XI

About some brain slaps.

4 min readApr 10, 2020

Sometimes when I’m reading it’s as though the words slap me. They slap my brain. They shake me awake and remind me of things I had forgotten, or open my eyes to that which I had never thought of before. There are many books out there that do that, and Crazy Love by Francis Chan is only an example. And hey, obviously the Bible, that one’s the evident winner.

I write down things from books that I want to remember, that I want my future self to be reminded of once in a while. Here’s some of those things from Crazy Love. Got my red journal beside me, ready to go. I hope it’s of blessing to you.

I want you to understand that the only sane response to His love is wholehearted devotion to Jesus
I believe He wants us to love others so much that we go to extremes to help them
Why would God create more than 350,000,000,000 galaxies (and this is just a conservative estimate)? Perhaps God wanted us to see these pictures so that our response would be, “Who do I think I am?”
His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can’t contain Him. Isn’t it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?
Intellectually we all know that we will die, but we do not really know it in the sense of living as though it were true. On the contrary, we tend to live as though our lives would go on forever
Stress says that the things we are involved in are important enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace towards others, or our tight grip of control
To be brutally honest, it doesn’t really matter what place you find yourself in right now. Your part is to bring Him glory (…) The point of your life is to point to Him
I am thankful for the unknowns and that I don’t have control, because it makes me run to God
O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still.
Grandma Clara acted toward God the way we act toward people we’re madly in love with [thoughts, actions, sacrifice, time, money, longing…]
Isn’t that what brings Him glory — when believers desire Him and are not merely slaves who serve Him out of obligation?
I need God to help me love God
We should be the ones begging to worship in His presence
I want You. And when I don’t, I want to want You.
God didn’t just give a little for us; He gave His best. He gave Himself.
We are loaded down with too many good things, more than we could ever need, while others are desperate for a small loaf (…) As we begin to practice regular giving, we see how ludicrous it is to hold on to the abundance God has given us and merely repeating the words thank you
[about giving sacrificially] Pride tells you that you’ve sacrificed more than others. Fear tells you it’s time to worry about the future. Friends say you’ve given enough
[THIS!!] The love for equals is a human thing — of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing — the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world. The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing — to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints. And then there is the love for the enemy — love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.
Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you (…) Be careful not to turn others’ lives into the mold for your own. Allow God to be as creative with you as He is with each of us.
How will you answer the King when He says, “What did you do with what I gave you?”