Crazy Love

With my small group I'm reading the book "Crazy Love" by Francis Chan.  It's a very challenging book and one you can't just skim over and think you got the message.  It takes deep thought and radical change.

No one likes change.  Change isn't easy.  But if we're not growing, we're dying, so change is essential to not just the human experience but for our spiritual lives as well.

I don't want to look back on my life and see a long list of wasted opportunities and superficial spirituality.  I want to build my relationship with God into something so deep and powerful that it doesn't take moments of disaster to get me to my knees crying out.  I'd rather be there everyday.

But that kind of relationship can't happen without change.  Change to my attention span.  Change to the way I spend my time.  Change to the way I view myself.  And largely change to the way I view God. 

If I look at my relationship with God like He's only a DJ there to take my requests, my prayers are going to be shallow and selfish.  But if I approach Him based on who He is, the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of heaven and earth whose holiness is unmatched and whose love can't be defined, then something is bound to change.  My prayers start to reflect the reverence that should be there and my faith gets a lot more bolder as I realize who He is and what He can do not just in my life but in the lives of those around me.

Some quotes from the book that have me thinking:

“But God doesn't call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn't come through.” (Francis Chan)

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.” (Francis Chan)

“It is true that God may have called you to be exactly where you are. But, it is absolutely vital to grasp that he didn’t call you there so you could settle in and live your life in comfort and superficial peace.”  (Francis Chan)

“The irony is that while God doesn't need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don’t really want Him most of the time.  He treasures us and anticipates our departure from this earth to be with Him—and we wonder, indifferently, how much we have to do for Him to get by.” (Francis Chan)