Don't Waste Your Life

by John Piper

“You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

pursuing God’s glory would be virtually the same as pursing my joy.

In other words, it is better to lose your life than to waste it. If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full.

Treasuring life above Christ is a tragedy.

wooings

Cortejar

gripping

Emocionante

Only one life, ’Twill soon be past; Only what’s done for Christ will last.

What would it mean to waste my life? That was a burning question. Or, more positively, what would it mean to live well—not to waste life, but to . . . ?

And 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.

sky?

O céu está lá. Posso olha-lo e não vê-lo. Posso vê-lo e não ver a glória de Deus nele.

God is there. Not in here, defined and shaped by my own desires.

All that looks like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.

He helped me see what is there in the world—things that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore.

He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes.

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. The Bible is a lump of clay, and I am the potter. Interpretation is creation.

“The Unity of the Bible”

It has become clearer that God being glorified and God being enjoyed are not separate categories.

Resolution #5: “Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can.” • Resolution #6: “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.” • Resolution #17: “Resolved, that I will live so, as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.” • Resolution #22: “Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness, in the other world, as I possibly can, with all the power, might, vigor, and vehemence, yea violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert, in any way that can be thought of.”

Seeking happiness in God and glorifying God were the same.

This glory of God, therefore, [consists] in the creature’s admiring and rejoicing [and] exulting in the manifestation of his beauty and excellency.

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.

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

God created us for his glory.

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.

We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone’s self-esteem. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees.

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

This is love. God’s love for us is God’s doing what he must do, at great cost to himself, so that we might have the pleasure of seeing and savoring him forever.

He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.

God without Christ is no God.

The opposite of wasting your life is living life by a single God-exalting, soul-satisfying passion. The well-lived life must be God-exalting and soul-satisfying because that is why God created us

The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.

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.

One of the reasons we are not as Christ-centered and cross-saturated as we should be is that we have not realized that everything—everything good, and everything bad that God turns for the good of his redeemed children—was purchased by the death of Christ for us.

We simply take life and breath and health and friends and everything for granted. We think it is ours by right. But the fact is that it is not ours by right. We are doubly undeserving

All we deserve from him is judgment (Romans 3:19). Therefore every breath we take, every time our heart beats, every day that the sun rises, every moment we see with our eyes or hear with our ears or speak with our mouths or walk with our legs is, for now, a free and undeserved gift to sinners who deserve only judgment.

But for those who see the merciful hand of God in every breath they take and give credit where it is due, Jesus Christ will be seen and savored as the great Purchaser of every undeserved breath. Every heartbeat will be received as a gift from his hand.

Now we see that every experience in life is designed to magnify the cross of Christ.

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.

How can we become the kind of people who trace all our joy back to joy in Christ and him crucified? Answer: The old self that loves to boast and exult and rejoice in other things died. By faith we are united to Christ. His death becomes the death of our self-exalting life. We are raised with him to newness of life. What lives is a new creature whose single passion is to exalt Christ and his cross.

Yes, because being dead to the world does not mean having no feelings about the world (see 1 John 2:15; 1 Timothy 4:3).

God’s aim is not that we merely admire his gifts, but, even more, his glory.

Now the point is that the glory of Christ, manifest especially in his death and resurrection, is the glory above and behind every blessing we enjoy.

Therefore every enjoyment in this life and the next that is not idolatry is a tribute to the infinite value of the cross of Christ—the burning center of the glory of God.

He loves us. And love does not mean making much of us or making life easy. It means making us able to enjoy making much of him forever—no matter what it costs.

If our life and death do not show the worth and wonder of Jesus, they are wasted.

Christ was of infinite value to Paul, and so Paul longed for others to see and savor this value. That is what it means to magnify Christ—to show the magnitude of his value.