Is He Forgotten?

I recently finished Francis Chan’s second book entitled Forgotten God.  If you’re anything like me, that title really strikes up an interest in seeing what he is talking about.  This is an extremely well written book and a great follow-up to Crazy Love.  Chan argues that the church as a whole has forgotten a very important part of the Trinity and I am pretty sure that I would agree with this.  Unfortunately, it seems that we have forgotten the power and the importance of the Holy Spirit.    What I really love about this book, however, is that Chan doesn’t just make a claim that we have forgotten the Holy Spirit.  The book is full of encouragement and advice about how to engage the Holy Spirit in your own lives.  He points out where we have seemingly missed the point and challenges us to go back and make the changes.  The scary thing is that he states that we can have a seemingly successful church without the Holy Spirit.  You might be asking yourselves how this is possible, but I can really see where he is coming from.  Think about it.  If you get a dynamic speaker, a great band and really cool visuals, you can draw loads of people in.  And the Holy Spirit isn’t even necessary for this combination to draw people in.  But here is the deal.  Drawing people in is not enough.  You might be able to draw people in but these people might just be there for a show.  The Holy Spirit is necessary to cause those life-changing decisions to be made on a consistent basis and this cannot be faked.  Chan is really practical about this as well.  At the end of each chapter, he tells a story of a person/couple that exhibits exactly what he is talking about in the chapter.  I highly recommend this book to anyone that is searching for something more than just a show from their church.  I also challenge anyone that reads this to take Chan’s challenge of trying to read the Bible again without any preconceived ideas of what you will find and then see what this Word of God tells us about the Holy Spirit.