While the goal of the American dream is to make much of us, the goal of the gospel is to make much of God.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the pursuit of personal success with the purpose of glorifying a higher power.
David Platt highlights a fundamental difference between the American dream, which often emphasizes individual achievement and prosperity, and the gospel of Christianity, which prioritizes the glorification of God. This statement invites reflection on the motivations that drive people's lives, suggesting that true fulfillment comes not from personal ambition, but from a life dedicated to honoring and serving God.
In practice
In a sermon highlighting the importance of spiritual priorities over worldly success.
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.
The price is certainly high for people who don’t know Christ and who live in a world where Christians shrink back from self-denying faith and settle into self-indulging faith. While Christians choose to spend their lives fulfilling the American dream instead of giving their lives to proclaiming the kingdom of God, literally billions in need of the Gospel remain in the dark
What if the very reason we have breath is because we have been saved for a global mission? And what if anything less than passionate involvement in global mission is actually selling God short by frustrating the very purpose for which he created us?
A high view of God’s sovereignty fuels death-defying devotion to global missions. Maybe another way to put it, people, and more specifically pastors, who believe that God’s sovereign over all things will lead Christians to die for the sake of all peoples.
[...]there is no injustice in God. The injustice lies in Christians who possess the gospel and refuse to give their lives to making it known among those who haven't heard.
God involves us in his missions not because He needs us, but because He loves us. And in His mercy He has invited us to be involved in His sovereign design for the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.
Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one's belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.
How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
We are not only to renounce evil, but to manifest the truth. We tell people the world is vain; let our lives manifest that it is so. We tell them that our home is above and that all these things are transitory. Does our dwelling look like it? O to live consistent lives!
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