Everything

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

Mark 12:30

Do you love God with everything? Do you rely on Him for more than that breath you just took and the seemingly all too distant future? Do you realize that God loves you with His everything? Now that's crazy love.

Chan started chapter three of Crazy Love with a direct accusation: "Most of us, to some degree, have a difficult time understanding, believing, or accepting God's absolute and unlimited love for us" (54). Why? Why is God's boundless love so hard to understand?

Because we don't truly understand the love relationship God wants to have with us.

The Bible frequently refers to God as our Father (I Cor. 8:6; II Cor. 1:3), describing Him as a loving, providing, protector. Unfortunately, few children describe their earthly fathers with similar adjectives--children today feel afraid and abandoned by their fathers.So, when the Bible describes God as our Father, children (teens and adults) are blinded by their perception of an earthly father, not enlighted by the wonderful picture of our heavenly Father.

Do you realize that God knew and loved you before He made you (Psalm 139)? "The very face taht a holy, eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful, merciful, fair, and just God loves you and me is nother short of astonishing" (61). How true! I am so undeserving of God's unlimited love! "The irony is that while God doesn't need us but still wants us, we deperately need God but don't really want Him most of the time"(61)--that's a sad, but honest, truth, isn't it? God loves and longs for me despite my [pitiful] efforts to ignore Him.

It's time to stop shoving God into our mold. Stop conforming God to your father. Start loving God naturally--with the type of relationship you wish you could have with your dad. Get to know God by communicating with Him "frequently and zealously" (57) through prayer and time in His Word. If you want to improve your relationship with your father--earthly or heavenly--you've got to spend time with him! We've got to make Him our everything.

Have you made God your everything? Whether you have or haven't, pick up the Bible. Now that's one book you can read cover to cover knowing you are going to be challenged and changed.