Leftover Christians

"How much can we spare?" or "What will it take?" Which of those questions best defines how we look at the kingdom of Christ. I ran across those questions in David Platt's new book, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (Multnomah Books, 4/17/2010).

Those questions were actually posed to Platt in a letter he received from a missionary friend who was serving in a closed country where millions have yet to even hear the name of Jesus. In the letter, the missionary, named Jason, says:

"...there will continue to be millions and millions of people who do not hear as long as we continue to use spare time and spare money to reach them. Those are two radically different questions. 'What can we spare?' and 'What will it take?'"1

In the book, David Platt goes on to ask what would happen if we stopped thinking in terms of what we could spare, and started looking at the Great Commission and the needs of the world in terms of what it would take.

To be honest, most of the people in our churches are "leftover" Christians, and by that, I do not mean that they are the remnant. What I mean is that they give the Lord Jesus whatever is leftover in their life after they have spent the rest on themselves and their desires.

This is certainly true of our money. The Bible calls for at least a tenth of our income to be given back to the Lord through the local church, but satistics indicate that most of our people give somewhere around 2% of their income. That is, after they have met the minimum payments on their credit cards, paid the cable bill, went to the movies, and ate out 3 nights a week.

The leftover mentality also applies to our time. Increasingly, people are unwilling to even give Sunday to the Lord in worship, much less any other time to Him for service. We are just too busy, we contend, with little-league, yard work, American Idol, and other pressing matters filling our schedules. Someone else with a less active life will have to see to it that the Kingdom is served.

If we honestly expect to stand before Jesus with any hope of hearing a "Well done," we are going to have stop looking at our lives and labors for Him in terms of what we can spare. May God give us a generation of hot-hearted, gospel-driven, self-sacrificing Christians who will look at the multitudes perishing without Christ and ask the question, "What will it take?"

1 Platt, David, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, (Multnomah Books ebooks, 2010), kindle edition