, thousands of other children were trafficked around the world of sexual exploitation, and hundreds were killed in an earthquake in Pakistan. All in one week. And yet, during that same week, the greatest concerns for many of us were how our football teams played and how our CPF accounts fared.

In addition to all this, see thousands upon thousands of our brothers and sisters in China and North Korea and Laos and Saudi Arabia imprisoned and killed because of their faith in Christ.

See all these things, and realize that the purpose of our lives is not just to have a comfortable life, a good career, a decent family, and an easy retirement in this world. We were created for so much more than this. Jesus is worthy of so much more than this.

We have a choice. We can settle for casual devotion to Jesus, sitting comfortably in our nice church buildings, where we are insulated and isolated from the inner city and the spiritual lostness of the world. We can give a tip of our hats to the purpose of Christ in the world while we go on designing endless (church) activities that revolve around us. We can retreat into our nice, cozy communities where we can live nice, decent lives while we pretend the starving millions do not exist. We can hide behind our catchy phrases and our easy prayers that dilute the awesome reality of who Jesus is and what it means to follow him. We can spend our Christian lives sitting comfortably in the nurseries of our churches while drinking spiritual milk.

Or we can decide that Jesus is worth more than this.

We can decide that he has created us for a much greater purpose. We can decide to die to ourselves and our dreams and our plans, and we can decide to let our hearts be conquered by a superior ambition. Ultimately, we can decide to sacrifice our lives, our gifts, our skills, our time, our families, and our resources to make the great worth of Christ known amid urgent spiritual and physical needs in all the world.

Let's sacrifice it all!

For the glory of Christ among a billion people who have not even heard the gospel...

For the sake of people who are starving, suffering and dying every single day...

For the millions in your city who do not know Christ and are headed of a Christless eternity..

For all of this and more, let's sacrifice it all!

And when we do, we will discover that Jesus is, indeed, absolutely worthy of all our plans and all our dreams and all our ambitions.

Taken from The Radical Question, David Platt

(Some parts have been modified to fit the Singapore context)