I finished Crazy Love by Francis Chan this morning, and I’m glad I picked it up. I’m also glad I finished it, because there’s this section at the end where Chan cuts loose a barrage of profiles of people who represent what he’s writing about, and I really thought that was one of the best parts of the book.
A lot of times, with books like Crazy Love, I don’t really finish the book. Not because the book isn’t good, it’s just that with a lot of non-fiction books you start to feel like you’ve gotten the point long before you’ve reached the end of the book. It’s hard for me to keep reading at that point, but in this case I’m glad I did, because the last couple of chapters hold a different style and some very rewarding reading.
Crazy Love is simply a book about being totally in love with God. It’s about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Nothing fancy or outrageously original, nothing difficult to understand conceptually. Still, it’s written with conviction and passion, and what it lacks in intellectual challenge it makes up for by challenging the reader to direct action and follow through. Chan is serious, he wants you to actually do something different with your life after reading the book. Frankly, that kind of challenge is probably more important than the intellectual one, anyways. After all, at its core the Christian life is not difficult to understand, but challenging to practice.
Another thing I really like about this book is that Chan seems unable to write a paragraph without calling out the words of scripture. He quotes roughly the entire New Testament before the book is over. while I’m saying that playfully, I really did like that part of the book. It’s not just Chan’s voice that I heard in these pages, but I heard the voice of the Spirit calling to me in the words of holy scripture. I felt challenged not just by the preacher here, but by his texts, and I think that perhaps this is how it should be.
I’m going to give this book a thumbs up. Like anything else, you need to understand what you’re getting into if you’re going to like it, and this book is primarily a shot in the arms kind of book, one that is meant to challenge and encourage believers to really begin acting like disciples. If you could use something like that now, then check it out. It’s pretty cheap on Amazon, if you take the link below:
Crazy Love by Francis Chan
