Read Psalm 8
I've already confessed my love for books. I read a lot and brainless fiction is what I am drawn to first. The pile of reading material on my end table gets shuffled every now and then and one book keeps showing up on top. This book has the ability to make my stomach flip with nerves. From the moment I cracked its spine I knew it would convict me to my soul. Am I ready for this kind of responsibility? It is easier not to read it and to be content with a rather shallow faith. Crazy Love, by Francis Chan pushes the limits and I catch a glimpse of a relationship with God that is so mind blowing it frightens me. I hope you will read the whole book, but until then, here is an excerpt from the chapter on knowing God.
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"There is an epidemic of spiritual amnesia going around, and none of us is immune. No matter how many fascinating details we earn about God's creation, no matter how many pictures we see of His galaxies, and no matter how many sunsets we watch, we still forget.
Most of us know that we are supposed to love and fear God; that we are supposed to read our Bibles and pray so that we can know Him better; that we are supposed to worship Him with our lives. But actually living it out is challenging.
It confuses us when we love God because we feel we should love Him, instead of genuinely loving out of our true selves, we have forgotten who God really it. Our amnesia is flaring up again.
It may sound "un-Christian" to say that on some mornings I don't feel like loving God, or I just forget to. But I do. In our world, where hundreds of things distract us from God, we have to intentionally and consistently remind ourselves of Him....
We need [the same sort of] reminders about God's goodness. We are programmed to focus on what we don't have, bombarded multiple times throughout the day what we need to buy that will make us feel happier or sexier or more at peace. This dissatisfaction transfers over to our thinking about God. We forget that we already have everything we need in Him. Because we don't often think about the reality of who God is, we quickly forget that He is worthy to be worshipped and loved. We are to fear Him.
A. W. Tozer writes,
'What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.... Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.'
If the "gravest question" before us really is what God Himself is like, how do we learn to know Him?
We have seen He is the Creator of both the magnitudes of the galaxies and the complexities of caterpillars. But what is He like? What are His characteristics? What are His defining attributes? How are we to fear Him? To speak to Him? Don't check out here. We need to be reminded of this stuff. It is both basic and crucial." -- Crazy Love, by Francis Chan (pg 29-30)
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