Book Review: Forgotten God

Forgotten God by Francis Chan:

I read his more famous book, Crazy Love, a couple of years ago and had really mixed feelings about it.  I have a few friends who loved Crazy Love and that book literally changed their lives.  I struggled with it and thought Chan was taking some potshots at American Christians and offering some nice ideas without offering a plan on how to live it out.  Therefore, I put off reading Forgotten God for a while.

I liked this book better than Crazy Love.  Francis Chan is never going to be compared with great Christian writers like C.S. Lewis, N.T. Wright, or even Mark Driscoll, but he writes a decent devotional book and he strives to challenge his readers.  Those who are fans of David Platt (Radical) would like this book.

There was one thing in particular I did like about this book:

Chan states “when we are referring to God, balance is a huge mistake.  God is not just one thing we add to the mix called life.  He wants an invitation from us to permeate everything and every part of us.”  Chan challenges the idea that we need a “healthy balance” of the Holy Spirit.

That idea really challenged me.  I come from a pentecostal background and often I have tried to strike a balance between the pentecostal church I grew up in and the mega church where I served and saw people come to Christ by the hundreds.  At the church I grew up in, we tried to give the Holy Spirit free rein, but it seemed like people just ended up getting weird.  At the mega church I served at for a season, salvation decisions were happening all the time but it seemed like we were too scheduled and honestly too self-reliant on our relevance and excellence.  We didn’t need the Holy Spirit.

I don’t think anymore that it’s about finding a balance between the two.  We need as much of the Holy Spirit as we can get and we need to pursue the mission of God with all that is within us.  Hopefully, God will give us His wisdom to figure out how to do that!