Crazy Love by Francis Chan

Overwhelmed By A Relentless God

God's greatest command is, to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind". But most often, we go through life giving Him our leftovers. God  calls us to a life that is absolute  craziness to the world, yet as Christians our lives often make sense to unbelievers.  God has an outrageous, crazy love for us, as evidenced by,  while we were still sinners, he drained all the resources of heaven to rescue us.  God loves us and longs for us to love Him back. He is not satisfied with us "just fitting Him into our lives", He wants everything. It is foolishness to search for fulfillment in anything else. It is frustrating when loving God is so difficult, when our capability to comprehend Him is lacking, but when we constantly run after Christ in all that we do, we will find Him.  "God has called us each to live faithful and devoted lives before Him, by the power of His Spirit".  Too often we live selfish lives that are forgetful of our God, but his desire for us is to admit we are out of control and reach out to Him for help. When we see ourselves as merely playing a role in a movie about God, then the glory changes from ourselves to the One whom glory is due.  If we are in constant pursuit of Christ in our daily lives, then the thorns of this world will not choke out the seeds in the good soil but we will find complete and total satisfaction in Him.     Chan states that his "hope and prayer is that you finish this book with hope, believing that part of your responsibility in the body of Christ is to help set the pace for the church by listening and obeying and living Christ". Wow! What a challenge! This is not a new instruction but the command emphatically engrained in the New Testament.  The truth is that everything in the body is either living and growing or falling away. May my desire be to live out this Crazy Love everday with everyone I come in contact with until the day I see my God, that I would not be ashamed when He asks, "What did you do with what I gave you?".

Best quote in the book: "Our greatest fear as individuals and as a Church should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter". Tim Kizziar