Crazy Love by Francis Chan

Week 3: Chapter 3 — Crazy Love

Read Chapter 3 of Crazy Love. Key passages: Romans 5:6-8; 1 John 4:9-10; John 3:16.

Having established God's greatness and our smallness, Chan now turns to the staggering center of the story: that this infinite God loves us — specifically, obsessively, and at great cost. Sit with that before you discuss it.

Discussion Questions

7 questions

1.Chan describes God's love as "crazy" — not sentimental or safe, but wild and relentless in a way that defies logic. In what ways does the love described in Romans 5:8 ("while we were still sinners, Christ died for us") qualify as "crazy" by any normal human standard?

2.Chan uses the analogy of a parent's overwhelming love for a newborn child to illustrate a small shadow of how God feels about us. Did that illustration resonate with you? What emotions did it surface? If you are a parent, how did it reframe your understanding of God's love for you?

3.One of Chan's key moves in this chapter is distinguishing between knowing facts about God's love and actually feeling loved by God. Why is that gap so common? What causes it in your own experience?

a.When did you last feel genuinely loved by God — not just theologically convinced of it, but emotionally moved by it?

b.What tends to block or diminish that sense for you?

4.Chan points out that God's love is not triggered by anything good in us — it is rooted entirely in His own character. How does that truth challenge performance-based Christianity? How does it challenge the way you relate to God when you are failing?

5.The title of the book and this chapter claim that God's love for us is, in some sense, "crazy." Do you find that word helpful or off-putting when applied to God? What does it protect you from thinking about God's love, and what might it risk?

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Closing Prayer

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God, we have heard that You love us so many times that the words have lost their edges. Do something new in us today. Let the love You showed at the cross — costly, undeserved, utterly irrational by human standards — break through the familiarity and land on us afresh. We don't want to just know it theologically; we want to feel it, be undone by it, and be changed by it. Thank You that Your love is not based on our performance. Help us to stop striving to earn what You have already freely given. Amen.

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