Don't Waste Your Life

by John Piper

Only one life, ’Twill soon be past; Only what’s done for Christ will last. To the left, beside these words, was a painted green hill with two trees and a brown path that disappeared over the hill. How many times, as a little boy, and then as a teenager with pimples and longings and anxieties, I looked at that brown path (my life) and wondered what would be over that hill. The message was clear. You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one.

He helped me become alive to life. 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.

the verses of the Bible are not strung pearls but links in a chain. The writers developed unified patterns of thought.

Dr. Fuller, called “The Unity of the Bible” (which is also a book by that title3) the unifying flag was hoisted over the whole Bible.

But now here was the greatest mind of early America, Jonathan Edwards, saying that 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.

Life is wasted when we do not live for the glory of God.

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.

The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness.

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.

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.

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.

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 of it.

he calls us to follow him. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). He says it will probably not go better for us than for him.

His beauty shines most brightly when treasured above health and wealth and life itself.

We Boast Best in the Cross When We Bear It And it costs us dearly. The normal Christian life is one that boasts only in the cross—the blazing center of God’s glory—and does it while bearing the cross. “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27). Bearing the cross is the means by which we are increasingly liberated to boast in the cross. Suffering is God’s design in this sin-soaked world (Romans 8:20). It portrays sin’s

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Bonhoeffer’s book was a massive indictment of the “cheap grace” that he saw in the Christian Church on both sides of the Atlantic. 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.

Death makes visible where our treasure is. The way we die reveals the worth of Christ in our hearts. Christ is magnified in my death when I am satisfied with him in my dying—when I experience death as gain because I gain him.

Many professing Christians would get angry at this design. They might even scream, “I don’t care about your power being perfected! I am in pain! If you love me, get me out of this!” That was not Paul’s response. Paul had learned what love is. Love is not Christ’s making much of us or making life easy. Love is doing what he must do, at great cost to himself (and often to us), to enable us to enjoy making much of him forever.

What a tragic waste when people turn away from the Calvary road of love and suffering. All the riches of the glory of God in Christ are on that road. All the sweetest fellowship with Jesus is there. All the treasures of assurance. All the ecstasies of joy. All the clearest sightings of eternity. All the noblest camaraderie. All the humblest affections. All the most tender acts of forgiving kindness. All the deepest discoveries of God’s Word. All the most earnest prayers. They are all on the Calvary road where Jesus walks with his people.

Lest we think that this risk-taking life was unique to Paul, he made it a point to tell young Christians that they would meet unspecified troubles.

Christ’s love for us does not spare us these sufferings. Risk is real. The Christian life is a painful life. Not joyless. But not painless either.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne,

Oh my friends! Enjoy your money; make the most of it; give none away; enjoy it quickly for I can tell you, you will be beggars throughout eternity.2

Joy in God is awakened in the heart when God graciously opens our eyes to see the glory of Christ in the Gospel (2 Corinthians 4:4).

In other words, if we look like our lives are devoted to getting and maintaining things, we will look like the world, and that will not make Christ look great. He will look like a religious side-interest that may be useful for escaping hell in the end, but doesn’t make much difference in what we live and love here. He will not look like an all-satisfying treasure. And that will not make others glad in God.

It tells me that there is a war going on in the world between Christ and Satan, truth and falsehood, belief and unbelief. It tells me that there are weapons to be funded and used, but that these weapons are not swords or guns or bombs but the Gospel and prayer and self-sacrificing love (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). And it tells me that the stakes of this conflict are higher than any other war in history; they are eternal and infinite: heaven or hell, eternal joy or eternal torment (Matthew 25:46). I need to hear this message again and again, because I drift into a peacetime mind-set as certainly as rain falls down and flames go up.

Ralph Winter

David Wells says, rest with a kind of “weightlessness” even on the church. It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable.

C. S. Lewis, “Christianity and Literature,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1967), 10.