Don’t Waste Your Life

Don’t Waste Your Life
by
John Piper

 
 
He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me the newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist.(p. 19)

I was stunned at the gamesmanship in the scholarly world as authors used all their intellectual powers to nullify what they themselves wrote! (p. 24)

But the fact remains that to this day well-paid, well-fed professors use tuition and tax dollars to argue that “since literature does not accurately convey reality, literary interpretation need not accurately convey the reality which is literature. (p. 24)

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. (p. 31)

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. (p. 31)

It is more like the word magnify. But here too we can go wrong. Magnify has two distinct meanings. In relation to God, one is worship and one is wickedness. You can magnify like a telescope or like a microscope. When you magnify like a microscope, you make something tiny look bigger than it is. A dust mite can look like a monster. Pretending to magnify God like that is wickedness. But when you magnify like a telescope, you make something unimaginably great look like what it really is. With the Hubble Space Telescope, pinprick galaxies in the sky are revealed for the billion-star giants that they are. Magnifying God like that is worship. (p. 32)

To make them feel good about themselves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to the Alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors. (p. 33)

The disproportion between us and the universe is a parable about the disproportion between us and God. (p.34)

If you don’t point people to God for everlasting joy, you don’t love. You waste your life. (p. 35)

And “passion” is the right word (or, if you prefer, zeal, fervor, ardor, blood-earnestness) because God commands us to love him with all our heart (Matthew 22:37), and Jesus reminds us that he spits lukewarm people out of his mouth (Revelation 3: 16). (p. 43)

This is what I live to know and long to experience. This is virtually the mission statement of my life and the church I serve: “We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.” (p. 47)

If I deserve nothing by condemnation because of my sin, but instead get life and breath in this age, and everlasting joy in the age to come, because Christ died for me, then everything good – and everything bad that God turns for good – must be the reward of his suffering (not my merit). (p. 53)

Death is a threat to the degree that it frustrates your main goals. Death is fearful to the degree that it threatens to rob you of what you treasure most. But Paul treasured Christ most, and his goal was to magnify Christ. And he saw death not as a frustration of that goal but as an occasion for its fulfillment. (p. 66)

Ordinarily faith would mean trust or confidence you put in someone who has given good evidence of his reliability and willingness and ability to provide what you need. (p. 70)

The dying I have in mind is the dying of comfort and security and reputation and health and family and friends and wealth and homeland. (p. 71)

One of my aims is to explode the myth of safety and to somehow deliver you from the enchantment of security. Because it’s a mirage. It doesn’t exist. Every direction you turn there are unknowns and things beyond your control. (p. 81)

Caleb was unable to explode the myth of safety. The people were gripped by the beguiling enchantment of security – the notion that there is a sheltered way of life apart from the path of God-exalting obedience. (p. 88)

I have been assuming that the power and the motive behind taking risks for the cause of God is not heroism, or the lust for adventure, or the courage of self-reliance, or the need to earn God’s good will, but rather faith in the all-providing, all-ruling, all-satisfying Son of God, Jesus Christ. The strength to risk losing face for the sake of Christ is the faith that God’s love will lift up your face in the end and vindicate your cause. The strength to risk losing money for the cause of the Gospel is the faith that we have a treasure in the heavens that cannot fail. The strength to risk losing life in this world is faith in the promise that he who loses his life in this world will save it for the age to come. (p. 90)

In other words, no misery that a true Christian ever experiences is evidence that he has been cut off from the love of Christ. (p. 95)

On the far side of every risk – even if it results in death – the love of God triumphs. (p. 95)

If we do not see this and experience this, we will probably turn God-centered motives into a kind of benevolence that tries to do good for man without knowing what the greatest good really is – namely, all-satisfying pleasure in God. But if we experience forgiveness as the free and underserved gift of joy in God, then we will be carried by this joy, with love, into a world of sin and suffering. (p. 101).

I am concerned for the poor but more for you. I know not what Christ will say to you in the great day …. I fear there are many hearing me who may know well that they are not Christians, because they do not love to give. The give largely and liberally, not grudging at all, requires a new heart; an old heart would rather part with its life-blood than its money. Oh my friends! Enjoy your money; make the most of it; give money away; enjoy it quickly for I can tell you, you will be beggars throughout eternity. (p. 102)

In fact, it is virtually impossible not to be a part of our modern, Western culture; and if we do not think in terms of measured appropriation, biblical evaluation, and thoughtful transformation, we will probably be consumed by the culture, and won’t even know that we are more American than we are Christian. (p. 117)

For every careless saint who burns himself out and breaks up his family with misdirected zeal, I venture, there are a thousand who coast with the world, treating Jesus like a helpful add-on, but not as an all-satisfying, all-authoritative King in the cause of love. (p.118)

What is happening in America is that television is transforming all serious public business into junk…. Television disdains exposition, which is serious, sequential, rational, and complex. It offers instead a mode of discourse in which everything is accessible, simplistic, concrete, and above all, entertaining. As a result, America is the world’s first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death. (p. 121)

“in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.” These last two words are important. Christians do not just go to work. They go to work “with God.” They do not just do a job. They do their job “with God.” God is with them. (p. 136)

The difference is that humans are morally self-conscious and make choices about their work on the basis of motives that may or may not honor God. (p. 140)

So the second way we make much of God in our secular work is through the joyful, trusting, God-exalting design of our creativity and industry. (p. 142)

So the third way we make much of God in our secular work is by having such high standards of excellence and such integrity and such manifest goodwill that we put no obstacles in the way of the Gospel but rather call attention to the all-satisfying beauty of Christ. (p. 144)

So they were driven from the garden of happy work to the ground of anxious toil. The curse under which we live today is not that we must work. The curse is that, in our work, we struggle with weariness and frustration and calamities and anxiety. And all this is doubly burdensome because now by this very toil we must keep ourselves alive. (p. 145)

If we simply work to earn a living – if we labor for the bread that perishes – we will waste our lives. But if we labor with the sweet assurance of God will supply all our needs – that Christ died to purchase every undeserved blessing – then all our labor will be a labor of love and a boasting only in the cross. (p. 150)

So my point here is that, as we work, we should dream of how to use our excess money to make others glad in God. (p. 150)

You can steal to have. Or you can work to have. Or you can work to have to give. When the third option comes from joy in God’s goodness, it makes him look great in the world. (p. 151)

This is your love, O God, not to make much of me, but do whatever must be done so that I waken to the joy of making much of you through all eternity. (p. 186)