Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

by 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.

Do not assume you are good soil.

LUKEWARM PEOPLE do whatever is necessary to keep themselves from feeling too guilty. They want to do the bare minimum, to be “good enough” without it requiring too much of them. They ask, “How far can I go before it’s considered a sin?” instead of “How can I keep myself pure as a temple of the Holy Spirit?”

LUKEWARM PEOPLE feel secure because they attend church, made a profession of faith at age twelve, were baptized, come from a Christian family, vote Republican, or live in America. Just as the prophets in the Old Testament warned Israel that they were not safe just because they lived in the land of Israel, so we are not safe just because we wear the label Christian or because some people persist in calling us a “Christian nation.”

Everyone knows that if you sign up for the Marines, you have to do whatever they tell you. They own you. Somehow this realization does not cross over to our thinking about the Christian life. Jesus didn’t say that if you wanted to follow Him you could do it in a lukewarm manner. He said, “Take up your cross and follow Me.”

God doesn’t just want us to have good theology; He wants us to know and love Him.

As Tim Kizziar said, “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.”

—1 Corinthians 13:4–8, 13 ESV But even those words have grown tired and overly familiar, haven’t they? I was challenged to do a little exercise with these verses, one that was profoundly convicting. Take the phrase Love is patient and substitute your name for the word love. (For me, “Francis is patient.…”) Do it for every phrase in the passage. By the end, don’t you feel like a liar?

How many of us would really leave our families, our jobs, our education, our friends, our connections, our familiar surroundings, and our homes if Jesus asked us to? If He just showed up and said, “Follow Me”? No explanation. No directions. You could follow Him straight up a hill to be crucified. Maybe He would lead you to another country, and you would never see your family again. Or perhaps you would stay put, but He would ask you to spend your time helping people who will never love you back and never show gratitude for what you gave up. Consider this carefully—have you ever done so?

True faith means holding nothing back; it bets everything on the hope of eternity.

O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, so that I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, “Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.” Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.

God wants to change us; He died so that we could change. The answer lies in letting Him change you.

Jesus Christ didn’t die only to save us from hell; He also died to save us from our bondage to sin.

you have a distinct choice to make: Just let life happen, which is tantamount to serving God your leftovers, or actively run toward Christ.

Having faith often means doing what others see as crazy. Something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers.

When you pray, your prayers are heard by the same God who answered Moses’ prayer for water in the desert, the God who gave Abraham and his barren wife a son, and the God who made the slave Joseph second in power only to Pharaoh.

How would my life change if I actually thought of each person I came into contact with as Christ—the person driving painfully slow in front of me, the checker at the grocery store who seems more interested in chatting than ringing up my items, the member of my own family with whom I can’t seem to have a conversation and not get annoyed?

By loving “the least of these,” we are loving God Himself.

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.

I spoke at a summer camp several years ago. Afterward, a number of students told me I was their “favorite speaker.” It felt good to hear them talk about how funny and convicting my messages were. I loved it. I got back to my room and thanked God for helping me speak so well. About three minutes into my prayer, I stopped. It hit me that the students were talking about me, not God. I was standing before a holy God and robbing Him of the glory that was rightfully His. That’s a terrifying position to find yourself in.

One of the ways I know to fight against pride is through focused prayer. What I mean is that before you say one word to God, take a minute and imagine what it would be like to stand before His throne as you pray.

The Bible teaches that the church is to be that light, that sign of hope, in an increasingly dark and hopeless world.

The average Christian in the United States spends ten minutes per day with God; meanwhile, the average American spends over four hours a day watching television.

How much of your money is spent on yourself, and how much is directed toward God’s kingdom? How much of your time is dedicated to pursuing your life and your goals, and how much is focused on God’s work and purposes?

A friend of mine once said that Christians are like manure: Spread them out and they help everything grow better, but keep them in one big pile and they stink horribly.

I knew God wanted all of me, yet I feared what complete surrender to Him would mean. Trying harder doesn’t work for me. Slowly I’ve learned to pray for God’s help, and He has become my greatest love and desire.

Many times when I speak, whether at my church or another venue, I remind myself that I could die right after I finish, so what would I want my last words to be?

Keep in mind that the population of China is over 1.3 billion, and in India it’s over 1.2 billion. Meanwhile, there are around 300 million people in the United States. This means that we are a small minority. Our views of “Christianity” are peculiar to the vast majority of the world.

The crazy ones are the ones who live life like there is no God. To me that is insanity.