Don’t Waste Your Life (Part 2)

I ended the previous devotional message with: “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.” Chapter 2 of John Piper’s book continues this thought…

God created us to fully display His glory (Isaiah 43:7) and to delight in Him with all our heart (Psalm 37:4).

It was becoming clearer and clearer that if I wanted to come to the end of my life and not say, “I’ve wasted it!” then I would need to press all the way in, and all the way up, to the ultimate purpose of God and join Him in it. If my life was to have a single, all-satisfying , unifying passion, it would have to be God’s passion. And I believe God’s passion is the display of His glory and the delight of my heart.

It has become clearer that God being glorified and God being enjoyed are not separate categories. What John Piper is saying is that enjoying God supremely is one way to glorify God. Being happy IN GOD is the way we glorify Him. :)

So to your questions: Why am I here? To be happy? Or to glorify God?... The answer is that God’s purpose for your life is for you to have a passion for God’s glory and a passion for your 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.

My favorite point John Piper makes from this chapter: 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 for the joy of all peoples.

So my question for us to consider is, “What passions are you pursuing in life?”

May we not waste another moment but rather live for the glory of God by enjoying Him and displaying His excellence.

Many blessings!
<3 Shannon

“The More I Seek You” – Kari Jobe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI_1YliutzA&feature=related

I’ve included this song tonight because the song’s message radiates the joy we have in the Lord – Kari Jobe sings, “The more I find You, the more I love You.” This line is so heart-warming for me because it reminds me of how much more I want to know the Lord when I spend a mere second in His presence. It all goes back to John Piper’s words – When we have a passion for God’s glory, we will have a passion for the joy in that glory.

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