Crazy Love

Francis Chan's book Crazy Love has been making the rounds in a lot of circles. I started it on the Baltimore mission trip and finished it up on our staff retreat a couple of weeks ago. On the whole, it was a challenging book that included a chapter called "Profile of the Lukewarm" that everyone needs to read.

Here are some quotes from the book that caught my attention:

• The life that Jesus calls us to is absolute craziness to this world.
• Calling yourself a Christian, being involved in a church, and trying to stay away from things that "good Christians" avoid - drinking, drugs, etc. is an incomplete view. When we have this view, our God is too narrow and small.
• On the average day, we live caught up in ourselves. On the average day, we don't consider God very much. On the average day, we forget that our life truly is a vapor.
• 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.
• Are we in love with God or just His stuff?
• Lukewarm people don't really want to be saved from their sin; they want only to be saved from the penalty of their sin.
• 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.
• I need God to help me love God.
• It is when we stop actively loving Him that we find ourselves restless and gravitating toward other means of fulfillment.
• What are you doing right now that requires faith?
• We've elevated safety to the neglect of whatever God's best is, whatever would bring God the most glory, or whatever would accomplish His purposes in our lives and in the world.
• Obsessed people orient their lives around eternity.

-- Peace, Jamie