Don’t Waste Your Life

Excerpt from John Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life”:

In those early years God awakened in me a fear and a passion not to waste my life. The thought of coming to my old age and saying through tears, “I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!” was a fearful and horrible thought to me.

“Only one life,
‘Twill soon be past;
Only what’s done
For Christ will last.”

You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.
So the question is… What would it mean to waste your life? Or what is the opposite of not wasting your life?

Growing up I knew I didn’t want a minimal life. I didn’t want to live on the outskirts of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and pursue it…There must be something more – something outside ourselves, something bigger and greater and more worth living for than what we saw in the mirror.

Song: Blowin’ in the Wind by Bob Dylan
“How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ‘n’ how many ears must
one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take
till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend,
is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

How many times can a man look up and not see the sky? There is a sky up there to be seen. You may look up ten thousand times and say you don’t see it. But that has absolutely no effect on its objective existence. It is there. And one day you will see it. How many times must you look up before you see it? There is an answer. The answer, The answer, my friend, is not yours to invent or create. It will be decided for you. It is outside you. It is real and objective and firm. One day you will hear it. You don’t create it. You don’t define it. It comes to you, and sooner or later you conform to it – or bow to it.

To miss this answer would mean a wasted life.

To avoid living a wasted life, we must “Glorify God” (1 Corinthians 6:20) and contrary to popular belief, by pursuing God’s glory, we are ultimately pursuing our joy.


There is a lot more to be said about not wasting our life, but I think I will end this message here for today.

May the Lord stir in you the same passion He stirred in John Piper to pursue something more – something greater and bigger.

And as always – God bless!
<3 Shannon

Rather than a song today, I’d like to share with you a video that I found on www.desiringGod.com. Enjoy! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBJzUnxiKwA