crazy love: a review

Christians spend so much of their time trying to live the right way. We try not to swear or use foul language. We try not to tell dirty jokes. We try to make our kids sit straight and be quiet in the worship space.

Do you ever wonder if we are trying to do the wrong things?

Sometimes I wonder if we major in the minors and completely ignore the big things God is calling us to. I wonder if we gloss over Jesus’s radical calls to obedience in the scriptures on purpose, or if we simply miss it.

Francis Chan, in his book Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God says that yes, indeed, we have missed it. At least the vast majority of us have.

You may wonder if this is simply another angry book blasting the North-American church for not following Jesus. To be honest, I wondered that myself. As I began to read the book, I actually felt that it moved rather slowly. Chan takes his time outlining what it means to follow God, and makes sure that we understand just who this God is.

He incorporates his website in his text, urging the reader to go and watch some videos that are hosted there. I found this somewhat distracting. When I sit down to read a book, I want to read the book. I do not want to have to take the time to go to my computer and watch a visitor.

These drawbacks were more than made up for, however, as the book progressed. Chan Biblically draws an outline of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, not in specifics but in attitude.

His explication of what it means to be obsessed with Jesus really hit home for me. Here is a quick summary of his description of a person deeply in love (obsessed) with Jesus.

People who are obsessed with Jesus: give freely and openly, without censure, aren’t consumed with their personal safety and comfort above all else, live lives that connect them with the poor in some way or another, are more concerned with obeying God than doing what is expected or fulfilling the status-quo, know that the sin of pride is always a battle, do not consider service a burden, are known as givers, not takers, think about heaven frequently, are characterised by a committed, settled passionate love for God, are raw with God, have an intimate relationship with Him, are more concerned with their character than comfort, know that the best thing they can do is be faithful to his saviour in every aspect of his life.

While there are other books that relate the same subject, they rely more on experience than scripture. Chan makes a concerted effort to remind us that it is only in Jesus that we are saved, and that for the glory of God. This salvation calls us to lead a radically different life than those around us. This is one of the best books I have found that outlines the Biblical basis and demand for radical discipleship in an accessible and engaging way.

brokenness

There are times in our lives when we have to take steps of grace toward reconciliation in order to continue healing wounds graven deep into our souls.

These steps hurt.

In a recent post Ann Voskamp shares an experience of reconciliation which happened around an Easter service.

I ask him to come, come see the kids in a play Easter morning, not at the church but at the arena, neutral territory, and Dad asks if his step-daughter, my age, her children, his step-grandchildren, ages of my children, might come too, his family that I’ve never met though he’s been remarried seven years now – years I’ve found too painful, this tearing away of one life, patching on a new one, somehow better — my chin trembles while I nod, find a smile, say the words and mean them, “Yes, of course.”

Pain of new family replacing old. Pain of new children replacing her.

A woman my height, my age, with eyes that sparkled, who had woke up this morning in Dad’s guest room, room of my childhood, my window offering her day.

How do you deal with a situation like this? How do you respond to your family being torn apart by divorce? How do you deal with the memories?

Memories too that too long I’ve been muddling in sadness, trying through a fog of tears to piece together who we were, only to cut myself on glass… when I should have just swept it all up, been done with it. But who throws away a family?

Now, yes finally, now I’ve just picked up the shards of us, one-by-one tucked them in a I-remember-those-days envelope, sharp edges to finger now and then, of then and what isn’t now. A long ago fine china, fragile and dropped.

And yet, there on Easter morning as the choir sings Crown him with Many Crowns there is hope.

This wringing out on Easter Sunday morning, wringing of my brother in the choir, my sister and husband, their four sweet little girls, sitting somewhere behind me, my mama working in the kitchen, and my Dad and his family sitting all together here beside me. He takes it, bears it, breaks the strangling tightness of it with the iron spike.

And when they crescendo, “Celebrate! Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!” I raise my hand, my voice, and the joy falls wet.

What is ripped apart, what is soiled and tattered, what is dead, will one day rise, the gashes healed.

