Crazy Love

READ Revelation 2:1-7 Psalm 19:1-4

To just read the Bible, attend church, and avoid “big” sins – is this passionate, wholehearted love for God?
Francois Fenelon, The Seeking Heart

This quote begins the preface of Francis Chan’s book Crazy Love. I was challenged by a friend and fellow Hoper to read this book recently. It’s a book that speaks to the heart of our faith and speaks to the heart of the state of the church in America today. What seems to be happening in the church today is a drifting away from our first love.

Ever been in love? Remember the time you spent getting to know your first love? How you couldn’t spend enough time being together, talking on the phone, walking together, and just spending as much time being with one another? And if you couldn’t spend time with one another how you’d be thinking of each other all the time? Remember that? It’s a time we want to bottle up and never forget so we can experience it over and over again.

But time, it’s a funny thing. It changes our priorities and how we enjoy our circumstances. Over time we get familiar with one another and over time we get maybe too comfortable with one another so we start to drift away from loving as we once did.

Have you noticed this can be true in our relationship with God? God wants us to be crazy in love with Him. Enjoying every moment with Him, thinking about Him by just remembering Him as our first love. Revelation 2 speaks about a church that is being warned not to forget their first love. And it’s not just the church in Ephesus this happens with. It happens with us as well.
This week let’s break free from the status quo. Let’s get hungry for a faith that says we’re madly in love with God. Chan writes – “God is calling you to a passionate love relationship with Himself. Because the answer to religious complacency isn’t working harder at a list of do’s and don’ts – it’s falling in love with God. And once you encounter His love, you’ll never be the same. Because when you’re wildly in love with someone, it changes everything.”