Our children were 6, 5 and 3 the first time I read Don’t Waste Your Life. I’d gone along on a work trip with my husband, and for the first time in years, with our children at their aunt’s house and my husband at his all-day conference, I sat and read and read. I can still remember the exact location and the sounds and the smells around me as, hour after hour, I devoured John Piper’s words. I was gripped by his writing, and his words reignited a yearning in my heart. That day was 15 years ago. That original copy has since disappeared from my shelf. So today I ordered a new one. I need to re-read a book so full of challenging truth — truth I easily forget, and many in my affluent culture avoid.
I need God to convict me of irrelevance chosen. I need Him to pierce through the fog of life-numbing distractions I’m daily tempted to choose. If the Lord allows me more decades in this life, one thing is as true for me as it was 15 years ago:
I don’t want to waste my life.
I’ll bet you don’t either. So, we need piercing words. Words written to shake us awake, written to help drag us from a slow descent into wasted living.
Here’s an excerpt:
“I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start to call earth “home.” Before you know it, I am calling luxuries “needs” and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don’t think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached people drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set…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…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. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.” (John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life)
_____________________________________
Even More Beautiful 