Don't Waste Your Life

by John Piper

If you are a Christian, you are not your own. Christ has bought you at the price of his own death. You now belong doubly to God: He made you, and he bought you. That means your life is not your own. It is God’s. Therefore, the Bible says, “Glorify God in your body.” God made you for this. He bought you for this. This is the meaning of your life.

Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, it is better to lose your life than to waste it.

Some of you will die in the service of Christ. That will not be a tragedy. Treasuring life above Christ is a tragedy.

For me as a boy, one of the most gripping illustrations my fiery father used was the story of a man converted in old age. The church had prayed for this man for decades. He was hard and resistant. But this time, for some reason, he showed up when my father was preaching. At the end of the service, during a hymn, to everyone’s amazement he came and took my father’s hand. They sat down together on the front pew of the church as the people were dismissed. God opened his heart to the Gospel of Christ, and he was saved from his sins and given eternal life. But that did not stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled face—and what an impact it made on me to hear my father say this through his own tears—“I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!”

the meaning of existentialism was that “existence precedes essence.” That is, first you exist and then, by existing, you create your essence. You make your essence by freely choosing to be what you will be. There is no essence outside you to pursue or conform to. Call it “God” or “Meaning” or “Purpose”—it is not there until you create it by your own courageous existence.

Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern.

things that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore.

“If that’s where God leads you, that’s where I’ll go.” From that moment on I have never doubted that my calling in life is to be a minister of the Word of God.

If there is only one life to live in this world, and if it is not to be wasted, nothing seemed more important to me than finding out what God really meant in the Bible, since he inspired men to write it. If that was up for grabs, then no one could tell which life is worthy and which life is wasted.

And so it was that Existentialism came home to roost in the Bible: Existence precedes essence. That is, I don’t find meaning—I create it.

Friedrich Nietzsche had given the obituary a hundred years earlier: “Whither is God? . . . I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. . . . God is dead. God remains dead and we have killed him.”

He showed me the obvious: that the verses of the Bible are not strung pearls but links in a chain. The writers developed unified patterns of thought. They reasoned. “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD” (Isaiah 1:18). This meant that, in each paragraph of Scripture, one should ask how each part related to the other parts in order to say one coherent thing. Then the paragraphs should be related to each other in the same way. And then the chapters, then the books, and so on until the unity of the Bible is found on its own terms.

Delighting in God was not a mere preference or option in life; it was our joyful duty and should be the single passion of our lives.

Seeking happiness in God and glorifying God were the same.

Either you glorify God or you pursue happiness. One seemed absolutely right; the other seemed absolutely inevitable.

God’s purpose for my life was that I have a passion for God’s glory and that I have a passion for my joy in that glory, and that these two are one passion.

God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.

Enjoying and displaying are both crucial. If we try to display the excellence of God without joy in it, we will display a shell of hypocrisy and create scorn or legalism. But if we claim to enjoy his excellence and do not display it for others to see and admire, we deceive ourselves, because the mark of God-enthralled joy is to overflow and expand by extending itself into the hearts of others.

The wasted life is the life without a passion for the supremacy of God in all things f...

We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life.

But he created us and called us to make him look like what he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. We are meant to image forth in the world what he is really like.

They do not feel loved when they are told that God created them for his glory. They feel used.

Love is giving someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees.

Why would God have bothered to create such a microscopic speck called the earth and humanity and then get involved with us? Beneath this question is a fundamental failure to see what the universe is about. It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.

If you don’t point people to God for everlasting joy, you don’t love. You waste your life.

God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self so that we can enjoy knowing and admiring him forever.

“That he might bring us to God”—to himself. God sent Christ to die so that we could come home to the all-satisfying Father. This is love.

Christ must be explicit in all our God-talk. It will not do, in this day of pluralism, to talk about the glory of God in vague ways. God without Christ is no God.

“Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

To bring us to this highest and most durable of all pleasures, God made his Son, Jesus Christ, a bloody spectacle of blameless suffering and death. This is what it cost to rescue us from a wasted life.

“All things were created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16).

“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you” (John 17:1).

Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain.

The opposite of wasting your life is to live by a single, soul-satisfying

You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them.

In April 2000, Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards were killed in Cameroon, West Africa. Ruby was over eighty. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing eighty years old, and serving at Ruby’s side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over a cliff, and they were both killed instantly. I asked my congregation: Was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great passion, namely, to be spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ—even two decades after most of their American counterparts had retired to throw away their lives on trifles. No, that is not a tragedy. That is a glory. These lives were not wasted. And these lives were not lost. “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).

Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.

But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.

What is the one passion of your life that makes everything else look like rubbish in comparison?

Therefore every good thing in life, and every bad thing that God turns for good, is a blood-bought gift.

And if this is my job, yours is the same, just in a different form: to live and speak in such a way that the worth of “Christ crucified” is seen and savored by more and more people.

Boasting in the cross happens when you are on the cross. Is that not what Paul says? “The world has been crucified to me, and I [have been crucified] to the world.” The world is dead to me, and I am dead to the world. Why? Because I have been crucified. We learn to boast in the cross and exult in the cross when we are on the cross. And until our selves are crucified there, our boast will be in ourselves.

Galatians 2:19-20: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” When Christ died, we died. The glorious meaning of the death of Christ is that when he died, all those who are his died in him.

Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27).

“The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

He believed in justification by grace through faith. But he did not believe that the faith that justifies could ever leave people unchanged by the radical Christ they claim to believe.

But Paul was a very unusual person. And Christians ought to be very unusual people. For Paul, the opposite of being shamed was not his being honored, but Christ’s being honored through him. “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that . . . Christ will be honored in my body.”

Death is fearful to the degree that it threatens to rob you of what you treasure most.

When the hour comes for everything to be taken from us but Christ, we will magnify him by saying, “In him I have everything and more. To die is gain.” If we learn to die like this, we will be ready to live.

Paul said, “I die every day!” (1 Corinthians 15:31).