There where wood and wounds intersect.

the heart of compassion

In God Came Near Max Lucado wonders what the last moments in the carpentry shop would have been like for Jesus. What would it have been like to hear the call to leave all that and begin the long road to the cross in Jerusalem? What could have compelled him to go? To leave his secure world, the place he had always known, the place where he was loved and respected, to march the dusty road laid before him?

You see, he didn’t have to go. He had a choice. He could have stayed. He could have kept his mouth shut. He could have ignored the call or al least postponed it. And had he chosen to stay, who would’ve known? Who would have blamed him?

He could have come back as a man in another era when society wasn’t so volatile, when religion wasn’t so stale, when people would listen better.

He could have come back when crosses were out of style.

But his heart wouldn’t let him. If there was hesitation on the part of his humanity, it was overcome by the compassion of his divinity. His divinity heard the voices. His divinity heard the hopeless cries of the poor, the bitter accusations of the abandoned, the dangling despair of those who are trying to save themselves.

And his divinity saw the faces. Some wrinkled. Some weeping. Some hidden behind veils. Some obscured by fear. Some earnest with searching. Some blank with boredom. From the face of Adam to the face of the infant born somewhere in the world as you read these words, he saw them all.

And you can be sure of one thing. Among the voices that found their way into that carpentry shop in Nazareth was your voice. Your silent prayers uttered on tearstained pillows were heard before they were said. You deepest questions about death and eternity were answered before they were asked. And your direst need, your need for a Saviour, was met before you ever sinned.

And not only did he hear you, he saw you. He saw your face aglow the hour you first knew him. He saw your face in shame the hour you first fell. The same face that looked back at you from this morning’s mirror, looked at him. And it was enough to kill him.

He left because of you.

He laid his security down with his hammer. He hung tranquillity on the peg with his nail apron. He closed the window shutters on the sunshine of his youth and locked the door on the comfort and ease of anonymity.

Since he could bear your sins more easily than he could bear the thought of your hopelessness, he chose to leave.

What more could be said?

on the incarnation; ch 4

Today we pick up our series on St. Athanasius’s book On the Incarnation.

It seems strange in this time of Advent to think about Jesus’s death, but this chapter deals with just that subject. Athanasius told us the reasons God came down in human flesh, and reminds us that he did it to provide redemption AND to renew the knowledge of God in humankind. Both of these are displayed in his death on the cross as well.

Thus, then, God the Word, revealed himself to men through His works. We must next consider the end of His earthly life and the nature of His bodily death. This is, indeed, the very centre of our faith, and everywhere you hear men speak of it; by it, too, no less than by other acts, Christ is revealed as God and Son of God.

For Athanasius, the cross screams of God’s self revealing nature. He had to suffer a public execution because he could not die on his own (how could he get sick when he healed others?). He also could not avoid the plotting of the Jews, because he had come to defeat death, and to do that by absorbing it in himself. More than this, however, he could not avoid death, because he came to bring new life; the resurrection.

The supreme object of His coming was to bring about the resurrection of the body. This was to be the monument of his victory over death, the assurance to all that He had himself conquered corruption and that their own bodies also would eventually be incorrupt; and it was in token of that and as a pledge of the future resurrection that He kept His body incorrupt.

His death provided the evidence that the curse had been lifted (cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree), and to break down the dividing wall within humanity.

We see the fitness of his death and of those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself. Even so, He foretold the manner of His redeeming death, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to myself.”

Through Jesus death on the cross, he defeated the ‘prince of the air’ because he was raised in the air on the cross to suffer and die. By this, he reopened the road to God through the heavens. Jesus did not need this new road, but we did.

No, it was we who needed it, we whom He Himself upbore in His own body–that body which He first offered to death on behalf of all, and then made through it a path to heaven.

In the incarnation, Jesus made himself corruptible, so that he could die, and through his death accomplish these amazing things.

The glory of it is staggering.

The logic of it, incomprehensible.

Even so, there are things that we ‘know’ to be true, or that we take on faith based on the say so of someone we really trust, even though our gut and everything in the world tells us the opposite.

I guess that is what faith is all about.

what is the church about?

“Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage-heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died and that is what he died about, that is where the church should be and that is what the church should be about.”

George MacDonald

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