Guest Review: Crazy Love - Francis Chan

By Taylor Ellen

I received a copy of Francis Chan’s book Crazy Love for Christmas. Although I expected it to be another decent book on what it means to be a Christian in today’s culture, what it gave me was a “holy slap in the face.” It convicted me about the way I was living my life. Instead of living a merely “good, Christian life” in today’s culture, Crazy Love challenges readers to go against what society is saying and to go all-out and live a radical life for Christ.

Chan opens the first chapter with this: “What if I told you to stop talking at God for a while, but instead to take a long, hard look at Him before you speak another word?” So often, especially in American society, church is 90% concerned with the type of music we worship with, the person who gives the message, or the building we go to; and only 10% is about God Himself.

American Christians have become so consumed with the world’s idea of religion that they have lost sight of who God truly is. Instead, we have turned God into what we want Him to be for us. God is holy, yet we manage to constantly overlook that holiness. Chan quotes R.C. Sproul saying, “Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.” American Christians compare themselves with how the world thinks a follower of Christ should look, rather than what God says a follower of Christ should be. As we make our relationship with God completely about us, it becomes harder and harder to look past ourselves and earnestly, passionately seek after Him.

Chapter two begins, “You could die before you finish reading this chapter.” Comforting, isn’t it? But it’s true. In the scope of all of eternity, our lives are rather short—a blink of an eye. So why are we so selfish? How come we think that everything is about us? One of the most convicting sections in the book was a metaphor that Chan used which compares our lives to a movie. It went something like this: Suppose you were cast as an extra in a movie, and your scene was ¾ of a second long. Then, you get all of your friends and family together for the premier and tell them to come see this movie about you. After the movie ended, wouldn’t they all think you were crazy for thinking the movie was about you? Life is the same way. Our lives are ¾ of a second in the movie of life. Clearly, the movie isn’t about us; we are crazy to think that it is. The purpose of an extra in a movie is to point back to the star, and since God is the “star” of the movie, “the point of your life is to point to Him.”

Chapter three focuses on the craziness of God’s love for us. He knew everything about us before we were created. He knows what our names will be, what school we will go to, whom we will marry, how we will die. He knew everything about us before our great-grandparents were born. This incredible God who knew us even before our creation, loves us. “The wildest part is that Jesus doesn’t have to love us. His being is utterly complete and perfect, apart from humanity. He doesn’t need me or you. Yet He wants us, chooses us, even considers us His inheritance…” God’s unfathomable love for us is crazy. That’s why it’s so hard for us to understand. But just because we can’t always understand God’s love doesn’t mean that He loves us any less.

Chapters four, five, and eight go together. Chapters four and five focus on what a lot of churchgoers look like today: lukewarm. If you’re a coffee drinker you can know that there is almost nothing worse than taking a huge gulp of lukewarm coffee. It’s disgusting. That’s how lukewarm Christians are to God (Revelation 3:16). The lukewarm Christian is almost indifferent to God, living foremost for himself and serving anything that’s left over to God. But what are leftovers to the God of the universe? Lukewarm lives couldn’t be farther from the holiness that God intended for His children. As Chan writes, “they equate their partially sanitized lives with holiness, but they couldn’t be more wrong.” In contrast to the Lukewarm, chapter eight is all about the Obsessed—people who are truly in love with God, and whose lives reflect it. Chan gives multiple examples of how your love life with Christ shows through your life on earth, but the main pattern I saw was that people whose lives are consumed by love for God aren’t focused on themselves. Rather, they are entirely concerned with Christ and others.

I encourage you to go to a bookstore, purchase a red book entitled Crazy Love, and sit down to read.